Senate Votes To Build That Fence! High!

Yesterday the Senate passed, 54-44 an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2010 authored by South Carolina extremist Jim DeMint that requires he completion of at least 700 miles of reinforced fencing along the southwest border by December 31, 2010. Most Democrats voted against it and most Republicans voted for it. However, it was, obvioulsy far from a party-line vote. Some mainstream Republicans, concerned about their party's xenophobic, anti-Hispanic face-- like Mel Martinez (R-FL), George Voinovich (R-OH), Dick Lugar (R-IN), and Susan Collins (R-ME) --voted with the Democrats.

Most of the Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with the anti-Hispanic Republicans are from Evan Bayh's anti-Obama Bloc of Conservadems: Bayh himself, of course, plus Max Baucus (MT), both Nelsons (FL & NE), the two Arkansas cretins (Pryor and Lincoln), Arlen Specter (PA) and Mary Landrieu (LA). Funny that Gillibrand, in a tough election battle, voted no while Schumer's reactionary side slipped out on this one. The newest member of the Senate, Al Franken, voted no, while Amy Klobuchar, also from Minnesota, voted with the Republicans.

Earlier, Democrats were beaten-- despite their 60 vote majority, unable even to get to 51-- when they attempted to kill an anti-immigrant amendment by Alabama KKK member Jeff Sessions. Every Republican voted in favor of turning the screws on immigrants trying to work while a dozen Democrats strayed over to the Dark Side, again led by the hard-core conservatives inside the Democratic caucus: Bayh, Baucus, Ben Nelson, Lincoln, Pryor and Landrieu. Lieberman voted with them.

I've been reading Dave Neiwert's excellent new book, The Eliminationists and he goes into a disturbing thread throughout American history dealing with xenophobic and Know Nothing anti-immigration sentiments. It may be Mexicans and Central Americans radical right kooks like DeMint, Burr, Isakson, Vitter, Grassley and their followers are targeting now but their political antecedents were justas hate-filled towards Jews, Germans, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Italians and Slavs at one time or another.

The immigration debate is rapidly becoming the most prominent current example of the American Right's attempt to persuade the public to launch into another monumental mistake on the basic of provably false information. And... the nation's media have played an outsize role in helping it happen.

In the spring of 2008, a coalition of progressive immigration reform groups commissioned a poll to help political candidates who were looking to change their strategy and the nature of the immigration debate. One aspect of the polling stood out as a prime example of how deeply right-wing misinformation infects the public discourse. One of the first sections of the poll, headlined "Biggest Concerns About Illegal Immigration," featured the public responses to a set of concerns identified by the pollsters as the most common issues raised in focus groups. Poll respondents named their "one of two biggest concerns about illegal immigration today." These were the results:

- Immigrants receiving free public services such as health care (48%)

-Immigrants not paying taxes (35%)

-Takes jobs from Americans and lowers wages (20%)

-Too many immigrants aren't learning English (20%)

-Weakens our security against terrorism (18%)

-Causing crime problems in many communities (17%)

If you look down that list, something stands out: each item reflects a fear based either on outright false information or on gross distortions from a highly selective set of facts.

This kind of misinformation has been-- and still is-- used to justify and even encourage hate crimes, hate crimes Republicans and many right-wing Democrats refuse to outlaw. Neiwert examines the effectiveness of hate crimes in terrorizing immigrant families. He quotes a study by Yale political scientist Donald Green: "If the point of hate crimes is to terrorize the population into maintaining boundaries between these perpetrators and the victimized populations, at least in some areas-- certain parts of town, certain parts of the country, etcetera-- you know, certain kinds of romantic relationships , whatever-- then it does succeed in that. Because people really do feel they have to constrain their behavior lest they open themselves up for attack." ... There is no small irony in the conservative movement's steadfast opposition to hate-crimes legislation. Their flimsy pretense is that they are doing so in the name of protecting people's free-speech rights."

