Liberty Yes, Anarchy No

Texas GOP Releases Platform- Are You a Republican?

2010-06-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

At long last, the 2010 platform for the Texas Republican Party is available for the lay person to read.

As you'd expect, it's equal parts feudalism, fascism, and theocracy.

To give you a notion of how things came about this way: the Texas Republican Party has actually managed to be to the right of the Constitution Party (an openly theocratic smash-the-state third party) since 2006, if not earlier. In 2010 a strong minority faction of libertarian Republicans, led in spirit by Ron Paul and failed gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, threatened to overthrow the ruling Rick Perry-controlled party leadership. To help prevent this, the 2010 platform was rammed through the state convention as a unit, with absolutely no amendments or votes on specific issues allowed.

In short: if you're hoping for reform within the Republican Party, forget it. Not going to happen.

Still, I've been waiting for an actual copy of the 2010 platform for a couple weeks now, ever since several left-wing blogs (especially Huffington Post) mentioned a lot of what's in the platform. ("I am shocked, SHOCKED, to discover anti-homosexual bigotry and Christian supremacy in this political party!")

In the past year, I've bumped into several friends and acquaintances here in Texas who, despite being anti-torture, anti-war, pro-choice, pro-pot, pro-sexual-equality, pro-gay-marriage, etc. identify as Republicans- and loyal Republicans at that. With them in mind, I've assembled a quiz, using ONLY the Texas Republican Party platform for source material, to demonstrate to them that perhaps they're not the sort of person the Republican Party currently represents.

And, after way too much time working on it, here it is- go try it out now, lest OKCupid take it down for being too politically biased:

http://www.helloquizzy.com/tests/are-you-a-true-texas-republican-the-quiz

(If the poll gets taken down, I've saved the questions and can post them here later.)

So- how'd you do?

The Lies of Barack Obama

2010-05-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

... that is, the ones not made up out of thin air by the Republicans.

Barack Obama said he'd stop torture and hold those responsible accountable. Instead, he's fighting in the courts to continue indefinite imprisonment and protect Bush's military commissions,* while torture continues under his watch at Bagram in Afghanistan. He's also blocked any possible investigation, never mind trial, of those who committed torture or who authorized it, even while our allies are moving forward with their own trials in the face of American hostility.

Barack Obama said he'd pull us out of Iraq by 2010. In fact, even by the end of 2011 there is supposed to be a permanent 50,000 troop presence for purposes of "training."

Barack Obama said he'd put a stop to funding wars through off-budget supplemental bills. He lied about that one, too.

And, most recently, he promised a moratorium on the issuing of new permits to drill deep-ocean oil wells... and then kept right on issuing those permits, with not even so much as a slow-down.

Guantanamo is still open.

The PATRIOT Act and the Military Commissions Act are still law, and there is no bill even filed, much less likely to pass Congress, to repeal them.

And the Obama White House worked hard to water down both health care reform (making it into little more than a taxpayer hand-out to insurance corporations) and financial reform (so that no company Too Big to Fail would suffer).

I honestly cannot see any reason to support- or even TRUST- this man anymore.

* Take note: he nominated the lawyer who argued in favor of permanent imprisonment without due process of law to the Supreme Court.

Cull Day, because I have no words...

2010-05-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

First and foremost: we're apparently STILL running a torture hole in Afghanistan.

The International Committee for the Red Cross says since August 2009 U.S. authorities have been providing the names of prisoners in a separate facility at Bagram Air Base, the BBC reports.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC they were held in a separate building and subjected to abuse.

Now, aside from mentioning sleep deprivation, this short article doesn't mention specific abuses at Bagram. Nor does it say clearly that these abuses are ongoing, or ended with Obama's January 2009 order.

But the implication here is that Barack Obama has actively continued the Bush administration policy of torture, his own rhetoric notwithstanding. We do know that he explicitly blocked Bagram prisoners from seeking legal recourse such as writ of habeas corpus. We also know that Obama has actively and aggressively blocked any and all attempts to hold torturers and those who ordered torture accountable for their actions. This article does not quite come out and say that Obama has deliberately continued torture... but it does NOT look good for the President.

The fact that Obama has nominated a second Supreme Court justice who believes the President should be all-powerful and unrestricted makes it look even less good, quite frankly. I still say Obama is in all essentials a Republican president.

On this point the Kagan choice probably reflects the perspective of the man who made it, Barack Obama: not the Obama of the 2008 presidential campaign but rather the Obama who has governed since January 20, 2009—broadly continuing the strong executive posture of the Bush team in national security matters.

(BTW, Kagan supports late-term abortion bans- just so you know.)

More on Kagan from Andrew Sullivan:

Her life, so far as one can tell, is her career, and her career has been built by avoiding any tough or difficult political or moral positions, eschewing any rigorous intellectual debate in which she takes a clear stand one way or the other, pleasing every single authority figure she has encountered, and reveling in the approval of the First Class Car Acela Corridor elite. The NYT profile - which is superb apart from its editorial decision to excise any account of any non-trivial private life (she smokes cigars!) since high school - is chilling in its assessment of a human soul in steady, determined pursuit of approval and power.

. . .

Kagan strikes me as the Democratic elite's elitist: free of any conviction that is not caged in a web of Clintonian caution, punctiliously diligent in every aspect of her career, motivated by a desire never to offend those with power, and rewarded in turn by the protection and praise of these elites.

So, yeah. But enough of our Republican President Obama...

The pro-choice candidate for Bart Stupak's Congressional seat has been forced out of the race by the Democratic Party machine.

Democrat Connie Saltonstall, the abortion-rights advocate who challenged retiring Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) after he resisted a health-care overhaul because of his antiabortion stance, ended her campaign Monday after the party establishment closed ranks around another candidate.

. . .

"I am forced to do this because it has become apparent to my campaign that the leadership of the Michigan Democratic Party has preemptively anointed Gary McDowell as their Democratic candidate," Saltonstall said. "They are replacing Bart Stupak with another Upper Peninsula, anti-choice, anti-women's health-care rights candidate."

Want to know the difference between Democrats and Republicans? Republicans take a firm and unyielding stance defending things that are absolutely EVIL; Democrats refuse to take any stance to defend anything GOOD, preferring instead to pursue power for its own sake. The Democratic Party stands for NOTHING- especially not democracy, since they want to deny Yoopers of a choice of Democratic options in the primary.

And finally, evidence that Republican anti-drug and anti-gay positions are based solely on hate: a medical marijuana dispensary in Montana was firebombed, and a Republican state legislator in Iowa wants to deny "family" status to same-sex families using state camping parks.

I probably could- and should- make a long essay on each of these links... but, collectively, they're so depressing that I just don't have the words to do it.

God, but we need something besides the two corrupt parties (and multitude of incompetent third parties) we have now.

Oh, it is ON now.

2010-05-03T17:46:00.000-07:00

He opposes prosecutions for torture, and has gone out of his way to make sure those who committed, ordered, or enabled torture never face justice.

He opposes restrictions on executive power, defending warrantless wiretaps and other searches and maintaining the imprisonment of accused terrorists without legal recourse. Apparently forever.

He opposes equal rights for gays and lesbians. I mean, really, REALLY opposes equal rights.

He killed the public option and instituted the same individual mandate he promised during the campaign would never be a part of his health care reform.

He opposes immigration reform.

He punishes people who tried to stop the federal government from breaking the law.

He opposes separation of church and state.

He supports the continuation of the failed and counterproductive war on drugs.

In addition to all that, he effectively killed American manned spaceflight for the foreseeable future once the Shuttle shuts down; he pulled the plug on hydrogen energy research in favor of more ethanol, nuclear, and above all offshore oil drilling; and, as a matter of routine, he surrenders to Republicans on drafting legislation, on nominations to office, and on procedure.

And now the man Obama picked to run the FCC is going to cave in on net neutrality- basically allowing the big telecoms, the same ones Obama let off the hook for helping Bush break the law and spy on you and me, to control what you see on the Internet.

The author of the above article has even more to say elsewhere, according to ZDNet:

We simply cannot believe that Julius Genachowski would consider going down this path. Failing to reclassify broadband means the FCC is abandoning the signature communications and technology issues of the Obama administration. Such a decision would destroy Net Neutrality. It would deeply undermine the FCC’s ability to ensure universal Internet access for rural, low-income and disabled Americans. It will undermine the FCC’s ability to protect consumers from price-gouging and invasions of privacy.

If Chairman Genachowski fails to re-establish the FCC authority to protect Internet users, he will be allowing companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to slow down, block or censor content at will. They can block any website, any blog post, any tweet, any outreach by a political campaign — and the FCC would be powerless to stop them. Without reclassification, nearly every broadband-related decision the agency makes from here forward will be aggressively challenged in court, and the FCC will likely lose. The phone and cable companies know this, which is why they’re going all out to keep the FCC from doing so.

Genachowski should not buckle to phone and cable industry pressure, but it will take courage to stand up to one of the biggest lobbying juggernauts in Washington. It’s not too late — and the public is watching. This decision facing the FCC chairman is about more than one single issue, or even a broken promise to the American people. If the FCC fails to stand with the public, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it.

But he will cave- under, no doubt, direct orders from his boss.

If I had wanted Republican policies, I would have voted for John McCain.

But no- I voted for Barack Obama...

... a mistake I will never, ever make again.

Three more links to make you think...

2010-04-30T17:31:00.000-07:00

First: Republicans lie shamelessly and get away with it by portraying all dissenting voices as "socialist liberals".

Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Second: a Miami Herald columnist explains that illegal aliens are here illegally because it's literally impossible for them to come legally:

Legal immigration quotas were set more than 20 years ago, when the U.S. demand for unskilled and highly skilled workers was much smaller than today's.

The U.S. labor market demands up to 500,000 low-skilled workers a year, while the current U.S. immigration system allows for only 5,000 permanent visas for that category, according to the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration reform advocacy group.

``There is no real line for unskilled workers,'' says Maurice Belanger, the Forum's public information director. ``If you are a Mexican wanting to get a legal visa to work as a waiter in the United States, you would be dead before you get your visa.''

And finally: a Daily KOS writer explains that the "libertarian" 1800s were no golden age, as Libertarians would have you believe, but for most a hellish time when life was nasty, brutish, and short.

No quote from that one: you really need to read the whole thing. I mean it. It sums up most, if not everything, that I had misgivings about when I was part of the Libertarian movement. And his summation- that conservatives currently calling themselves "libertarians" like, for example, Glenn Beck, are nothing but rich people who don't want to pay taxes... that's right on target.

Go, read, and think.

Meanwhile, the Imperial Presidency rolls on....

2010-04-30T17:15:00.000-07:00

So, where are President Obama's priorities, now that health care is behind him and financial reform is apparently rolling along?

Immigration reform? Apparently not if he can help it.

Ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell? No, not so much.

Nominating judges who will push hard against pro-corporate conservative justices on the Supreme Court and roll back unconstitutional government powers? Doesn't look that way.

Attacking and prosecuting Bush-era whistleblowers to ensure that the American people will never know the next time a President breaks the law?

Oh, yeah. He's all over THAT action.

The evidence of Republican evil accumulates...

2010-04-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

If you doubted Republicans were racists, note Arizona voting to ban classes teaching about non-white ethnic histories and to fire teachers who speak with a non-Anglo accent, and a Texas GOP US Rep comparing illegal aliens to grasshoppers- locusts, that is- instead of human beings.

If you doubted Republicans cared more about ideology than people, note a new Oklahoma law, passed over the governor's veto, requiring women who seek an abortion to get a vaginal probe ultrasound scan- including those who have just been raped.

If you doubted Republicans are more interested in partisan rule and total control of government than actually making government work well, read Ezra Klein's uncommonly observant article about how one of Utah's Senators is being run out of office for daring to negotiate with a Democrat on an alternative health care proposal.

The Republicans: the Party of Evil. Never believe otherwise.

In a Just World, Crist Should Now Be the Frontrunner...

2010-04-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

The most evil man in America endorses Marco Rubio for the GOP nomination for US Senate.

And Rubio hasn't rejected it.

What more needs to be said?

What I Want to Know Is, What's the Chicken-Squirrel Exchange Rate?

2010-04-22T13:10:00.001-07:00

So, the person who will almost certainly defeat Harry Reid and represent Nevada in the US Senate said this:

"Let's change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I'm telling you that this works. You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say I'll paint your house."

... yes, because Wellpoint will be more than happy to negotiate payment-in-kind for your insurance. Pharmaceutical companies are just eager and willing to give people their medicines and let them "work off" what they owe. And hospitals, now for the most part run by for-profit corporations, are ready and willing to take payment for your stay and surgery in livestock.

And then the Nevada Republican Party DEFENDS this woman:

Although the party is officially neutral in the primary between Lowden, former UNLV basketball player Danny Tarkanian and former state Rep. Sharron Angle, Nevada GOP communications director Ciara Turns nevertheless offered a vigorous defense of Lowden's statements, and condemned the Democrats for the way that Lowden is being attacked.

"Well it's pretty clear that they're attacking the way she conveyed her message because they can't attack her message," said Turns. "Her message is pretty clear. She was clearly trying to make the point that if we moved away from an insurance-based system and more people started paying cash for their health care, then prices would come down. But they don't want to address that. The left doesn't, Harry Reid's campaign doesn't want to address that, because it's a legitimate point that they can't argue. And so they've decided to go after the way she delivered her message instead of the substance of it."

Um, NO. The whole point of bringing in barter is, health care has become too expensive for the average person to pay cash. It's also become much too complicated and networked for any patient to negotiate fees and payment with all the many people- primary care doctor, specialist, lab technicians, pharmaceuticals, hospital corporations, clerical workers- that might be involved in their treatment.

But this is just one wingnut, right? Right?

WRONG.

Bell's made his comments last week, during discussion of a proposed state law that would attempt to nullify the federal health care insurance mandate in the state of Tennessee. Here is a transcript of a dialogue in committee between Bell and Democratic state Rep. Joe Towns, courtesy of the Nashville Scene, as Bell explained that many people get along without insurance:

Bell: They're some of the healthiest people you have ever seen. They pay cash when they go to the doctor. They work out arrangements with the hospitals if their children have to be hospitalized. This is an individual choice that we're talking about.

Towns: You're saying they pay cash? For organ transplants and cancer and heart cases, they pay cash?

Bell: I said they pay cash or work out other arrangements. I know for a fact. I know someone in the medical field who has been paid with vegetables from the Mennonite community.

Towns: That's an anomaly. That's not how the system works. I can't take a sack of vegetables down to the utility company and pay my utility bill on my house. Nobody's going to take vegetables for payment. We can't run the country on vegetables and horse trading.

The core of the Republican position is this: if you're too poor to pay cash for your health, you should only get whatever health care you can pay for in barter.

Now, I for one would be quite happy to see for-profit insurance corporations outlawed. I believe insurance is a confidence scheme made legal- you pay for a policy, and then the person who sold you the policy seeks any excuse imaginable not to pay you if you try to collect on it.

But the end of insurance has to be replaced with some workable system- otherwise everything goes crash. Doctors go bankrupt. Hospitals close. Health care at all levels suddenly becomes much more scarce- and thus much more expensive, as demand spikes above supply.

But Republicans, being rich enough to pay cash for their health care, don't care. After all, if you're too poor to pay a doctor it must be your own fault, riiiiiight?

Religious Wars in the US...

2010-04-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

On the one side, we have people trying to institute a Christian Taliban in the United States, starting with Amarillo, Texas:

Perhaps the most insidious tactic Repent uses is trying to destroy the reputation of the swingers. In Amarillo, people can be ostracized over a whiff of impropriety. On one tape, Grisham directs followers to get the license-plate numbers in the Route 66 parking lot. “A new couple can be here three or four hours,” says Mac. “Whenever they leave, the Repent Amarillo group will call them by first and last name, know where they live, know where they work, just within a very few hours.”

. . .

They're also going after churches they believe to be insufficiently Christian (Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, Unitarians), palm readers, people who practice witchcraft, and anything and everything that might create a "demonic stronghold" in Amarillo. And they're not just threatening to pray for people: Repent Amarillo's "actions" include prayer, according to Repent Amarillo's website, "but [also] may involve more aggressive use of soldiers and prayer warriors." Check out the group's locked-and-loaded website.

Of course, these tactics would not work if not for the vast majority of citizens of Amarillo enabling these people. Tolerance is entirely lost on one whole side of the political spectrum...

... and don't look for help from the other side of the aisle.

The Department of Justice filed a notice with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit that it intends to appeal a federal court decision that found the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional.

A federal judge in Wisconsin ruled last week that the National Day of Prayer, instituted by Congress in 1952, violates the separation of church and state.

. . .

“The Justice Department today made the right decision to defend the constitutional right of Congress to establish a National Day of Prayer,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said. “Setting aside a day to honor a religious practice of many Americans throughout history is in no way unconstitutional. Every American is free to either enjoy it or ignore it.”

Note: applying regulations to interstate insurance companies or international financial institutions is unconstitutional (despite Congress power to regulate both interstate and international commerce), but setting aside a day for all Americans to pray is NOT (despite the First Amendment and the total lack of any enumerated Congressional power to advocate or promote religion).

And by his actions, Obama apparently demonstrates his belief that government should promote religion.

So, one side wants government to promote religion; the other side wants government to ENFORCE religion. Neither side is willing to leave matters of personal conscience to the individual.

Whichever side wins, we all lose.

Why Today I Despair for the American Political System...

2010-04-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

On the Republican side: Republicans signal that not even total capitulation will stop them from portraying financial reform as "permanent bailouts."

On the Democratic side, Obama is still willing to cave in and "compromise" with the Republicans, despite the Republicans saying point blank that they will not compromise. (Also, Obama's Treasury department used its voting power in Citigroup to block disclosure and transparency in derivatives at that company- proving that its calls for "more transparency" are outright lies.)

Back on the Republican side, we get proof that Republicans will destroy anyone who dares to even suggest compromise or working with the Democrats.

Back on the Democratic side, the president we elected to stop criminal conduct in office protects the lawbreakers while punishing those who blew the whistle on them.

There is no hope, no change, in either party.

I'm considering moving to England and joining the Liberal Democrats. At least every issue listed in this article, I agree with and support...

... and more to the point, there's at least a third option that has a chance, however small, to win when the big two parties both become too odious to stand.

Not So Much Cull Day, as Think About It Links

2010-04-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

... but since it's mostly a list of links, I'll put the Cull Day tag on it anyhow.

First, file under good news v. bad news: Good news is, a ban on unmarried couples adopting is struck down in Arkansas, thus a win for gay families; bad news is, word is coming out that Obama is ordering that the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell be halted, thus yet more proof that Obama is no friend of gay rights.

Bruce Bartlett, conservative bloviator, tells us about the day he figured out that most conservatives hear nothing outside of Fox News, Limbaugh, and other right-wing propaganda outlets. Interesting reading.

Ezra Klein points out that corporations regard contracts as sacred when they're getting paid, but not so much when they have to pay employees.

Securities and Exchange Commission investigators knew "Sir" Allen Stanford was breaking the law with a Ponzi scheme... but did nothing about it for eight years. Why? Because it was too much hard work:

We found that senior Fort Worth officials perceived that they were being judged on the numbers of cases they brought, so-called "stats," and communicated to the Enforcement staff that novel or complex cases were disfavored. As a result, cases like Stanford, which were not considered "quick-hit" or "slam-dunk" cases, were not encouraged.

But that's not all: the head of the Fort Worth office of the SEC's enforcement division was in Stanford's back pocket:

The OIG investigation also found that the former head of Enforcement in Fort Worth, who played a significant role in multiple decisions over the years to quash investigations of Stanford, sought to represent Stanford on three separate occasions after he left the Commission, and in fact represented Stanford briefly in 2006 before he was informed by the SEC Ethics Office that it was improper to do so.

And, finally, a very interesting and thought-provoking story that points out why the fundamentalists are absolutely determined to defend the literal text of the Bible as the direct word of God Himself:

Because if God wrote it, personally, then its authority cannot be questioned. And wielding authority that cannot be questioned is what this story is all about.

This is a story about control. It is about, in the unintentionally candid terms of one of the main actors, "absolute authority" and the desire to wield that authority over a text so that the text, in turn, may be used to wield absolute authority over others.

This is very intriguing to me because, in no small part, it explains why fundamentalism is so strongly associated with the South. After all, politics in the South- indeed, every single aspect of the antebellum South, and most aspects of the post-Reconstruction South- centered around control, around making sure no one got above his or her proper station in life. From colonial days right down to the present, the South was split between the few who gave the orders and the many who obeyed- the few who organized the lynchings and the many who either carried them out or became the targets, the few who controlled the government and the many who voted as they were told to vote.

For these people, religion is merely a tool to maintain their control over society- and to defend that control when it is threatened by change.

So- read these links, and think about what they have to say.

It's not a threat- it's a WARNING.

2010-04-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

So, today being the anniversary of Lexington and Concord (and Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing), all the militia groups (including a lot of teabaggers) are holding protests across the country.

Two are being held in the Washington, DC area, and they couldn't be more different; one is a simple Second Amendment rally, whose organizers are deliberately keeping out anyone who might actually bring a gun into the District or threaten the government.

The other one, being held just across the river in gun-legal Virginia, is more or less the exact opposite:

According to the Washington Post, protesters at the "Restore The Constitution" rally will take advantage of new gun laws signed by President Obama allowing the carrying of firearms in national parks to make an armed stand for liberty today.

Rally organizer Daniel Almond put the event together "because he is upset about health-care reform, climate control, bank bailouts, drug laws and what he sees as President Obama's insistence on and the Democratic Congress's capitulation to a 'totalitarian socialism' that tramples individual rights," the Post reports.

Almond will be packing heat, and he's calling on others to join him. The park is just a few miles from downtown D.C. and, on a clear day, the Capitol dome is visible from the location.

This second rally is so extreme in its orientation that even the organization calling for the military to mutiny against the federal government withdrew its support:

An Oath Keeper's board member explained his group's decision to pull out of Almond's event April 12 to the Post.

"It had gotten to the point that it would be dangerous to attend," the Oath Keeper told the paper. "There are people out there willing to do anything to create chaos in an uncontrolled situation, and [the event] is wide open for disaster."

Yeah, when an organization that waits with breathless anticipation for civil war with a "tyrannical" federal government doesn't want to be part of an armed anti-government rally, you can bet there's trouble.

The thing to remember, though, is that this second protest is absolutely NOT an isolated fringe group. It's part and parcel of the modern conservative movement- and especially the Republican Party. Remember, these people elect representatives who call for their constituents to be "armed and dangerous" in opposition to federal laws, who appear in the South and praise efforts to "rise again" in either ignorance of history or support of rebellion.

And, of course, these are the voters without whom the Republican Party would fall to the ranks of the "third" parties. In part, the armed rally within sight of the capitol is a reminder of this: do as you're ordered, or next time we won't bother with an election.

These are people who, more and more, are coming round to the idea of an armed rebellion against the elected government of the United States.

Granted, there is a little bit of good news about this. In my home state, the governor who said Texas might need to secede is in a tight race against a Democrat... and, by the way, that three-point lead is from a polling outfit with a six-point Republican bias, as (repeatedly) proven by FiveThirtyEight.com . And the Democrats are on the attack, mocking the neo-secessionists and militiamen:

Barnes, in particular, took aim at what he characterized as Republicans’ frivolous pursuits since they took power, such as making it illegal to implant a microchip in a person without his permission and threatening to secede from the U.S.

“Do they not know that the Yankees have got the atomic bomb now?” he joked. “We won’t make it through Bull Run.”

So perhaps there's hope.

But in the meantime... maybe it's time to organize gun owners who SUPPORT the currently elected government for a rally of our own.

Someone needs to make it clear that, if these loonies go to war to overturn an election, they WILL be opposed.

Tea Party: They Are Who We Thought They Were

2010-04-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

Recently efforts on the right have been made to make the Tea Party movement more mainstream- to present tea party activists not as ignorant racist Republicans, but as independents intellectually concerned about the direction of our nation.

Well, recently CBS News and the New York Times released their own poll of the tea parties- the largest sample size yet.

CBS News and the New York Times surveyed 1,580 adults, including 881 self-identified Tea Party supporters, to get a snapshot of the Tea Party movement.

. . .

Eighteen percent of Americans identify as Tea Party supporters. The vast majority of them -- 89 percent -- are white. Just one percent is black.

...Three in four are 45 years old or older, including 29 percent who are 65 plus. They are also more likely to be men (59 percent) than women (41 percent).

More than one in three (36 percent) hails from the South, far more than any other region. Twenty-five percent come from the West, 22 percent from the Midwest, and 18 percent from the northeast.

They are better educated than most Americans: 37 percent are college graduates, compared to 25 percent of Americans overall. They also have a higher-than-average household income, with 56 percent making more than $50,000 per year.

More than half (54 percent) identify as Republicans, and another 41 percent say they are independents. Just five percent call themselves Democrats, compared to 31 percent of adults nationwide.

Nearly three in four describe themselves as conservative, and 39 percent call themselves very conservative. Sixty percent say they always or usually vote Republican.

Beginning to get the picture?

This poll does make one distinct change from certain previous polls, specifically the previous CBS-NYT poll on the subject- education. In the February poll, the average teabagger was as likely as the general public to have a college degree; in the April poll, considerably more so. (Average income was also slightly higher in the April poll.)

So, let's compare numbers with the old poll and the new, and throw in the Daily Kos's poll of Republicans for good measure when applicable.

TEA PARTY SUPPORTERS BROKEN UP BY REGION:

SOUTH: February poll 37%, April poll 36%, KOS GOP poll 42%
WEST: February poll 29%, April poll 25%, KOS GOP poll 25%
MIDWEST: February poll 19%, April poll 22%, KOS GOP poll 22%
NORTHEAST: February poll 16%, April poll 18%, KOS GOP poll 11%

BY RACE:

WHITE: February poll 95%, April poll 89%, KOS GOP poll 89% (national proportion about 60%)

BY AGE: February poll 59% over 45, April poll 75% over 45, KOS GOP poll 70% over 45 (national proportion about 50%)

Do you notice the parallels?

The teabaggers ARE the Republican Party, and vice versa. (The poll shows 3/4 of teabaggers calling themselves conservative, and 60% saying they consistently vote Republican.)

With that in mind, consider some other datapoints from the new survey:

Fifty-three percent of Tea Party supporters describe themselves as "angry" about the way things are going in Washington, compared to 19 percent of Americans overall who say they are angry. (Note: that means teabaggers are about half of all the people who are "angry" about Washington for any reason whatever. - Kris)

. . .

Eighty-eight percent disapprove of President Obama's performance on the job, compared to 40 percent of Americans overall. While half of Americans approve of Mr. Obama's job performance, just seven percent of Tea Party supporters say he is doing a good job.

Asked to volunteer what they don't like about Mr. Obama, the top answer, offered by 19 percent of Tea Party supporters, was that they just don't like him. Eleven percent said he is turning the country more toward socialism, ten percent cited his health care reform efforts, and nine percent said he is dishonest.

Seventy-seven percent describe Mr. Obama as "very liberal," compared to 31 percent of Americans overall. Fifty-six percent say the president's policies favor the poor, compared to 27 percent of Americans overall. (Note: And why is this supposed to be a bad thing again? - Kris)

. . .

Sixty-four percent believe that the president has increased taxes for most Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans got a tax cut under the Obama administration.

. . .

Twenty-four percent of Tea Party supporters say it is sometimes justified to take violent action against the government. That compares to 16 percent of Americans overall who say violence against the government is sometimes justified.

. . .

An overwhelming majority of Tea Party supporters, 84 percent, say the views of the Tea Party movement reflect the views of most Americans. But Americans overall disagree: Just 25 percent say the Tea Party movement reflects their beliefs, while 36 percent say it does not. (Note: As with all Republicans, the theme is this: if you disagree, then you're Not Really An American. - Kris)

. . .

Thirty percent of Tea Party supporters believe Mr. Obama was born in another country, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Another 29 percent say they don't know. Twenty percent of Americans overall, one in five, believe the president was not born in the United States. (Note: The Daily KOS poll of Republicans showed almost identical numbers on the same question - Kris)

The poll also shows distinct animus towards non-whites, especially blacks. Considering some of the people who take an active role in organizing tea party protests, that shouldn't be surprising:

[Brian "Sonny"] Thomas is the founder and president of the Springboro Tea Party in southwest Ohio. He faces a misdemeanor charge after recently going to the home of the mother of his son, in violation of a protection order. The woman had previously told police that their son had returned from Thomas's home with bruises.

Thomas had already been in hot water, after he tweeted during a march in support of immigration reform: "Illegals everywhere today! So many spicks makes me feel like a speck. Grr. Where's my gun?"

Thomas's son, and the son's mother, are Hispanic.

. . .

The tweet wasn't the first evidence that Thomas may be unusually preoccupied with race. Among the links to the Springboro Tea Party site is one to a site called white-pride.org, which sells t-shirts expressing pride in various European ancestries. CNN found a picture on Thomas's MySpace page -- no longer available -- of him wearing a "white pride" t-shirt. The "White Pride" slogan is frequently used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Remember, that's not just a group of independent fringe people. As the polls show... that's the mainstream Republican Party- the old rich white folks trying to preserve their privilege and undermine or outright destroy the federal government.