Again, this is pattently-- and provably-- false, although you might not know about that by listening to the barrage of hate-tinged right-wing radio and TV, not just Limbaugh, Dobbs, O'Reilly and Coulter but even from more mainstream sources. Last time an anti-hate crimes bill came up for a vote, not only did every single Republican in the House oppose it, but 15 reactionary Blue Dog Democrats joined them, homophobic bigots within the Democrat caucus, frequently crossing the aisle to vote with the GOP, like Dan Boren (OK), Chris Carney (PA), Travis Childers (MS), Joe Donnelly (IN), Brad Ellsworth (IN), Parker Griffith (AL), Baron Hill (IN), Frank Kratovil (MD), Mike McIntyre (NC), Walt Minnick (ID), Heath Shuler (NC), Gene Taylor (MS), etc. When Iraq War vet Patrick Murphy (D-PA) took over the sponsorship of the House bill to repeal the homophobic Don't Ask Don't Tell military policy, he declared that "he is targeting fellow Blue Dog Democrats" as sponsors. Is it possible that Patrick is so blind that he missed the fact that every single homophobic asshole in the Democratic caucus is a Blue Dog and that the only Democrats to oppose the Hate Crimes bill were all Blue Dogs? Or is he just playing word games to please wealthy donors in the New Hope area? In this case, their fangs were barred towards gay and lesbian families. But these are among the same right-wing Democrats who also target immigrants and whose violent rhetoric encourages hate crimes from deranged people who feel empowered by them. It's bad enough we have Republicans like this; it is unconscionable that there are, in 2009 Democrats this narrow-minded as well. (Funny, many of these are part of the same crew also opposing health care reform, some actually saying they oppose the public option out of fear that immigrants' children may wind uo being treated!)

A headline in yesterday's Oregonian explained why both of the state's Democratic senators, moderate Ron Wyden and progressive Jeff Merkley, voted to get tough on immigration. it's clear that immigration policy-- even for two of the better members of the Senate-- like so much of our government processes, are a gobblygook of ineffective laws and regulations primarily determined by special interests and campaign donations. The Senate should never have been included as part of the government and should have long since been abolished as the anti-democratic throwback it always was meant to be. At least one disgrace to that disgraceful body, Roland Burris, has decided to not run for a full term.

Like Everyone Else, We're Wondering WHY Palin Suddenly Resigned As Governor Of Alaska

Like Dave Neiwert in his book The Eliminationists, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that there is a real problem in this country with domestic right wing terrorism. This week they reported on 75 plots, conspiracies and racist rampages since the carnage in Oklahoma City. Few Republican elected officials-- exceptions being lunatic fringe extremists like Helen Chenoweth (R-ID), Steve Stockman (R-TX), David Duke (R-LA)-- embrace these terrorist groups overtly and publicly. Many in the party, on the other hand, have learned about winking and nodding and using coded phrases to make clear where their sympathies lie. Generally speaking, in Idaho, if you don't want to be associated with racists and right-wing terrorists you join the Democrats, not the Republicans. When the national Democratic Party declared it would no longer coddle racists, white southerners defected en masse to the GOP, led by hate-filled right-wing Democrats like Strom Thurmond (SC), Jesse Helms (NC), Phil Gramm (TX), and Dick Shelby (AL). Most Democrats breathed a sign of relief and were happy to see them go-- wondering why a few, like Zell Miller (GA) and Dan Boren (OK) stayed-- while the Republican Party not only courted them and welcomed them with open arms, they transformed the entire nature of their party's ideology to accommodate racism and eliminationism.

John McCain never felt especially comfortable with leading this parade, but, in a nod in that dark direction, he picked someone to run as his VP, Sarah Palin, for whom it came very natural. By all means read the account by CBS News of Sarah Palin's relationship, as the Republican vice presidential nominee, with the secessionist extremists of the Alaska Independence Party, a party she went beyond winking and nodding at-- and a party of which her husband Todd was a member for seven years. Palin didn't like it one bit when Neiwert exposed her extremism on CNN and she went screeching to McCain's campaign manager to make it go away. They said they couldn't change history and suggested she stonewall and avoid the topic by claiming, however incongruously, that Todd loves America.

Of course, the question on everyone's mind-- since Palin suddenly announced that she was resigning as governor of Alaska-- is why? And why so sudden? Which scandal is it that caused her political collapse? Is the kick back scandal enough to have sent her packing? In Alaska? Remember, even in the midst of huge public shitstorms and scandals beyond what anyone could be expected to recover from, far right extremists David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Mark Sanford (R-SC) and John Ensign (R-NV) have stuck with the GOP scandal mantra-- unless they catch you, and photograph you, with a live boy or a dead girl, just hang in there and the GOP base will forget. I think in Palin's case we can be sure it was neither a live boy nor a dead girl. So what made her resign? Bill Kristol-- along with other delusional wingnut true believers-- thinks it's to prepare for a presidential run in 2012.

[S]he's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she'll take a hit for leaving the governorship early - but how much of one? She's probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.

Other wingnuts, every bit as extreme and delusional as Kristol, are less optimistic. Few people outside of the lunatic fringe take Palin-worshipper Jonah Goldberg seriously but he's already declared that she's blown it. If most Americans feel they need a hot bath after reading a typical Goldberg screed, Palin fans find him as right as rain: "There’s a reason why the Left and much of the media establishment hated you from day one. Some hated you out of the fear that you might stop Barack Obama’s unfolding coronation. Others because you seemed to expose the snobbery, arrogance, and ideological pieties of elite feminism. Your beauty, your status as a working mom, your blue-collar husband, your bravery in taking on the political establishment in Alaska, your proud status as a pro-lifer and mother of a special-needs child: All of these things were-- and are-- deeply threatening to a secular left-wing cultural elite."