And if anybody tells you different... don't believe it.

Post-Convention Cull Day

2010-04-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, a LOT apparently happened while I was busy at, or recovering from, the convention I worked at this past weekend. Too much for me to keep track of, or research, or comment in detail on.

So... it's Cull Day!

First off: Oklahoma becomes the first state to begin organizing its secessionist army.

Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.

. . .

"Is it scary? It sure is," said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. "But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?"

Incidentally, folks, it should be borne in mind that, just before the Civil War, most newspapers in the South were agents of the fire-eating secessionist wing of the Democratic Party, deliberately ginning up fear, hatred and paranoia among their readership. Today... we have Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax.com, Drudge, National Review... so, yeah.

The Tea Parties are trying to unite... except, well, it's only those tea party groups funded and run by Republican Party activists that are uniting:

Mark Skoda, a Tea Party leader from Memphis (and a founder of the recent Tea Party Convention), is serving as the chief spokesman for the effort, and appears to have played a leading role in putting it together. Skoda, working closely with Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, had helped organize and promote February's convention, at which Sarah Palin delivered the keynote speech and which enjoyed widespread media coverage. Also part of the new coalition is the Tea Party Express, the brainchild of a team of California Republican political consultants.

But one prominent group, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), doesn't appear to be joining the party. Jenny Beth Martin, a leader of TPP noted to TPMmuckraker that her group already considers itself the largest grassroots Tea Party organization, and said it hadn't been involved in planning the new federation. TPP had also stayed away from February's convention.

It should be noted that Tea Party Nation is the group founded and led by former Republican leader Dick Armey. This is a clear case of the Republican Party trying- and failing- to co-opt the teabaggers, who are definitely much more radical and bigoted than the national average. Even Fox News is calling the teabaggers out on their lunacy, now that they realize they won't be controlled.

Even as Virginia Governor McConnell apologizes and backtracks on his leaving slavery out of the Civil War, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour brushes slavery off as unimportant:

CROWLEY: You know what I'm trying to get at here is that there's a sort of feeling that this is insensitive. But you clearly don't agree?

BARBOUR: To me, it's a sort of feeling that it's a nit, that it is not significant, that it's not a -- it's trying to make a big deal out of something doesn't amount to diddly.

So, yeah: slavery was wrong, "everybody knows that," but apparently it wasn't important at all to the Confederacy. Riiiiight.

Matthew Yglesias cuts right to the heart of both the Republican desire to celebrate the CSA, and the core of teabagger support:

... something that links the mentality of today’s right to the mentality of the slaveowners and segregation proponents is the white southern political tradition’s very partial and selective embrace of majoritarian democracy. As long as national institutions are substantially controlled by white southerners, the white south is a hotbed of patriotism. But as soon as an non-southern political coalition manages to win an election—as we saw in 1860 and in 2008—then suddenly the symbols of national authority become symbols of tyranny and the constitution is construed as granting conservative areas all kinds of alleged abilities to opt out of national political decisions. Even if you think opposition to the Affordable Care Act has nothing whatsoever to do with race, the underlying political philosophy by which a George W Bush or James Buchanan is a national president but an Abraham Lincoln or a Barack Obama merely a sectional one remains incoherent and pernicious.

Meanwhile, if you haven't had enough reminders of innate Republican evil, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, testified that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld knew full well they were imprisoning- and torturing- innocent people in Guantanamo and elsewhere:

I came to understand that there were several different reasons for the refusal to release detainees in Guantánamo, even those who were likely innocent. These reasons continued to the time of my departure from the Department of State in 2005. At least part of the problem was that it was politically impossible to release them. The concern expressed was that if they were released to another country... the leadership of the Defense Department would be left without any plausible explanation to the American people...

. . .

Another part of the political dilemma originated in the Office of Vice President Richard B. Cheney, whose position could be summed up as “the end justifies the means”, and who had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent, or that there was a lack of any useable evidence for the great majority of them. If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it. That seemed to be the philosophy that ruled in the Vice President’s Office.

Of course, with Dawn Johnsen's nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel scuttled, the last faint hope of Obama ever following up on this testimony has long since flown away.

And finally, a recent federal court ruling puts a major kink in plans for net neutrality regulations. That said, it was almost certainly the right ruling:

If “ancillary jurisdiction” is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, it could just as easily be invoked tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the FCC dreams up (including things we won’t like). For example, it doesn't take much imagination to envision a future FCC "Internet Decency Statement." After all, outgoing FCC Chairman Martin was a crusader against "indecency" on the airwaves and it was the FCC that punished Pacifica radio for playing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, something you can easily find on the Internet.

Of course, this ruling can- and probably will- lead to more direct and stringent regulation of telecoms and internet providers by the FCC, since they won't be allowed to do spot-checks on egregious incidents. This issue is by no means settled.

Of course, the local newspaper has NOTHING on the runoffs...

2010-04-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've just been given a major reason to vote in the almost totally forgotten Republican primary runoffs: a lunatic, hypocritical theocrat who, despite being almost totally unqualified, wants to be on the state supreme court.

Currently locked in a tight runoff in the GOP primary for a six-year term on the Texas Supreme Court, the self-described "patriot and Reagan conservative" came in first in a six-way primary last month. The runoff between Green, who has a law degree but no judicial experience, and Fort Worth family district court judge Debra Lehrmann is next Tuesday.

. . .

Green once punched a political rival on election day 2006, and his four-year tenure as a legislator in the Texas House was marked by controversies like the time he filmed an TV infomercial for a nutritional supplement in his Capitol office (more on both of these episodes below).

Since 2001, Green has been going around the country speaking as a representative of WallBuilders, a group dedicated to education about America's "forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built."

. . .

Green, for his part, has also embraced the Tea Partiers. In a video of a tea party rally featured on his own YouTube channel, Green exhorts the cheering crowd to say that "we are firing the first shots of the second American Revolution right here in Texas."

Green's last stint in public service, as a state representative from Dripping Springs south of Austin, was marked by ethical problems, In one incident, he successfully lobbied the state parole board to release a man who owed $400,000 to a company owned by Green's father, according to the Dallas Morning News. In another, prosecutors looked into his role lobbying the health department on behalf of a dietary supplement firm, Metabolife, that was also represented by Green's law firm.

More coverage here and here.

Now, obviously this person should not be allowed within a mile of being a judge. And since the Republicans hold all the seats on the Supreme Court, it's highly unlikely that the winner of the Republican primary will win.

But...

... if the Democratic candidate has any chance at all, it's only with this lunatic carrying the GOP standard. His primary opponent is, by comparison, quite sane and moderate- and, in a contest that leans Republican at best, probably unstoppable.

So, your advice: should I gamble, cast my vote for the crazy man, and hope the Democrats win in November... or vote for the sane family court judge, knowing that she will almost certainly stomp on the Democrat with cleats come November?

Don Blankenship: Teabagger, Racist, Greedy, Sociopathic... Republican

2010-04-07T12:29:00.000-07:00

So the big news the past couple days is the big mine explosion in West Virginia.

This is by no means the first time that a mine belonging to the Massey Corporation has caused the deaths of workers. The CEO of the corporation, Don Blankenship, has said in an interview that despite the multitude of safety violations, there was nothing wrong with how the mine was run:

I mean violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process. You have inspections every day and it’s hard to differentiate sometimes between head count or number counts of violations and the seriousness or type of it.

[Upper Big Branch] was a mine that had violations. I think the fact that MSHA and the state and our firebosses and the best engineers you can find were all in and order this mine and all belive it was safe … speaks for itself.

Any suspicion that the mine was improperly operated or illegally operated or anything like that would be unfounded. None of these groups would have allowed this mine to operate had it been unsafe.

Yes, this nitwit does not realize- or will not admit- that safety regulation violations are a definitive sign that the mine IS unsafe.

Of course, you'll notice that he mentiones the Mine Safety and Health Authority, the state government, and his employed engineers... but he doesn't mention union safety crews or inspectors. That's because, over the past decade, he's purged the United Mine Workers of America from his corporation's mines.

The combative head of the nation's sixth-biggest coal company has benefited greatly by facing down the union. But it's not his only enemy. Environmental regulators, who he says are in cahoots with the union, aren't particularly fond of him either. They say he runs some of the industry's dirtiest mines. Now Wall Street has joined the party. The cocky, independent streak that served him so well has led to bad decisions, such as hiring cheaper but inexperienced workers.

. . .

The 53-year-old made his name in 1985, when Massey insisted on separate negotiations for each of the company's mines. In protest the United Mine Workers of America struck at mines run by Blankenship. But after 15 months, with one worker shot to death, 91 others sent to the hospital, three of Blankenship's armored cars trashed and those 11 bullets fired into his office, the union caved in, agreeing to less featherbedding and less job security. Now Massey's liabilities for future retiree benefits and land reclamation equal $11 for each ton it ships annually; its three biggest rivals average $20 a ton.

. . .

The 53-year-old made his name in 1985, when Massey insisted on separate negotiations for each of the company's mines. In protest the United Mine Workers of America struck at mines run by Blankenship. But after 15 months, with one worker shot to death, 91 others sent to the hospital, three of Blankenship's armored cars trashed and those 11 bullets fired into his office, the union caved in, agreeing to less featherbedding and less job security. Now Massey's liabilities for future retiree benefits and land reclamation equal $11 for each ton it ships annually; its three biggest rivals average $20 a ton.

. . .

Blankenship, making a contrarian bet that the supply of low-sulfur coal will fall even faster than demand as more eastern miners fold up shop, has bought mines in West Virginia. Massey now has a third of Central Appalachia's proven and probable reserves. It mined 44 million tons last year, up from 13 million in 1990. "We're skating where the puck is going to be," says Blankenship.

. . .

n October 2000 the floor of a 72-acre wastewater reservoir built above an abandoned mine in Kentucky collapsed, sending black sludge through the mine and out into a tributary of the Big Sandy River. The sludge killed fish and plants for 36 miles downstream... Blankenship says the accident "could have happened to anyone" and partly blames faulty maps of the old mine . . . the reservoir had shown signs of leaking right before the accident and Massey failed to report that fact to regulators as required, according to the U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration. The cleanup has cost $58 million so far.

. . .

The state's Surface Mine Board, which includes the vice chairman of the state lobbying group for the coal industry, called Massey's actions at Madison "absolutely the worst behavior by any company that any member of this board has ever seen over the decades that this board has been in existence."

Over the two years through 2001 Massey was cited by West Virginia officials for violating regulations 501 times. Its three biggest rivals, mining twice as much coal in the state as Massey, were cited a collective 175 times. Blankenship says Massey is unfairly targeted by regulators. "We don't pay much attention to the violation count," he says.

. . .

In the winter of 2000-01 electricity demand rose and the spot price for Central Appalachian coal jumped from $24 a ton to $48 a ton. Mining companies began digging furiously, hiring more workers and pushing up wages. Blankenship refused to match the increases. Miners quit in droves. The timing was awful. Blankenship had planned to increase Massey coal production for the coming year from 44 million tons to 56 million tons and so needed to add staff. He had to turn to people with little experience. By the end of 2001 half of his 5,000-person staff were new hires.

The company's cost of sales, which includes miner's wages, jumped 11% in 2001 for each ton of coal sold. And, despite the surge in coal prices, Massey's operating margin fell a third, to 13%, that year. Blankenship says his decision to let the old workers go will be vindicated as savings from lower wages pile up.

And the above is a Forbes article from 2003- in other words, that was his closest FRIENDS writing about him. His allies in big business were, at the time, sharply critical of his short-sighted policies combined with his monopolistic desires- as you see above, his corporation controls a third of all coal in Appalachia, and holds near total dominion over West Virginia, where coal is the only industry.

Here's what his ENEMIES say about him, and it's based on more recent material:

Here's something else about Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company: Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year's Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the "Friends of America Rally."

. . .

Massey ranks among the nation’s top five coal producers and is among the industry’s most profitable. It has a spotty safety record.

The federal mine safety administration fined Massey a then-record $1.5 million for 25 violations that inspectors concluded contributed to the deaths of two miners trapped in a fire in January 2006. The company later settled a lawsuit naming it, several subsidiaries and Chief Executive Don Blankenship as defendants. Aracoma Coal Co. later paid $2.5 million in fines after the company pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges in the fire.

. . .

The Manville Trust filed the case in July 2007 against company Chairman, CEO, and President Don Blankenship and certain other current and former officers and directors. The plaintiff sought several corporate governance reforms, specifically regarding environmental compliance and worker safety. Citing several incidents involving Massey Energy, including a major federal water pollution lawsuit, penalties for two coal miners' tragic deaths and other safety and environmental compliance problems, the lawsuit claimed that a "conscious failure" by the defendants to ensure compliance with federal and state regulations and other legal obligations posed a "substantial threat of monetary liability for violations."

. . .

Blankenship will spend millions to keep the Massey Energy's workforce non-union, is perfectly happy to discriminate against union workers even if it means being sued and losing, and might hate unions as much as he hates 'greeniacs'.

This is the same mine where the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently ruled that Spartan Mining illegally discriminated against 82 UMWA members by refusing to hire them because of their union membership status.

“This settlement highlights yet again the treacherous and backhanded manner Massey treated the miners who had worked at the Cannelton mine for decades,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said. “While it was discriminating against these experienced miners because of their age or union status, the company was at the same time publicly crying about the lack of experienced miners in the coalfields.

“But it wasn’t that Massey couldn’t find experienced miners,” Roberts said. “They were there all along and wanted to work. It was that the company would rather break the law than allow its employees to have a strong voice at work and the tremendous benefits of a union contract.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish. An investment in experienced workers trained in state-of-the art safety measures combined with OSHA compliance and mine safety measures might have saved at least 25, and possibly 29 lives.

Instead Don Blankenship spent that money and more on a US Chamber of Commerce corporate-sponsored tea party to convince good, hard-working honest people to work against their best interests.

Scared yet? That's only the beginning:

On April 3, 2008, ABC News reported that Blankenship attacked an ABC News photographer at a Massey facility near Belfry, Kentucky . . . "If you're going to start taking pictures of me, you're liable to get shot," Blankenship stated in the video.

. . .

A former employee of Blankenship, Deborah May, has filed a lawsuit claiming that stress from personal abuse forced her to quit her job as Blankenship's personal maid in November, 2005. The lawsuit claims that a wrong breakfast order from McDonald's, misplaced ice cream in the freezer and an improperly hung jacket in the closet caused difficulties with Blankenship.

. . .

He referred to the support of President Jimmy Carter for energy conservation in the 1970s to communism: "Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the first stage."