Even loony Jonah admits that most Americans see Palin as a laughing stock but he doesn't think it matters at all because, when push comes to shove he believes that Sarah Palin is "the 'It Girl' of the GOP." As opposed to... Lindsey Graham or Mitch McConnell? Another disappointed rightist in another far right GOP propaganda throw-away seems ready to start weeping:

Sarah Palin's resignation is an appalling dereliction of duty and a highly cynical move to set herself up for a presidental run for which she is manifestly unqualified... It is an absolute dereliction of duty to quit mid-term. When you run for office, you are making a promise to your constituents to serve out your term (unless you get elected to higher office or have one of the aforementioned compelling reasons not to do so). To do otherwise is, in effect, to break your word. It is a sign of a lack of integrity.

...What Sarah Palin did today was get out before the real challenges of the job (whatever challenges there are for such an easy job) really rear their heads. The going got tough in terms of spurious ethics charges against her, and she took off. That's cowardly. That's not sign of staying power. It's a sign of wanting to get out while the getting is good, in order to become a full-time candidate for a presidential race that won't culminate for 3 1/2 more years. It's a little too calculating, by half-- or more.

I just listened to her speech announcing her decision, and found it singularly unimpressive. "This was a rambling, bombastic, self-centered, 'poor me' kind of speech." That's how Mike Carey of the Anchorage Daily News just described her speech on Fox News. I agree. He then said it was, darn, I already can't remember if he said it was "pitiful" or "pathetic," but it was some word like that. Again, I agree. It was a speech in which she clearly made a bid for a national audience-- not a very effective bid, but a transparent one-- but didn't adequately explain to the people of Alaska why she was relinquishing her duty... Statesmen hang tough. Sarah Palin is cutting and running.

The GOP official who was i-chatting with her just before she announced her decision, Nick Ayers, the executive director of the Republican Governors Association, claims she sees herself as a national figure too big for a backwater like Alaska. Meanwhile, Time's Mark Halperin offers 10 possible reasons:

1. Her political standing has slipped enough that she could have lost a re-election bid if she tried to retain her current office.
2. Her political standing has slipped enough that even if she had run and won, she would have likely been bloodied in the race, maybe even in a primary.
3. Even more ethics complaints (many frivolous) would have been filed against her.
4. She's got a book to write.
5. She's got a special needs baby to raise.
6. It is logistically impossible to run for president as the sitting governor of Alaska-- because of flight times. (Not hard: *impossible*)
7. She couldn't truly explore her money-making potential as an incumbent governor.
8. She couldn't truly explore her media potential as an incumbent governor.
9. The legislature has turned so much against her that the job wasn't much fun any more.
10. If she wants to be the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 2012, she needs to spend more time raising money, establishing her international and national expertise, and traveling the Lower 48. And she needs to start now.

Although Palin has spewn out a dozen excuses and accusations for resigning-- from it's best for Alaska to it's best for our troops-- perhaps the DNC may be more on target than anyone else: she's a fucking fruitcake.

Either Sarah Palin is leaving the people of Alaska high and dry to pursue her long shot national political ambitions or she simply can't handle the job now that her popularity has dimmed and oil revenues are down. Either way-- her decision to abandon her post and the people of Alaska who elected her continues a pattern of bizarre behavior that more than anything else may explain the decision she made today.

I'm going to bet, though, that we haven't heard the end of this and that in the next few weeks another shoe is going to drop that will make it abundantly clear why Sarah Palin couldn't have remained in the governor's office even if she wanted to.


UPDATE: Sneaky Palin

When Palin met with Alaska's junior senator, Mark Begich (D), a couple days ago, she either hadn't made up her mind to quit yet or she purposely set out to deceive him. Alaska's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski (R), no more a friend of Palin than Begich, is in the state, and she was also taken by surprise. And like so many serious Republicans, she is aghast at Palin's dereliction of duty:

A very tough one-sentence statement out Friday night from Alaska's Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whose father Sarah Palin knocked off to win the GOP gubernatorial nomination in 2006:



"I am deeply disappointed that the Governor has decided to abandon the State and her constituents before her term has concluded," Murkowski said.




Is Florida Senate Candidate Marco Rubio Headed Down The Path To Fascism?

58 year old Dennis Mahon is a former resident of the Kansas City area, where he was imperial dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He ran for alderman in Northmoor, Mo., on a platform that included keeping the town white. He and his twin brother, Daniel, were arrested and charged with mailing a parcel bomb to a Scottsdale diversity office in 2004. His attorney, Robert Fagan, says his client is a "(military) veteran and a contributing member of society." A third man, Robert Joos, was also arrested in connection with the case and the Indiana home of Tom Metzgar, founder of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), whose website describes him as "converted from minister to Free Thinker, reborn from right-winger to racist."

All 4 of these misfits could easily have been a chapter in Dave Neiwert's stunning new book, The Eliminationists-- How Hate Talk Radio Radicalized The American Right. The book isn't so much about Hate Talk Radio per se as it is about the gradual transformation of mainstream conservatives to full blown fascists and all the steps that lead in that direction. Recently, over the course of a few days I made a very different kind of journey; I flew from L.A. to Hong Kong to Bangkok and on to Bali. The Eliminationists was my traveling companion.

I looked to Neiwert's careful definitions, historical examination and brilliant analysis to shine a light on something that has been bothering me all week. On the surface the casual tweet from Florida Republican, an unabashedly right-wing politician campaigning for the open U.S. Senate seat from that state against heavily favored mainstream conservative Charlie Crist, was just a harmless paen to the right-wing stalwarts at the NRA, part of the coalition he hopes will help him overtake Crist. I've been following Rubio in Twitter since he signed up and he'd never used the NRA hash tag before. And on this tweet he did:

But there was something more to it that has been bothering me. Many Republicans refer to Rubio as "our Obama," presumably because he's young, wrote a book and is from a minority group; he's Cuban-American. The former Speaker of the Florida House brags about his affiliation with the Bush wing of the GOP but his current campaign is reaching out to appeal to Republicans even more extreme and further to the right than that. He's gone from someone championing a reduction in property taxes and shrinking the state government to someone apparently advocating violence in Iran. As I read deeper and deeper into The Eliminationists I kept seeing the specter of Marco Rubio in a conservative movement that has become, in Neiwert's words, "a precursor to fascism." And Neiwert is very careful to warn off his readers from mixing up mainstream conservatives and fascists. He points out that "right-wing rhetoric-- particularly the eliminationist kind-- is so innately violent, and moreover permissive about the use of violence, that it has the effect of promoting a general environment in which violence is accepted and even glorified." Earlier he defined classical fascism in a way that made me wonder if young Mr. Rubio, growing up, at least politically, around so many full-fledged Cuban fascists, might be headed down a path that is anathema to everything most of us value as Americans.

Fascism was explicitly antidemocratic, antiliberal, and corporatist, and it endorsed violence as a chief means to its ends. It was "revolutionary" in its fervor, yet sought to defend status quo institutions, particularly business interests. It was also, obviously, authoritarian.

I'm not saying Rubio is far along the road as, say, Ann Coulter, a full fledged fascist transmitter-- way beyond the pretense of conservatism-- who wrote in the National Review, as a Contributing Editor, that "[w]e should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

In fact Rubio might not even be as far along as defeated Texas Republican Congressman Steve Stockman, a far right fanatic-- currently a vicious Hate Talk Radio host in Houston-- and militia movement stalwart, who appears to have been involved with the catastrophic bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, although he was never charged as a participant.

Earlier today I talked a little about my visits to Afghanistan in terms of tourism and Obama's miscalculations there. Now I want to recall how I marveled at the deeply ingrained Afghan gun culture when I was there in 1969 and again in 1971. I had never seen anything like it before-- not even in Texas. I used to write letters home explaining that you would no sooner expect to see an Afghan man walking along without a gun than you would expect to see an American walking along without his trousers. I remember often seeing pairs of grizzled old Afghan men walking along holding hands, each clutching an ancient long gun in the other hand. And 1969 was a relatively peaceful time in Afghanistan's turbulent history.

Before driving to Afghanistan, I spent a couple months in Iran, primarily in Tabriz, Tehran and Meshed. Iran is a nation that prides itself-- and rightly so-- as one with a rich cultural heritage and a firm claim to being one of the word's longest surviving civilizing forces. The Iranians are as proud of their civilization and the Afghans are proud of their xenophobia and barbarism. In Iran you never see someone with a gun other than a policeman or a soldier.

Rubio bemoans this and seems to think that if the Iranian demonstrators only had some guns they could have swept the tyrants of Tehran away. When Bush and Cheney held sway in Washington I used to wonder if maybe the Second Amendment fanatics had a point. Of course that would lead me to remember that no matter what armaments civilians have-- even in Texas-- the government has more deadly ones. Certainly if the Iranian demonstrators would have carried guns and shot up the police, the Supreme Leader would have responded with tanks. Or does Rubio thinks civilians ought to have the right to own tanks as well?