In a letter to the editor of the Charleston (WV) Gazette dated Oct. 30, 2009 Blankenship denied that global warming exists, and states: "Why should we trust a report by the United Nations? The United Nations includes countries like Venezuela, North Korea and Iran."

In 2005, Blankenship wrote a memo to employees telling them that maximizing coal production was more important than spending time constructing things like support beams or ventilation shafts: "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal."

So here we have a man who has no value whatever for the lives of other people, who believes that any form of regulation or conservation is Communist tyranny, who attacks and abuses other people and routinely gets away with it...

...oh, and did I mention he's one of the biggest Republican donors in four states, to the point that he's de facto boss of the Republican machine in West Virginia?

Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy — which owns the Whitesville mine — is a looming figure in West Virginia politics. Indeed, it's difficult to think of a figure like him in any other state in the current century. He financed a takeover of the state Supreme Court that wound up setting U.S. Supreme Court precedent around politics and the judiciary, and then tried to take over the Legislature.

And look down in the comments:

1) Massey Energy is based in Richmond; 2) Massey's Knox Creek site in Tazewell County "was one of ten sites in the country to be cited for major health and safety violations last October"; 3) our fine Attorney General is not only NOT cracking down on Massey, he "is actually working with Massey Energy on his lawsuit against the EPA;" and 4) Massey hearts Virginia Republicans, having donated $61,000 to Virginia Republicans in 2009 ("and $0 to the Dems"), not to mention $441,463 to Virginia Republicans since 1997 (just $8,250 to Democrats), including $40,000 to Bob McDonnell for Governor and $10,000 to Ken Cuccinelli for Attorney General.

And what did Blankenship get for his money? An attorney general who ordered Virginia universities to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and a governor who just declared April to be Confederate History Month... and then left out slavery altogether from his proclamation because:

"there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia."

Yeah... because the single biggest reason the secessionists themselves cited for forming the Confederacy isn't significant enough to be part of history.

So... Don apparently got what he paid for there.

And how did this nutbar not only survive, but prosper, in the decade he's been CEO of Massey? One word: politics.

Blankenship was abetted by former employees placed at the highest levels of the federal mine safety system. Massey COO Stanley Suboleski was named a commissioner of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission in 2003 and was nominated in December 2007 to run the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy. Suboleski is now back on the Massey board. After being rejected twice by the Senate, one-time Massey executive Dick Stickler was put in charge of the MSHA in a recess appointment in October 2006. In the 1990s, Stickler oversaw Massey subsidiary Performance Coal, the operator of the deadly Upper Big Branch Mine, after managing Beth Energy mines, which “incurred injury rates double the national average.” Bush named Stickler acting secretary when the recess appointment expired in January 2008.

. . .

U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), oversaw the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Chao “put on the brakes” on the MSHA investigation into the spill by placing a McConnell staffer in charge. In 2002 a $5,600 fine was levied. That September Massey gave $100,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, chaired by McConnell.

. . .

In May 2007 the EPA filed suit for $2.4 billion against Massey for violating “Clean Water Act more than 4,500 times from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2006″ in West Virginia and Kentucky, including the Martin County spill. In January 2008 Massey agreed to pay $20 million to settle the case.

In short language: Blankenship is one of many crazy, self-obsessed CEOs who have bought off the government. We can only wait and hope that this fresh tragedy actually goads a Democratic federal government into putting some teeth into the regulations and nailing Blankenship's hide to the proverbial war.

But, since the Democratic Party is the Party of Caving In to Evil, I'm not holding my breath. No doubt they have More Important Issues to Focus On. No doubt they Don't Want to Alienate Republicans in Congress. No doubt they wish to Seek Bipartisanship.

If the Democrats don't act now, and act definitively, it will be merely another example of why we desperately need some other party besides the Big Two- one irredeemably evil, the other useless.

Help! Help! My right to oppress others is being oppressed!

2010-03-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

A group of neo-Confederate lawyers wants people to self-identify on the 2010 Census as "Confederate Southern Americans”.

“A significant number of Southerners identifying themselves as Confederate Southern Americans on the Census form could finally spell the beginning of the end for the discrimination that has been running rampant, especially for the last 20 years or so, against all things Confederate, and for that matter against Southern heritage and identity in general,” SLRC executive director Roger McCredie said in a written statement.

He said this campaign could result in protections for “Confederate Southern Americans” much like those for other groups.

“In this age of honoring diversity, Southern/Confederate people are the last group in America that can be maligned, ridiculed and defamed with impunity,” said SLRC Board Chairman Neill H. Payne. “Using the Census to unite the Southern/Confederate community can be a significant first step to our obtaining rights and recognition that all American ethnic groups are entitled to.”

So... crackers are an ethnic group, then? And furthermore, separate from Caucasians elsewhere in the USA. Apparently Pennsylvania hillbillies are innately different from the Carolina variety.

And furthermore, the descendants of Confederates are apparently the victims of discrimination. (Because, you know, all that slavery, and Jim Crow, and lynching, and Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond and George Wallace and all that, that doesn't count.)

But who, exactly, is the SLRC? Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center has an article on the founders of the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC):

Since its incorporation in 1996 by Kirk Lyons (see biography, "In the Lyons Den," Summer 2000 edition, Intelligence Report) and two other men, the Southern Legal Resource Center has operated out of a nondescript duplex on a quiet street in Black Mountain, a historically liberal town near Asheville.

The SLRC replaced an earlier Lyons creation in Texas known as CAUSE, short for Canada, Australia, the United States, South Africa and Europe — the parts of the world where Lyons judged white majorities' rights under threat because of rising minority populations.

. . .

From the start, the SLRC was the creation of extremists. The core staff is made up of Lyons and his long-time partner and brother-in-law, Neill Payne, along with the two men's parents-in-law.

Both Lyons and Payne were married on the compound of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations in Idaho. The pastor presiding over their 1990 double wedding was Aryan boss Richard Butler, and their spouses were both daughters of Betty and Charles Tate, who now work at the SLRC. Betty Tate had been an Aryan Nations secretary, while her husband was a Butler aide; the couple's son is in prison for terrorist crimes. Louis Beam, a violently racist former Klan leader, was Lyons' best man at the ceremony.

The SLRC's board includes Lourie Salley III, who is executive director of the board and also a prominent member of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group. (Salley's hobby, according to Aiken, S.C., City Attorney Richard Pierce, is refitting small planes as "Nazi German observation planes.")

. . .

For more than two years, Kirk Lyons has been a key player in an attempt to turn the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) from its original mission of defending the memory of Southern Civil War combatants to far-right political activism. He helped organize a major pro-Confederate flag rally in South Carolina in 2000, which in turn helped to boost Lyons' credentials within the 32,000-member SCV.

There's much more, including evidence of outright fraud and deception, and the article is seven years old- which means there's seven years not covered by its evidence.

So... a legal board founded and run by a white supremacist wants white decendants of Confederates to use the Census to advance his self-serving battle to preserve white power.

And he and his are the victims.

Let me be very blunt here: there is only one defining factor that splits southern white people in America from the rest. There is only one bit of heritage that both unifies the South and differentiates it from the rest of the Union. It is the "peculiar institution" that the first seven states of the Confederacy seceded to defend.

It is race-based chattel slavery.

Defending the memory of brave soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War, putatively in defense of home and hearth against Union invasion, is one matter. Defending the culture that started that war by firing on the American flag- first on January 6, 1861 against the ship Star of the West, then on April 13 to force the surrender of Ft. Sumter, both in Charleston, SC- defending that culture is entirely different. That culture was built upon the belief in aristocracy and racial supremacy- and upon a contempt bordering on anathema for the entire concept that "all men are created equal."

That culture does not need to be celebrated, or preserved, or protected. It needs to be buried and washed away by the years.

But not forgotten. No, never forgotten- for the evils of the past can return, if we forget just how evil they were... even the undeniable evils of slavery and racial supremacy.

Why HCR Law Won't Make Anything Better

2010-03-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

I have almost nothing to add to Dan Froomkin's reporting:

In the short run, companies are expected to keep doing what they've been doing, which means, among other things, jacking up their rates. "There's nothing to stop them from raising their premiums, and that's what they're going to do," said Angell, a supporter of "single-payer" health insurance.

. . .

"They also will continue to try to shift more and more of the cost of health care from them to the people that are enrolled in their plans," Potter said. That involves moving people currently in managed care, with its relatively modest co-pays, "out of those plans and into high-deductible plans that make people pay thousands of dollars before the company will pay a dime," Potter said. ... And for people who can't afford to pay the full deductible, that's a lot like not having insurance at all.

. . .

The new law requires companies to maintain a medical loss ratio of at least 80 to 85 percent.

But there are still ways to game even that limit. One is, paradoxically, to spend more on health care, either by offering more services or driving up costs. Insurance companies typically want to spend less on this stuff, but if the 80 percent slice gets bigger, so can the 20 percent slice. Another way, of course, is to label more and more company expenses as health care.

. . .

One provision she expects them to exploit is the one allowing companies to charge as much as 50 percent more for people who engage in unhealthy behaviors. "With anyone who's chronically ill, you can always find an unhealthy behavior," she said.

"So that's the new preexisting condition."

Angell also pointed out that there's been very little coverage of the fact that insurance companies will still be allowed to charge older people (over age 55) much more than younger people. Three times as much, to be precise.

As a result, people between ages 55 and 65 (when Medicare kicks in) who don't have enough income to pay high premiums will be left with two options: Not buying insurance and being hit with a fine; or paying premiums they can't afford.

. . .

"One thing in particular is they'll be trying to manipulate how regulations are written." The intent of the regulations is set forth in the law, but not spelled out; that job has been left to the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), Potter said. "The industry will spend an enormous amount of money to try to influence how those regulations are written." . . . And each state legislature has to implement the regulations individually, including establishing their own regulations for the new health-insurance exchanges, where people not covered through their employers would be able to comparison shop for insurance at competitive rates.

. . .

"I think the worst-case scenario is they keep cheap customers in plans offered outside the exchanges, and leave the exchanges with high-cost customers, making it look like the exchanges are inefficient," Aaron said.

A lot of these dynamics would have been completely different if people had a so-called public option: A government-run insurance plan without the same toxic incentive structure. Then consumers would have had an alternative when private industry rates shoot up and services decline. But there is no such option in the new law.

Go read the whole thing, and understand why I feel that what passed in Congress has made nothing better- and some things worse.

Hutaree: Outlier, or Taste of the Future?

2010-03-30T12:25:00.000-07:00

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Sinclair Lewis didn't say it at all, apparently, but it is still a completely true statement. Even more true is Huey P. Long's version, "When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!".

With these quotes, freshly researched, in my mind, I sit down to write something about the followers of "Captain Hutaree," alias David Brian Stone.

As most of you no doubt learned yesterday, Stone and seven of his followers were arrested yesterday on an indictment alleging a plot to spark the overthrow of the American government. (An eighth follower was tracked down and arrested today.)

The indictment alleges that killing a law enforcement official would be just the beginning: "As a consequence of this act, law enforcement officers from throughout the nation would be drawn to and gather in the Eastern District of Michigan for the funeral," the indictment said. "According to the plan, the Hutaree would then attack law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession with improvised explosive devices with explosively formed projectiles."

Making Light goes into much, much more detail on the subject, even quoting broad sections of the federal indictment:

The HUTAREE’s enemies include state and local law enforcement, who are deemed “footsoldiers” of the Federal government, Federal law enforcement agencies and employees, participants in the “New World Order,” and anyone who does not share in the HUTAREE’s beliefs.

Since at least 2008, the HUTAREE has been meeting regularly to conduct military-style training in Lenawee County, located in the Eastern District of Michigan, and elsewhere. The purpose of this training has been to plan and prepare for the impending war with the HUTAREE’s enemies.

. . .

From on or about August 16, 2008, and continuing thereafter up to and including the date of the filing of this indictment, in the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, and elsewhere, the defendants … acting as a militia group known as the HUTAREE, did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree with each other and other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to levy war against the United States, to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States, and to prevent, hinder, and delay by force the execution of any United States law.

. . .

The general concept of operations provided that the HUTAREE would commit some violent act to draw the attention of law enforcement or government officials and which would prompt a response by law enforcement. Possible such acts which were discussed included killing a member of law enforcement after a traffic stop, killing a member of law enforcement and his or her family at home, ambushing a member of law enforcement in rural communities, luring a member of law enforcement with a false 911 emergency call and then killing him or her, and killing a member of law enforcement and then attacking the funeral procession motorcade with weapons of mass destruction. These acts would intimidate and demoralize law enforcement, diminishing their ranks and rendering them ineffective.

. . .

The general concept of operations further provided that, once such action was taken, HUTAREE members would then retreat to one of several “rally points” where the HUTAREE would wage war against the government and be prepared to defend in depth with trip-wired and command detonated anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), ambushes, and prepared fighting positions. It is believed by the HUTAREE that this engagement would then serve as a catalyst for a more wide-spread uprising against the Government.

And these cretins weren't just planning or training to kill cops as part of a crackpot scheme to trigger a mass theocratic revolution: they were actually trying to put that planning and training into action. Again quoting from the indictment (via Making Light):

e. On or about February 6, 2010, several conspirators attempted to travel to Kentucky to attend a summit of militia groups convened by DAVID BRIAN STONE. … The purpose of the summit of militia groups was to facilitate better communications, cooperation, and coordination between the various militias. In anticipation of the summit, DAVID BRIAN STONE … solicited a person he believed capable of manufacturing destructive devices to provide him with four anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) to take with them to the summit. Although weather conditions prevented them from reaching their destination, DAVID BRIAN STONE … identified law enforcement officers in a specific community near his residence, and one officer in particular, as potential targets of attack.

They were getting the weapons, and they had chosen the targets. It was just dumb luck- or excellent anti-terrorism work by the FBI- that Stone chose a government informant to approach for bombs and other explosive munitions.

After looking (exhaustively) through what's left online of the Hutaree websites, the Nielsen Haydens don't think much of their claims to defend Christ:

Are the Hutaree religious extremists or anti-government extremists? I’d say the latter. Their religious doctrine is barely there. They may talk a lot about Jesus, but their timing and plans appear to be driven by secular concerns.

David Neiwert agrees- because of what he saw in the 1990s, with the militia movement as it grew during Bill Clinton's presidency.

It very much reminds me of the Washington State Militia, the group whose bust and subsequent federal trial I covered in 1996-7. The WSM was a lot like the Michigan Militia in that it liked to sell itself as a civic-minded group whose main purpose was to defend citizens from government oppression and to perform various civic function. I'll never forget John Pitner, the WSM's "commander," telling reporters outside a meeting hall in Mount Vernon in January 1996 that he and his members had been heavily involved in sandbagging efforts to combat the floods that had hit local rivers the week before.

. . .

Pitner and six of his comrades were arrested in July 1996 and hit with a variety of charges, most notably for making pipe bombs. At the trial, it emerged that the FBI had videotaped many of the militiamen's meetings, and so both the trial audience and the jury got to hear Pitner and his cohorts planning various acts of violence, including bombing a local reporter's home and a nearby train tunnel.

Nothing has changed, except the name of the Democratic President.

And, just as with Ruby Ridge, JustUs Township, and the other militia nuts of the 1990s, the conservative movement is stumbling over themselves to defend the Hutaree.

The worst example of the above:

Last time I looked, wanting to start a civil war (insane as it is) was not a crime. Assuming they are crackpots, they still have the same constitutional rights as everyone else, and I hope for the sake of the rest of us that they are being respected.

So... apparently, treason- the attempted overthrow of the federal government by force of arms, in this case- is a constitutional right.

But is this really surprising at all? We've seen, time and again, the threatening signs of the teabaggers, such as, "WE COME UNARMED- THIS TIME," or, "IF BROWN CAN'T FIX IT, BROWNING CAN." We've seen certain of their members already busted for seeking a war with the federal government.

And, through it all, we've seen conservatives in general and certain elected Republicans in particular- John McCain, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin for examples- playing up both the rhetoric of rebellion and the paranoid beliefs that fuel the desire for rebellion.

And it should be most telling indeed about the true nature, and allegiance, of these militias that, during the administration of George W. Bush, they were almost totally SILENT. They sat, and waited, and relaxed... but now that a Democrat, as middle-of-the-road as they come, has taken over the Oval Office, it's right back to armed resistance and rebellion.

And, as Huey Long said, in the name of "anti-Fascism."

It is entirely possible- indeed probable- that the elected Republicans, and the conservative talking heads of radio and Fox News, don't intend to inspire an actual armed revolt against the federal government. They merely think that, by playing up the fear and paranoia of militia supporters, they themselves can regain control of that same government. Unfortunately, the more they use revolutionary rhetoric, the more they call on their followers to "defend the Constitution" or "uphold Judeao-Christian values", the more likely Hutaree-like terrorists are to pop up...

... and, of course, the more dependent Republicans will be upon them.

I conclude with a quote that really DOES come from Sinclair Lewis, from his book It Can't Happen Here, which I'm going to start reading in full... the excerpts I've glanced through thus far are all too applicable to the current political climate. Here's the quote:

He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.

Lewis is describing his soon-to-be Fascist dictator of America here... but he could just as easily be describing Rush Limbaugh, or Sarah Palin, or Glenn Beck, or Michele Bachmann, or Sean Hannity, or John McCain. All ignore the facts, or else blatantly lie about them... but all of them play on the fear and hatred of their listeners to bring them to acts which, had they the truth at their disposal, they might otherwise not support.

And people like "Captain Hutaree" are listening... and taking action.

Yes, fascism can happen here in America. It is on the march now. It carries a cross, it wears the flag either as a pin or a patch... and it claims to be our only defense against dictatorship and destruction.

And, if we do not become more alert, it will be too late to stop it.

Healthcare passed... healthcare killed?

2010-03-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin reports that state budget cuts and caps on benefits are already undermining the health insurance reform package:

Sunday's House vote means there's a new era dawning for health insurance in this country -- but not for tens of thousands of poor children about to lose their coverage, or the hundreds of thousands of poor families about to suffer the brunt of significant Medicaid spending cuts.

That's because while the health care debate has been raging in Washington, the recession continues to rage everywhere else. And state governments across the country are dealing with massive budget shortfalls by reducing spending on the people who need it most, with health costs a chief target.

. . .

The Republican governor and state legislature of Arizona last week made national news when they eliminated the state's Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), eliminating coverage for nearly 47,000 low-income children.

. . .

And yet despite that, states are slashing Medicaid spending where they can -- by reducing reimbursement rates to providers and cutting or capping various benefits.

"They're not actually cutting people off but, in some cases, what they're doing is paying providers less, so it's harder for people to get the services that they need," Guyer said.

For instance, in Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen is capping inpatient hospital services for most Medicaid recipients at $10,000. In Nevada, the legislature has put in place new limits on the number of diapers and bed pads available to incontinent Medicaid patients.

Yeah- the Medicaid system, intended to protect the poorest among us, will only pay $10,000 for a hospital stay in Tennessee. That can be the cost for one day in a hospital- or even for one TEST in a hospital, depending.

And with Republicans promising to use every tactic to repeal or undermine the health insurance reform bill, you can bet that more Medicaid and SCHIP cuts- or outright abolitions- are in the queue. That's why this bill is so horrible- it leaves virtually everything up to the states, the majority of which are still run by Republicans dedicated to rallying their base by seeking to destroy the safety net the Democrats are weaving with all the dexterity of knitters wearing oven mitts.

But are the supporters of the plan worried by the fact that everything they've promised relies on the good will of their sworn enemies to happen? Noooooo. In fact, they're making lists of all the stuff they say will happen immediately... which, ironically, helps reveal what WON'T happen immediately, or maybe ever.

Let's start at the top: #1: No pre-existing condition ban. For children. The overall ban on denying coverage for everyone with a pre-existing condition doesn't kick in until 2014- long after the next presidential election.

#3: Seniors will see the Medicare Part D "donut hole" closed by 50%... but not because coverage is going to be expanded. No, instead there will be tax rebates- long after the money was spent, IF the senior has it.

#5: Lifetime health insurance benefit caps are history, as of now. Annual benefit caps, though, continue until 2014.

#6: Remember #1? Well, there's a temporary high-risk government pool for pre-existing condition people... until 2014, when they'll have to rely on the state-run insurance exchanges. I'm not confident...

#7: If you get a brand-new health insurance plan now, it has to cover checkups and other preventative care. Your existing plan, however, if you have one, isn't obliged to do so until 2018- after Obama's out of office even if he wins in 2012.

#15: Fast food places have to put nutrition info and calorie count on all their menus. Including their DRIVE-THROUGH menus. Um... those things are hard enough to find stuff on ALREADY...

So... a lot of the stuff you thought you'd get now isn't coming for several years... and, even if the bill isn't repealed or overturned by the majority-conservative Supreme Court, a lot of the stuff might not come to pass AT ALL.

That's what comes of "bipartisan compromise."

Aftermath: What Have We Learned from Health Care Reform?

2010-03-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Begin with this article by Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com.

Tom's bullet points:

1. Non-incremental policy change is never easy.

2. The presidential pulpit doesn't bully by itself.

3. Misinformation is more easily disseminated than debunked.

4. Have an Administration bill.

5. Proxying process for policy works.

6. It pays to hold out.

7. Bipartisanship is a waste of time—except as a tactical feint.

All of which are true, but they dance around the core points a bit. Here's my version.

1. Fighting requires leadership. Nobody ever said something as initially ambitious as health care reform would be easy. Even with Democratic supermajorities, it was known by everyone (except Barack Obama and Max Baucus) that the Republicans would do everything in their power to sabotage their efforts. This was going to be an uphill struggle from the start... and the man who was elected, in no small part, to see it happen began by telling Congress, "Do something!" and then sitting silent in the White House for seven months. Such leadership as there was until last month came not from our president, but from two deeply unpopular and divisive figures, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid- which allowed the Republicans to turn the American people strongly against the whole process.

2. Leadership requires having specific, clearly defined goals, and a plan to achieve them, beforehand. Obama deliberately did not have this- taking the wrong lesson from Hilarycare. Hilary Clinton's 1993 effort failed because she shut out everyone else from the decision-making process, presenting her plan as a take-it-or-leave-it package. Obama responded not by sitting down with his party's Congressional leadership and thrashing out a plan, but by having no plan whatever- leaving it to Congress to make something up that he'd claim as his own after the fact. This left him- and the entire Democratic Party- impotent to defend a plan that didn't even exist from the attacks of Republicans and their media spokespersons.

3. Leadership requires expressing, repeating, and defending that plan. Obama, having no specific plan to defend, spent months generally silent, saying only that "we have to have health care reform" with no solid definition of what shape it would take. This allowed Republicans to lie broadly and shamelessly about the plan, defining it before the Democrats could. In popular opinion, the Democrats have yet to recover from this total strategic failure- and barring a tremendous rally by Obama this fall or the disintegration of the Republican machine, they will pay for it in the election to come.

4. The modern political process doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth- only about what sounds best. Beginning with Sarah Palin's "death panels" lie, the television media- and, indeed, most of the print media as well- have entirely failed to call out Republican talking points on their innacuracy or outright deception. This is fair enough, though, since the media has also failed to call out the Democrats- once they finally got something to bring to the people- on the empty nature of their own claims in support of the bill. About the best that can be said on the Democratic side is that they didn't lie so much as present the perfect best-case scenario for how their overly compromised plan would work. Net result: support and opposition for the bill had nothing to do with any actual, truthful facts, and everything to do with fear, anger, and partisan loyalties.

5. The Democrats, contrary to what Republicans claim, do not have any unifying ideology except greed for power. The only way the Democrats got the bill through the House was to guarantee that health insurance coverage for abortions would be henceforth illegal. One out of eight Democrats still voted against the bill- mostly because it was too strong rather than not strong enough. In the Senate, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman each extorted concessions that weakened the final plan to the point of impotence while, in the process, destroying the public opinion of the bill through such things as the "Cornhusker Kickback." By contrast, the Republicans- who have been fighting to purify their ranks- stood from beginning to end united as a solid wall against the whole process, even working to deliberately undermine and delay it. The Democrats could not hold together when it counted.

And, last but most of all:

6. What is done in Washington is done for absolutely no other reason than political tactics. Despite the rhetoric, virtually nobody in this whole process on either side stood on principle or voted according to the good of the nation. The final passage of the Senate bill last night in the House came about not because of Democratic unity on the bill, but because of Democratic fear of the consequences should they spend so much time on the effort to come up with nothing. Republicans, on the other side, scarcely even pretended to cooperate with Democrats to find a compromise- despite the pre-compromises initiated by Barack Obama. They knew, from the start, that they would gain absolutely nothing by cooperation, but by determined opposition they could rally their base and take advantage of Democratic divisions. In the end, Republicans opposed what is essentially Massachusetts' Romney-care on the national level not because of the merits but because Democrats proposed it. Likewise, Democrats voted for the final bill not because of the merits, but because they would suffer at the polls if they failed to pass anything- no matter how horrible what they passed was.

We desperately, DESPERATELY need something else in our politics.

Was I wrong? I dunno...

2010-03-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I said that Republicans didn't dare call out the racists in the Tea Party, because without the racists they lose.

Well, it turns out that the Republican leadership was denouncing those racists after all... or were they?

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the incidents "reprehensible" but said on NBC's Meet the Press "let's not let a few isolated incidents get in the way of the fact that millions of Americans are scared to
death, and millions of Americans want no part of this growing size of government."

. . .

"Nobody condones that at all," said House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R- Virginia. on ABC's "This Week." "There were 30,000 people here in Washington yesterday. And, yes, there were some very awful things said."

. . .

On CNN's "State of the Union," Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana, called the slurs "contemptible," saying, "I denounce it in the strongest terms."

. . .

As demonstrators gathered outside the Capitol Sunday to rally against the bill, one held a sign saying, "All tea partiers: If you hear a racial slur, step away, point, boo and take a picture of the rat bastard."

This is nice of CNN to report, but look at what I've bolded above. The leadership did not go in front of the tea partiers and denounce racism. They went on television news programs- none of which the teabaggers watch or trust, since the only news source they believe is Fox News.

And the only direct rejection of racism addressed to teabaggers was by... a sole, anonymous teabagger.

This is standard Republican tactics: say one thing in front of the loyal, another in front of the media, and ignore those who point out that the two contradict one another.

If someone knows of an elected Republican calling out racists in the teabagger protests on Fox News, or denouncing it at an actual teabagger rally, please let me know. Until then, I decline to retract my position: Republicans are too dependent upon racists and bigots within their party and within the teabagger movement to denounce them to their faces.

EDIT: A political cartoonist who was on the ground Saturday reports that the incidents were not as "isolated" as Boehner would have us believe...

... and a blogger, without attribution or details, reports a Republican congresswoman from Missouri as encouraging Tea Party racism. Don't know about this one, but maybe more will come out.

President Nancy Pelosi

2010-03-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

According to the New York Times and Politico, Barack Obama was not the one who circled the Democratic wagons and revived health insurance reform to the point that today's vote could happen.

It was Nancy Pelosi, the stories claim, who stood up to both Barack Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who wanted to settle for minor changes to health care after the election of Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat.

During a mid-February conference call with top House Democrats, Pelosi made it clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push – dismissing the White House chief of staff as an “incrementalist.”

. . .

The groundwork for Sunday’s vote was laid out during a three-day marathon White House negotiating session, which took place in the week before the Massachusetts special election Jan. 19. ... there was a stark reminder during those three days of the differing styles of the House and the Senate, and how that divide would define the next two months.

On the second day, Obama asked the House and Senate leaders to return after dinner with $70 billion in suggested cuts from the bill. The senators hunkered down in Sen. Max Baucus’s office, ordered pizzas and drew up a list of trims. Each senator gave up something, aides said.

Later that night, back at the White House, the House presented its approach: They would cut nothing. Obama, not persuaded, sent them to different rooms, and told them to keep working at it.

Eventually, they whittled the gap down to $20 billion, and Obama made his own suggestions.

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, seemed pleased. “I don’t speak for the House, but you have put forward a serious set of numbers,” he said to Obama, according to a person present.

Pelosi was not so impressed. “Mr. President, I agree with Henry on two points,” she said before turning to Waxman. “The president put out a set of numbers, and you don’t speak for the House of Representatives.”

Obama was done. He left the room in frustration, telling his aides to deal with it.

. . .

Around the time of Brown’s victory, Pelosi and her staff became alarmed by reports, in the New York Times and elsewhere, that consensus was growing for the House passing the Senate bill as-is – with no reconciliation.

Pelosi, according to several associates, went through the roof, telling Obama and Emanuel that there was no chance her members would pass the Senate bill with its excise tax and sweetheart deals.

It was Nancy Pelosi, not Barack Obama, who provided the leadership required to get the Democrats back on track for their major legislative agenda item of the Congressional term. Obama, rather than leading, followed her lead- almost completely unable to get her to bend or even give on anything.

This story reinforces what has become more and more apparent as time goes on: Barack Obama is a legislator, not a leader. He can campaign well and give good speeches at rallies, but aside from this he has shown absolutely no leadership qualities at all. The closest he has come to doing so is through his continued efforts to ensure that the crimes of the Bush Administration go forever unanswered for...

... which, considering Nancy Pelosi's past history on the subject, might also be a case of Pelosi's leadership rather than Obama's own.

And, to be honest, Nancy Pelosi is not a President I would ever, ever have voted for. In addition to being completely opposed to holding war criminals accountable (possibly because she herself is complicit in at least some of those crimes), she has a record of putting her own and her party's electoral prospects ahead of the good of the country- and even ahead of the things her party supposedly stands for, as I believe the current health insurance reform bill is a prime example.

But we've seen it since the stimulus package debate last year, when Nancy Pelosi took Obama's proposals and basically said, "Who runs Bartertown?" You can't even really say that Barack Obama has ever backed down from Nancy Pelosi... because, for the most part, he's never STOOD UP to Nancy Pelosi.

Or, for that matter, to pretty much anyone.

Well, the odds are very good that next year Pelosi will merely be Minority Leader- if that- and Obama will face instead Speaker John Boehner and a Republican majority. Maybe then we'll see some leadership out of him- although I severely doubt it.

In the meantime, Nancy Pelosi is effectively President, at least on all domestic affairs... and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is just a house.

Dancing With Them What Brung Ya

2010-03-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

The teabaggers are getting more vile- and more violent.

Threats of death to Barack Obama, threats of armed revolt against the federal government- these are nothing new. But a few days ago a Virginia tea party protester said that if health care reform passed, there would be "a new civil war." A brick was thrown through the office window of a Democratic representative from New York.

And then, just yesterday, teabaggers crowded several Democratic representatives, including openly gay Barney Frank and civil rights movement veterans Jim Clyburn and John Lewis.

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams.

The above linked article, when I read it, also came with a photo gallery of protest signs. Most of them were vile, but the worst was placed first: "If Brown Can't Stop It, a Browning Can." If you're not looking at the picture, Brown refers to Senator Scott Brown (Republican-MA); Browning is a make of firearm.

And this violence didn't stop with the signs, according to Talking Points Memo:

Standing next to Lewis, emerging from a Democratic caucus meeting with President Obama, (Representative Andre) Carson (D-IN) said people in the crowd yelled, "kill the bill and then the N-word" several times, while he and Lewis were exiting the Cannon House office building.

Death threats based on race: that's where the teabagger movement is now.

The reaction of the left to all of this was immediate and firm: such behavior is completely unacceptable. A Democratic member of Congress took the floor last night to confront Republican members on their support for the tea party movement, demanding that they stand up in public and denounce the racist and violent behavior of the teabaggers.

Dennis Palumbo of The Huffington Post sums it up pretty well:

...it's no longer just the health care bill ---it's about the Republicans' shameful silence in the face of escalating hatred and divisiveness on the part of Tea Party members. Where is the GOP leadership on this issue? Why aren't prominent Republicans on CNN and Fox News and CNBC decrying these racist and defamatory remarks?

What else does their silence indicate but agreement? Or at least a willingness to ride this growing tide of racist hatred to further their own political gain, in the upcoming mid-term elections and beyond. The health care debate has been debased into an excuse to roil frustrated Americans into an ugly, divisive frenzy, with the tacit support of the so-called mainstream GOP.

. . .

To the GOP leadership: regardless of the seats you hope to get in November in the mid-terms, you're only showing that, once again, political gain trumps the national interest.

So either speak up now, denouncing the haters, or accept that most reasonable people assume you agree with them.

At least one Republican was not at all slow in his response: specifically, to blame the Democrats for the racism.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) came to the defense of the racists and bigots who shouted slurs at members of Congress Saturday. The Tea Party protesters shouted the ‘n’ word at African American members of Congress the ‘f’ word at an openly gay member.

. . .

“When you use a totalitarian tactics, people, you know, begin to act crazy,” Nunes told C-SPAN’s Steve Scully Sunday morning when asked about the slurs. “I think that people have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone they can do it. It’s not appropriate--I think I would stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people protesting, that all of them were doing that.”

And when he says, "It's not appropriate," what he means is, "It's not appropriate to claim that all of the teabaggers were shouting, 'kill the bill and then the n----r.'"

He- and his fellow Republicans- are not even willing to say that it's wrong for anybody, ever, to call someone else "nigger." (Which it is. I spell out the word here only because I'm sick and tired of hiding from a word, no matter how evil the word is.)

Republicans are not even willing to say that it's wrong to call for the violent overthrow of the government.

Of course, the reason why this is is obvious. Even if you're willing to believe that most Republicans are not themselves racist (such as Paul Broun (R-GA), who equated health reform's passage to "the Yankee War of Aggression" on the House floor) or in support of the violent overthrow of the federal government (Michele Bachmann)... the party's elected officials are now utterly dependent upon the votes of those people who ARE racists, who ARE bigots, and who DO want the federal government destroyed unless they're the ones running it.

Without such voters, South Carolina and Alabama- to name but two- would be solid blue states.

And, of course, since this constituency has become the indispensable base of the Republican Party, more and more often they are electing their own to Congress- as witness Bachmann again, or Broun, or Nunes, or Jim DeMint, or any number of others. Which means that the longer the Republicans are completely dependent upon these voters for their continued survival, the more the Republican Party as a whole will resemble them.

But no elected Republican (except perhaps for Scott Brown or Olympia Snowe) dares stand up to these people and say, "You are wrong. What you say- what you advocate- is vile. I cannot and will not support or endorse these things, and I will not associate myself with people who do."

They can't do it... because these people are who got them elected in the first place.

And thus the Republican Party slips a little deeper into its identity as the Party of Evil.

EDIT: Nunes has been joined by the perennial wingnut loudmouth, Steve King (R-Iowa):

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), a leading voice in the tea party movement, said Sunday that protesters’ recent use of racial and homophobic slurs toward Members of Congress was no big deal.

“I just don’t think it’s anything,” King said, emphasizing that the incidents were isolated. “There are a lot of places in this country that I couldn’t walk through. I wouldn’t live to get to the other end of it.”

Yeeeeah. "There are a lot of places in this country that...I wouldn't live to get to the other end..." Nooooothing racist in that, I don't think.

But, since there are obviously people somewhere who would kill a white man on sight, just for being white, that makes threatening black Congressmen- or even the President- hunky-dory.

My friends, I give you the Republican Party- and brother, you can HAVE it.

Scared Shitless of a Mouth

2010-03-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

The other day Eric Holder was confronted by Republicans who want to prevent any nasty icky Muslim terrorists from ever being tried like the criminals they are.

Eric Holder, like his boss Barack Obama, caved in to them:

Mr Holder's response dodges the question a bit, but it also seems to suggest he doesn't like the idea, and thinks it's a Republican attempt to portray his administration as soft on terrorism.

Osama bin Laden "will never appear in an American courtroom," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told House members at a hearing Tuesday.

"Let's deal with the reality here," Holder said in response to questions from Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). "The reality is, we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse."

The blogger who quotes the above says that trying Obama would be a good idea. I agree. I MORE than agree.

There must be some part of my brain that's still frozen in September 10th 2001 mode, because I just can't remember the chapter in American history where we apparently decided that criminal trials are some kind of favour we do for terrorists that proves we're postmodern multicultural cowards who lack confidence in our own civilisation, or whatever. Seems to me that if a trial was good enough for Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein, it's good enough for Osama Bin Laden.

Exactly.

Let's look at the Constitutional protections for justice:

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. - Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 2

The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. - Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 3.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law... - Amendment V.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence. - Amendment VI.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. - Amendment VIII.

...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. - Amendment XIV, Section 1.

You will notice that, in every single quote here, there is no mention whatever of citizenship. The Republicans claim that all of the above protections only apply to American citizens... yet this is utter bullshit. These are not privileges granted only to citizens, to be ignored when dealing with foreigners; these are restrictions on the federal government. These are either things the federal government MUST do, or CANNOT do, when dealing with criminals.

It is unconstitutional to revoke the writ of habeas corpus except in case of domestic rebellion or armed invasion by a foreign power- PERIOD.

The Constitution demands a speedy public trial by jury for those accused of crimes.

The Constitution (Antonin Scalia's beliefs notwithstanding) prohibit cruel and unusual punishments- and also prohibit self-incrimination. That means, twice over, NO TORTURE.

And finally, after the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment passed all of these protections down, imposing them on the states- and, again, making the most basic ones available not solely to American citizens, but to any person whatever held within the jurisdiction of the United States, by any level of government.

And yet the Republicans claim that we need to overturn all of this, and hold people accused of terrorism- not convicted, merely accused by a single person- in prison indefinitely without trial or even legal counsel. Why?

Because of what these people might say at their trial.

PLEASE.

We tried Hermann Goering in an international court. We gave him full legal representation. We let him testify. We let him talk as much as he wanted- and oh, boy, did he talk. And then we proved, beyond all doubt, that he was an integral part of the Nazi war machine that killed millions of soldiers and tens of millions of civilians- including millions of German citizens.

And along with Goering we tried von Doenitz, Albert Speer, and dozens upon dozens of other Nazi leaders and commanders and officials, giving them all the opportunity to speak. This had some unusual results- Speer, for example, effectively pled guilty and gave testimony to both the evil of the Third Reich and the intense charisma that Hitler used to gain and hold power. In a few cases- Hjalmar Schacht, for example- were even found innocent of Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity.

And that's not all. We also tried Japanese war criminals- over five THOUSAND of them.

But, you say, these were not terrorists? We also tried the perpetrators and mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing. We tried Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing. We tried Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber."

And why did we give all of these people, who in most cases richly deserved what was coming to them if not more, a trial?

Because that is what we Americans call JUSTICE.

Because we, as a nation, are BETTER than these people who commit murder on a mass-production scale. Because our forefathers, having firsthand experience of a government which denied jury trials and which occasionally imprisoned people with no legal recourse whatever, wrote it down, and then reinforced it, that these things would NOT BE PERMITTED in their new country thenceforth.

And yet the Republicans are scared shitless that, because the accused has the right to testify in his or her own defense, that these terrorists would open their mouths in court and thereby, just possibly, persuade people to join their cause. For this threat- the threat that a man, in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, who may or may not even speak English, could undermine our country with words alone- the Republican Party, as a whole and virtually without exception, is willing to throw out our entire system of justice.

COWARDS.

Pathetic, bullying cowards, so convinced of the fragility and weakness of the republic they claim to hold dearer than all other things that they will throw out everything that makes the republic worth having in order to defend it.

COWARDS!

And yet... they are not the biggest cowards.

The biggest cowards are the people who keep caving in to Republican bullying- who support indefinite imprisonment of Guantanamo prisoners, military trials or no trials at all for many of them, and who are willing to abandon their attempt to try even one of these men for his crimes- and to even ridicule the idea of trying anyone in the future.

Cowards like Eric Holder, and Barack Obama.

Democrats, Republicans... cowards, all.

We need something else.

My Final Decision: I'm Against the Reform Bill

2010-03-19T16:02:00.002-07:00

As the title says: I'm against what's likely to be passed in the next week or so. Oh, I grant you it'll be disastrous for the Democrats if it fails, and their only hope of avoiding a Republican takeover of at least the House if not the Senate as well. On that ground- and on that ground ALONE- I hope it passes.

But, in and of itself, not as a political move but as a simple law, it's a bad idea. It won't work. And here's why.

Today somewhere or other I found a link to this extremely simplified explanation of what the health insurance reform plan does. It's a good summary. Let's start with this:

If you already have coverage through your employer... you keep it. And the government would offer small business incentives to provide coverage to their workers.

This insurance is strengthened by:

Banning exclusions for pre-existing conditions
Banning lifetime and annual caps on how much insurers will pay out for care
Capping consumers' annual out-of-pocket expenses
Requiring full coverage for preventive care
Allowing young adults to stay on the family's plan until they turn 26 years old

All well and good... but there's something utterly vital missing there.

There is absolutely no provision to cap how high insurance premiums can go, or how much they can be raised each year or due to changes in medical condition.

Insurance corporations can go to the limit- and well beyond.

Moving on:

Medicaid will be expanded to cover an additional 16 million Americans.

Which would be all well and good, if Medicaid were solely a federal program. It's not. The bulk of funding for Medicaid comes from the states, nearly half of which have governments whose governors or attorney generals have pledge to sue to have this bill declared unconstitutional. Even now these states want Medicaid killed; my state, Texas, has driven up the requirements to qualify for Medicaid to such an extreme, and driven so many off its rolls, that they no longer meet the minimum qualifications to receive ANY federal matching funds for Medicaid at all. In short: what this bill promises on Medicaid, the federal government is powerless to deliver.

Onward again:

State-based health insurance exchanges will enable these individuals, families, and small businesses to join together in larger risk pools to purchase private health insurance coverage at affordable prices.

Except the bill only empowers states to create these exchanges- it doesn't force them to. Again, nearly half the states want this bill struck down; they certainly will NOT cooperate with it in any way.

The new system will cost about $100 billion each year. Much of these new funds will be used to provide tax credits to offset costs for those individuals, families, and small businesses that still cannot afford to buy insurance and other improvements to the health care system.

Except, well, this cost estimate, and the ability of the federal government to provide these subsidies (which don't kick in for five years at least), rely on the overall cost of health insurance either remaining stable or coming down. As I mentioned above, there is absolutely no guarantee of this whatever. Indeed, in half the country the insurance exchanges which are supposed to provide competition among corporate insurance plans won't even happen because of Republican opposition to any sort of aid to the poor whatever.

And the subsidies come in the form of tax credits- which means you have to have the money for the insurance plans up front for a year before you can hope to get any money back at all.

And there is absolutely no guarantee that these tax credits will be anything like enough to offset the uncontrolled rise of health insurance costs. The only help here is that the penalty we would pay for not having health insurance would be waived if- in the opinion of the IRS- the minimum health policy available to you would cost more than 15% of your gross (not net) annual income.

Onward:

We will save money by:

Eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, as well as subsidies for health insurance and pharmaceutical companies
Better coordinating care to eliminate unnecessary hospitalizations and duplicate tests
Better utilizing electronic medical records
Paying for quality and not just quantity

Obama already introduced subsidies for electronic record-keeping systems. In fact, some doctors' offices have tried implementing such systems, at their own expense. The results: HIGHER expenses and SLOWER performance, because current laws- which this bill does not, to my knowledge, address- PROHIBIT the sharing of medical information without the patient's express permission, and thus the systems aren't talking to each other... and it's faster to write things on paper than to enter them into a computer.

The other items, to be blunt, are empty Washington talking points, with no substance.

And finally, let's look at what this plan doesn't even address:

It does absolutely NOTHING to stop health provider corporations, such as hospitals and chain/franchise clinics, from raising their charges astronomically to take advantage of the requirement that insurance companies cover services- which has happened in Massachusetts where a virtually identical program has been in force for years;
It does absolutely NOTHING to address the sky-high price of prescription drugs and the non-competitive market practices pharmaceutical companies engage in;
It only offers "support to state governments to find solutions" to frivolous malpractice lawsuits, tort reforms, and malpractice insurance premiums; and
It does nothing to address the practice, common at all levels of health care, of padding bills with unnecessary tests, outrageously marked-up supplies and over-the-counter medicines, and other additional charges and services included not to avoid lawsuit but simply to maximize profit.

So, in summary: this bill provides no, absolutely no guarantee that we will be able to afford health insurance, or that health care costs will go down or even level off... but it requires everyone in America but the truly indigent to buy it, at full cost, cash up front, in the hopes that whatever tax credits they get the following year will make them whole. It addresses absolutely none of the basic problems which have caused health care to become so expensive in the first place. The one good thing it does is that it requires health insurance corporations to take all comers and provide the coverage they promise... provided you, the customer, have infinitely deep pockets. (And if you do, what do you need with insurance anyway?)

This bill is a disaster waiting to happen. The only argument in its favor, from where I sit, is that if the Democrats spend all this time and effort and fail to pass it, the Republicans will regain power- and they are currently ruled by the most nakedly racist, bigoted, intolerant, evil and corrupt politicians to be found in our country.

But once this bill takes effect, and health insurance costs skyrocket, and other health care costs continue to rise without any foreseeable end in sight... won't the Republicans get back in power anyway?

The Democrats did this to themselves- pushing forward a program without first, in advance, making sure that their own party was united on what to do. By compromising, and compromising, and compromising just to keep their own party together- plus Obama's idiotic pre-compromises in an obviously futile effort at "bipartisanship"- they've destroyed everything good that might have been in this bill... and gained, in its place, a dog of a bill that they either kill (in which case it will be said Democrats are incapable of running the government) or pass (in which case I expect the results to be so horrible as to give Republicans another decade or more of absolute power).

We're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

Damn them.

I've Been Thinking This For Ages

2010-03-17T12:03:00.002-07:00

Now I have supporting evidence: Ryan Sager reports on a study that shows that, at the least, the prevalence of pornography in American is harmless.

And, in fact, there is some associative, but not causal, evidence that suggests that the availability of porn reduces rape:

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

And I especially find interesting the line that says that the single biggest associative factor with sexual abuse or rape is not pornography... it's a sexually repressive religious upbringing.

So there's actually a scientific reason why there are so many sexual skeletons in Republican closets...

Anyway, in light of this research, I ask all of you readers to support my program to make the world a better place...

In Texas, 71% of All Children Left Behind?

2010-03-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan quotes an article by former No Child Left Behind Act supporter Diane Ravitch, which among other things calls NCLB "a timetable for the demolition of American public education."

As interesting as that accusation is, and as well in line as it is with my state school board's turning history into Republican propoganda, I don't think it has substance. NCLB was George W. Bush's pet project- or, more apropriately, his wife's. It passed only with substantial Democratic support to offset Republican defectors. The program was likely well-intentioned- merely a prime example of both Bush's complete incompetence and Democratic willingness to do anything to preserve the illusion of serving their educational constituents.

Of course, today if Republicans passed an educational reform package, there would be no doubt whatever that the goal was to eventually destroy public education. The radicalization of that party leaves no doubt whatever of that.

But no, what interests me about the article quoted is this:

Many states claim that large majorities of their students are “proficient” in reading or math, but their claims are refuted by federal assessments (called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) that are given to all students in fourth and eighth grades every other year. For example, Texas reported that 85 percent of its students in those grades were proficient readers based on year-end state testing, but, on the NAEP, only 29 percent were.

If this is true, it would- and should- be a major talking point for Bill White against Rick Perry, especially since a lot of Texas' school districts are either in budget deficit or outright insolvent.

Yes, No Child Left Behind is a failure that should be scrapped, not patched (as Obama wants to do)... but it isn't the only failure in our schools, not by a long shot.

I repeat: with an ally like this, who needs enemies?

2010-03-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Daniel Larison has an excellent article on the totally one-sided, dysfunctional relationship the United States has with Israel.

I especially like this point, which needs to be made and trumpeted to the skies:

Dependence of one state upon another creates perverse incentives for both. The unconditional backing of one side in a conflict does not encourage compromise but devotion to maximalist positions. Likewise, if a patron receives no reciprocity for its support, only the client state benefits from the relationship, creating an increasingly untenable situation for the patron. Maximalist demands backed by a patron’s support tend to be detrimental even to the client state in the long run—because they shield the client from the consequences of its actions.

In other words, by protecting Israel when its government pisses off the rest of the world through blatantly outlaw behavior, the United States is in the long run weakening Israel. This protection only encourages Israeli governments to become more radical, more intransigent, and more bigoted against Palestinians- and even Arabs with Israeli citizenship. The final result: a government which, without American support and protection, would drown in civil war and invasion from furious neighbors.

And this protection certainly does nothing whatever for the United States, either. Israel has done nothing- absolutely nothing- to help America protect its interests or achieve its goals abroad. Indeed, in one of its main goals- stabilizing the Middle East- Israel has been a consistent and unyielding opponent, continually dispossessing Palestinians of their lands, expanding settlements illegal even by Israeli law, and committing violations of the peace such as the invasion of Lebanon two years ago, the massacres of the recent Gaza assaults, and the Mossad assassination of a Hamas leader in Qatar last month.

Do we gain economic benefits from Israel? No. Granted, we have a large trade surplus with Israel... but this is paid for entirely though American tax dollars, used to fund the single largest foreign aid recipient we have. Israel manufactures virtually nothing, has virtually zero natural resources, and has a labor pool too distant and too expensive to compete with either domestic labor or nations such as China, India or Indonesia.

Military benefits? HA. The very fact that we continue to defend Israel and pay it as much as $4 billion per year in foreign aid makes almost every other nation in the Middle East a default enemy. In order to maintain even minimally friendly relations with those countries willing to talk to us at all, we have to decline all offers of Israeli military support in our wars. Add to this the fact that Israel's intelligence network only shares information with the United States when it serves their own interests, and Israel as a military ally is on a par, in practical terms, with the armed forces of East Timor.

So, from our unique and totally one-sided relationship with Israel, the United States gains absolutely nothing. On the debit side, of course, we pour billions of dollars of money into the Israeli government. We gain the ongoing enmity of virtually the entire Muslim world. We lose diplomatic points with the rest of the world when we protect Israel from its policies of land theft, political imprisonment, and denial of basic civil liberties.

So, in every single practical measurement, the United States relationship with Israel is entirely to our severe DISadvantage.

And Israel, happy in the knowledge that the radical right religious forces in the United States, combined with American Zionists and their own deep-pocketed lobby groups like AIPAC, will keep this relationship comfortably one-sided and unconditional, has absolutely no interest in making things any better for the United States.

Obama of course knows this: that's why, after the initial posturing, he and his White House have shut up about Israel- backing down, yet again, from the shouting of the Republican right and the Israel lobby and their paid mouthpieces.

It's long past time for the United States to give Israel an ultimatum: get serious about peace with the Palestinians, or else lose their foreign aid and UN Security Council veto. Unfortunately, neither party is going to do that- which means, no matter what our own voters do, on foreign policy the President of the United States remains Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Unwanted Return of Cull Day

2010-03-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

Too many bookmarks and open browser windows, and I have to shut down the machine come morning to go work at a convention (because that's what I do).

So, I declare today a Cull Day- when I take all the bookmarked stories and stuff I won't be able to make a full-length post on anytime soon, and hand them to you, my handful of readers, with a few personal notes.

Beginning with Rep. Bart Stupak (D in name only-M). One day he claims to anticipate a compromise on his holding out for an amendment to the Senate health care bill to essentially ban all insurance coverage for abortions (so that federal subsidies and tax breaks can't be used to pay for abortions). Today he says there's no compromise in sight, and that he and eleven other Democrats will still vote no on health care over the abortion issue. Well, thank goodness he's getting a serious primary contender... maybe I should send off a campaign donation.

Texas judge rescinds anti-death penalty ruling - See, this is why judges should NOT be elected. At most a recall or retention election might be a good idea... but subjecting the justice system to political pressure, and allowing scum like Goodhair Perry to appeal to the ignorance of the people to threaten the tenure of a sitting judge, is a HORRIBLE way to ensure that justice is done.

Alan Grayson introduces Public Option Act - Why can't I have THIS guy for my representative? Well, besides the fact that he's from Florida. Anyway, it's not even the classic public option- it's literally Medicare For All, except that those under 65 would have to pay premiums if they want in, so that the expansion is revenue-neutral.

Fired Up - Andrew Sullivan is glad to see Obama finally taking his fight for health care reform to the people. I'm not so enthusiastic- mainly because Obama has fought to kill any publicly-funded competition to insurance corporations while doing absolutely nothing to prevent healthcare providers from jacking up their charges once this passes- you know, like they did in Massachusetts, when pretty much an identical health insurance reform was enacted, and health care costs promptly jumped 60% in three years. But more to the point: why, exactly, has Obama remained silent until his cornerstone program was in imminent threat of total collapse?

Creeping Clintonism; Or How Rahm Is A Scaredy-Cat - This time I agree with Sullivan so completely that I have absolutely nothing to add.

The Pro-Israel Lobby And The New Israel - Another Sullivan post- I'll quote my favorite bit here:

Nothing illustrates better the total bizarreness of the US-Israel relationship. No one in Washington - apart from a few Likudniks and Palinite end-timers - actually supports more settlements or any settlements i the West Bank. At the same time, Washington exercizes a UN veto to protect Israel from international law, funnels a vast amount of foreign and military aid to the country, helped finance the pulverization of Gaza last year, provides absurd international cover for Israel's 150 nukes, has worked tirelessly to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capacity, and on and on.

In return? Fuck you, Obama. To which the overwhelming response in Washington is: Obama screwed up.

Cornyn Pledges GOP Will Run On Repealing Health Care Reform - And this, folks, is why health care reform SHOULD take place IMMEDIATELY... and not be postponed until (under the most current version) 2018, after Obama is long gone. It's almost certain to be repealed by a Republican Congress and a Republican President before then- and there WILL be such a combination, because the health care reform package is going to remain deeply unpopular unless it contains a public option or unless the individual mandate is repealed. Only when (and if- I have the liveliest doubts) the reforms prove their worth in making health care affordable for everyone will they become too popular to repeal... and that won't happen, by DESIGN, for ten years.

GOP Lawyer's Latest Gambit: State Bill That Could Tie Up Health-Care Reform - Nullification lives, despite being quite obviously and blatantly unconstitutional... and can secession be far behind?

Waterboarding for dummies - Yes, despite what we were told, the American version of waterboarding turns out to actually have been MORE cruel than methods used by the Spanish Inquisition, the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II, and the Khmer Rouge. But not to worry, torture advocates- your poster boy's former boss is still on the Supreme Court, still ruling that torture is perfectly legal.

On a similar note, you simply must read this essay by Andrew Sullivan about what torture is doing to our nation. Especially since, despite the uncontested evidence, every door that might lead to justice keeps being slammed shut.

Virginia AG To State Colleges: Scrap Protections For Gay Workers - To explain, a quote:

In a letter to the state's institutions of higher learning, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli argues that the schools lack the legal authority to ban anti-gay discrimination, because only the state legislature can do so, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. That's a step that the GOP-controlled legislature recently declined to take.

Now, in my book this isn't just an order to all the colleges in Virginia to take away protections against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. This is, in effect, a direct order to begin/resume discriminating against gays. Cuccinelli is saying that colleges do not have the authority to NOT discriminate. And this is after the newly elected governor of the same state repealed all anti-discrimination protections for homosexuals. Republicans prove themselves once again opponents of freedom and advocates of fear, hatred and evil.

That's all for now- see you all next week.

Terrorist Until Proven Innocent?

2010-03-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

Several of my friends on LiveJournal commented on a bill submitted in the Senate by John McCain and Joe Lieberman- a bill which is, to all appearances, a direct attempt to block the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and anyone else held in Guantanamo Bay- now or ever. As Fox News ~~lies~~ reports:

The legislation by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., would result in banning all civilian trials for terror suspects who have been classified as enemy combatants and forcing their cases into military commissions.

The bill lays out “comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected unprivileged enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning,” according to a release from McCain’s office.

Here's the blog post linked to by my favorite blogger, Andrew Sullivan and its summary:

The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010, a legislative monstrosity produced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, goes further than any Bush-era legislation in abrogating the core principle of Anglo-American justice: that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. While the bill is deplorable in every detail -- it denies terrorist suspects their Miranda rights and codifies indefinite detention without trial -- one particular provision effectively ends the presumption of innocence for all of us. That provision codifies the President's right to define any criteria he chooses to deliver any individual into the legal Twilight Zone defined by the bill.

But that's not all: several other bloggers claim that the President would actually not be given a choice in the matter. Once a prisoner is determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant, he MUST be imprisoned forever: trying to try him in court would actually become ILLEGAL.

Is that true? Well, here's what a University of Utah law professor has to say on the bill:

The legislation’s panic response can be seen not only in the due process and rights denied, but in the categories of persons it addresses. By encompassing those suspected of material support for terrorism – a federal crime indeed but never part of the law of war – the bill subjects an extraordinarily broad group of persons to indefinite detention.

The proposed legislation’s impact would be a fundamental miscarriage of justice created by the unconstitutional denial of the right to counsel, the right to remain silent, the right to be free from arbitrary, let alone indefinite detention, and the right to a day in court.

Past practice in the US and abroad demonstrates, unfortunately, that panic and the desire to respond plays a dominant role over legitimate national security interests, respect for constitutional and international law considerations and careful analysis of the threat posed. That is, the response becomes what is important; its legitimacy and justification take a back seat. While terrorism poses a threat, that threat does not justify throwing our principles out the door in panic.

Um... accurate, but not helpful.

I suppose there's no substitute for going through the text of the actual bill itself, omitting the boilerplate, and see what the bill actually does. This is easier than it sounds: the bill is extremely short as such things go and reads more or less in common English rather than contract-legalese.

So: the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010. Let's start by skipping to the end and looking at definitions, so you'll know what the bill is talking about:

(9) UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENT.— The term ‘‘unprivileged enemy belligerent’’ means an individual (other than a privileged belligerent*) who (A) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; (B) has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or(C) was a part of al Qaeda at the time of capture.

Well, so far so good, right? Um, wrong. "Purposely and materially supported hostilities" is a very broad category. It could mean anyone who donates money to a charity run by a terrorist organization without knowing of the terrorist connection- as thousands of Muslims rounded up by John Ashcroft after the September 11th attacks could testify. Also, the list isn't limited to enemies of America: the phrase "or its coalition partners" requires a closer look:

(5) COALITION PARTNER.—The term ‘‘coalition partner’’, with respect to hostilities engaged in by the United States, means any State or armed force directly engaged along with the United States in such hostilities or providing direct operational support to the United States in connection with such hostilities.

So- for example- any organization levying war or terrorism on any of our allies, or giving material support to such an organization, also qualifies. Some of our allies, such as Turkey or Pakistan, could- and would- use this to include political opposition within their own countries. Since both nations are our allies, this law would create an open-ended commitment to take on all enemies of the governments of all our allies as our enemies- with no reciprocal obligations.

Of course, this bit would be Joe Lieberman's contribution. Israel is an ally (on paper), and Joe Lieberman recently went to Israel to tell the government of Benjamin Netanyahu that he and John McCain would use the Senate to ensure that Obama could not ~~hold Israel accountable for war crimes and land theft~~ do anything to interfere in Israel's actions. This bill would pretty much be a declaration of war against the Palestinian Authority, should Israel ever decide to farm out its own Mossad work to the CIA.

So- we have established that anyone fighting a terrorist war with the United States who isn't part of an enemy nation's army, i. e. a terrorist... OR anyone fighting a terrorist war on any ally of the United States... OR anyone providing "material support" for such persons, however you care to define that... is an "unprivileged enemy belligerent."

So, what do we do with "unprivileged enemy belligerents?" Let's go back to the top:

BELLIGERENTS IN MILITARY CUSTODY.

(a) MILITARY CUSTODY REQUIREMENT.—Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act.

... wait a minute. All that stuff from, "who is suspected of engaging in hostilities," down to, "and materially supporting such hostilities..." isn't that what we just defined as "unprivileged enemy belligerent"? I suspect this redundancy is meant to expand, not contract, the number of people for whom this could apply. But onward:

(b) REASONABLE DELAY FOR INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES.—An individual who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent and who is initially captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States by an intelligence agency of the United States may be held, interrogated, or transported by the intelligence agency and placed into military custody for purposes of this Act if retained by the United States within a reasonable time after the capture or coming into the custody or effective control by the intelligence agency, giving due consideration to operational needs and requirements to avoid compromise or disclosure of an intelligence mission or intelligence sources or methods.

In other words: the CIA gets first crack at all prisoners and can hold them indefinitely, doing whatever they want to them, before the military actually gets custody of them. Now, this bill does not actually SAY, "go ahead and torture them," but...

Anyway, the bill goes on to say that teams of interrogators shall be assembled from various law enforcement and intelligence agencies throughout the federal government. They'll pump the prisoner for intelligence while determining if he or she is, in fact, an "unprivileged enemy belligerent." These teams have pretty much free rein to do whatever they want with the prisoner. The President gets sole authority to set the rules and regulations for the conduct of interrogations.

There is one thing the interrogators definitely can't do, though:

(3) INAPPLICABILITY OF CERTAIN STATEMENT AND RIGHTS.—A individual who is suspected of being an unprivileged enemy belligerent shall not, during interrogation under this subsection, be provided the statement required by Miranda v. Arizona (384 U.S. 436 (1966)) or otherwise be informed of any rights that the individual may or may not have to counsel or to remain silent consistent with Miranda v. Arizona.

That's right: this bill, although not explicitly stripping all rights altogether from the accused, seeks to keep those rights secret. Friends, I regard it as a very bad sign when a government tries to keep even the law secret from those subjected to it.

But keep this in your mind- this bill would strip Miranda rights from the accused. We'll come back to this later.

Anyway, the interrogation group write a report saying whether or not they think the prisoner in question is an "unlawful enemy comb-" er, I mean "unprivileged enemy belligerent." This report goes to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General. These two worthies then report to the President and to the intelligence committees of Congress whether or not they agree with the preliminary report. The President only gets a say in the matter if SecDef and the AG disagree- otherwise he has to accept what gets handed to him.

The bill goes on to set criteria on deciding whether or not a prisoner should be interrogated in this fashion at all and set on the road to be "unprivileged enemy belligerents."** Here they are:

(2) CRITERIA FOR DESIGNATION OF INDIVIDUALS AS HIGH-VALUE DETAINEES.—The regulations required by this subsection shall include criteria for designating an individual as a high-value detainee based on the following:

(A) The potential threat the individual poses for an attack on civilians or civilian facili1ties within the United States or upon Unite States citizens or United States civilian facilities abroad at the time of capture or when coming under the custody or control of the United States.

(B) The potential threat the individual poses to United States military personnel or United States military facilities at the time of capture or when coming under the custody or control of the United States.

(C) The potential intelligence value of the individual.

(D) Membership in al Qaeda or in a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda.

(E) Such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

... WHOA.

"Such other matters as the President considers appropriate?"

This is a blank check to allow the President to throw anyone, absolutely anyone at all, down the black hole of terrorism investigation.

And what happens when our prisoner is determined to be an (ugh) "unprivileged enemy belligerent"? Do we try him, find him guilty, and lock him up?

No- only one out of the three:

SEC. 4. LIMITATION ON PROSECUTION OF ALIEN UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.
(a) LIMITATION.—No funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Justice may be used to prosecute in an Article III court in the United States, or in any territory or possession of the United States, any alien who has been determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2).

(b) APPLICABILITY PENDING FINAL DETERMINATION OF STATUS.—While a final determination on the status of an alien high-value detainee is pending under sec8
tion 3(c)(2), the alien shall be treated as an unprivileged enemy belligerent for purposes of subsection (a).

SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.

Well, no point in upholding Miranda rights if you never, ever intend the prisoner to see the inside of a courtroom. (Article III refers to the Constitution- it means any civilian court within the United States.)

That's the long and the short of it: anyone accused of being a terrorist, or a supporter of terrorism, or who meets whatever "other criteria" any future President might add, can be locked up FOREVER without legal right to challenge their imprisonment. They do not get to challenge, or even see, the evidence used to brand them an "unprivileged enemy belligerent." They do not get to explain or defend their actions. They're just held... held until the "end of hostilities," which everyone knows can never come because we're fighting a war not against a nation or even the al-Qaida organization but against a tactic.

This is unconstitutional on SO many levels. The guarantee of habeas corpus; the right to trial by jury; the right to confront one's accuser; the protection against self-incrimination; all of these things are human rights accorded to ALL people in American custody, not merely American citizens. This bill violates them all- and probably some other constitutional protections I can't think of right now.

I've heard someone posit that McCain and Lieberman intend to put this bill as a rider on the health insurance reform reconciliation bill or some other bill they know Obama won't dare veto. I haven't found any confirmation for this, and I don't know why they'd bother. Obama has already announced his plans to hold between twenty and sixty of the current Guantanamo Bay prisoners forever without trial, so that part of the bill obviously wouldn't bother him at all. And as for banning trials of any such prisoners in the future... well, all signs currently point to Obama backing down on Holder's attempt to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian courts.

At present, I can honestly see Obama signing this bill and praising it as a regrettable but necessary tool in the ongoing (and eternal) war on terrorism.

We can only hope this abomination dies in committee and never gets a chance for a vote. Considering the two names currently on the bill, though, and the high visibility it's getting in certain circles, I doubt that will be allowed to happen.

So, at some point, we may be looking at a situation where the President can order absolutely anybody to vanish into "unprivileged enemy belligerent" limbo- solely on his say-so.

IT COULD BE YOU.

If you have a congressperson or senator who gives a damn what constituents say (I don't), now would be an EXCELLENT time to put a word or ten in his or her ear.

* "privileged belligerent" = prisoner of war as per the Geneva Accords.

** However tired you might be of reading that phrase, it is as nothing compared to how sick I have become of typing it.

The Gander Serves His Own Sauce

2010-03-03T12:34:00.000-08:00

Well, for once here's a senator who deserves to win this year's election.

Using a scheduled midmorning speech on the Senate floor, Bennet will propose a package of bills that would cut a broad swath across a set of practices and procedures that have become notorious symbols of a gridlocked Capitol.

He will propose eliminating anonymous holds, banning private-sector earmarks, freezing pay and budgets for members of Congress, and barring lawmakers from lobbying for life.

Michael Bennet was appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy left as part of Obama's cabinet selections. He's facing a very tough race come November- in fact the smart money shows him losing, rather handily, to pretty much any Republican.

But Bennet deserves better- and he's working hard to solidify the Democratic base in a battleground state. He's the senator who drafted the letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid demanding that a government-run public insurance option be added to the health care reform bill through reconciliation- an effort which, as of today, picked up its 33rd supporter, not counting Harry Reid himself.

And now he's proposing changes to move the Senate away from its current state of dysfunction.

* Bennet proposes a time limit on filibusters, after which the threshhold for cutting off debate drops to 55 instead of 60.
* Bennet proposes eliminating the current practice of allowing a single Senator to anonymously place a hold on the confirmation of people nominated by the President for office.
* He'd also ban lawmakers of any sort from lobbying for life- and prohibit Congressional staffers from lobbying for at least six years.
* In addition to all that, he proposes curtailing earmarks for the private sector, freezing Congressional salaries and staff budgets, and imposing strict ethics regulations on the use of private charter jets for Congressional travel.

Every last one of these things is a good idea. Bennet doesn't get rid of the filibuster entirely- and considering the Democrats are currently on the frog-march for minorities in both houses, that might be a good thing- but he does pull its teeth quite a bit.

Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely that any of these reforms will actually pass. Senate rules require 67 votes, not 51 or 60, to be changed. The "nuclear option" threatened by Republicans in 2005 and murmured about now by Democrats would require a simple majority, but couldn't be used to reform filibusters- only to destroy the practice altogether. This is really a shame, because every one of Bennet's reforms needs doing- and badly- if we want a functional federal government.

I'm going to think long and hard about sending a check to Bennet for his election campaign. This is the sort of thing that needs to be encouraged- bucking against the system when it fails, rather than upholding the system over the people it was designed to serve. People who tilt at windmills deserve a reward.

Jim Bunning Gives In... For Now

2010-03-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

Last night Jim Bunning gave up his filibuster- which, contrary to the mainstream media pundits, was NOT unsupported by the rest of the Republican Party- and allowed a resolution to extend certain benefits and projects through the end of March to pass. It's worth noting that eighteen Republicans voted against that resolution when it finally came to a vote- which means eighteen Republicans voted against:

* Avoiding a 21% cut in Medicare payments to doctors
* Extension of unemployment benefits
* Extension of COBRA health insurance subsidies, without which COBRA becomes immediately unaffordable to anyone not employed
* Various transportation projects, including road construction and public safety activities

But Bunning didn't just surrender. The Democrats cut him a deal:

In the end, the Democrats ended the standoff by promising Bunning votes they say he knows he will lose: first came his amendment to the unemployment bill, which failed last night. There's more coming, say Democratic sources -- the party agreed to allow more of his legislation to reach the floor, even though everyone knows the bills are doomed to fail.

The aforementioned amendment was to use Reconciliation Act funds- the 2009 stimulus package- to pay for the thirty-day extension.

But the important thing isn't that Bunning let the bill come to a vote, or that his amendment failed: it's that this could happen all over again in four weeks.

Consider: this extension runs out at the end of the month. The Senate might, or might not, have the final legislation to fund all of this for the full year done by the end of the month. If not, ANOTHER extension measure will be brought forward...

... and Bunning, who has never played nice and seldom held up his side of agreements with other Senators, will still be there, and he'll still be demanding that the stimulus funds be whittled down to pay for the extensions.

Don't take the "Unemployment Held Hostage" signs down just yet.

Results of the GOP Primary

2010-03-03T11:30:00.002-08:00

First, the local: John Thompson handily defeated the old-school, hard-right challenger Kathie Freeman, 3700 to 1371.

Second, the statewide: Rick Perry won a clear majority, avoiding a runoff against Kay Bailey Hutchinson.

"From Driftwood, Texas, to Washington, D.C., we are sending you a message tonight: Stop messing with Texas," Perry told supporters, who spent the cold evening listening to country music and roasting marshmallows.

(Yes, because the fifth highest poverty rate in the nation combined with massive cuts in government aid to the poor and sick is something that really deserves to be DEFENDED.)

With Hutchinson's defeat, the main political question in the state is: will she honor her promise, which she's already altered twice, to resign her Senate seat after the primaries? The current oddsmakers say no; after all, bare-faced lying and hypocrisy have never hurt Republican candidates yet.

Of the five propositions put before Republican primary voters, all passed- and only the last, the requirement to get sonograms before getting abortions, passed with less than ninety percent of the vote. (The percentages on Prop. 5 were 69%/31% in favor.)

Although most incumbents easily defended against challengers on the Republican side, there are a couple of very interesting outcomes in contests for the Texas state school board races. The former chair of the board, and the driving force behind efforts to bring young-Earth creationism into science classes and far-right revisionist history into social studies, Don McLeroy, is almost certainly going to a recount... on the wrong end. Current unofficial returns show him losing to moderate Republican challenger Thomas Ratliff, 58,338 to 57,528- a difference of only 810 votes. Another hard-right Republican incumbent on the school board, Geraldine "Tincy" Miller, lost by a slightly larger margin to George M. Clayton, a school teacher running specifically against agenda-driven changes to the Texas state curriculum.

So, on that last point, perhaps there is some little hope for the future. At the least, if these numbers hold up, two of the seven young-Earthers on the fifteen-member state board of education will be thrown out.

And that's not counting what might happen if the Democrats find some previously unknown reserves of competence and actually win some races this year...

Phoenix: Church Not Allowed to Feed the Poor

2010-03-02T11:33:00.000-08:00

Phoenix officials are fighting in court to stop a church from holding a daily free breakfast for the homeless on its grounds.

The reason? The church is in a wealthy neighborhood, and the rich neighbors want to preserve their property values from the "blight" of homeless people.

I'm on the side of the church in this one, for two reasons.

One, you do not have a right to property values. Real estate, like any other commodity, is worth only what someone else is willing to pay at any given moment. It has no absolute value- except as itself. The value of your home is just that- a HOME. Efforts to use the law to preserve a dollar value in a home invariably lead to violations of the rights of others- in this case, the right of the church to fulfill its mission by aiding the needy. There are arguments to be made for basic protections- for example, that a 24-hour scrapyard cannot set up shop right next to a pre-existing residential neighborhood- but not for zoning ordinances made for the sole purpose of preserving real estate investments.

Two (and more important), this is what Christian churches are supposed to do. The very people who complained about these dinners- wealthy, mostly white, mostly Republicans- have been crowing for years about how government welfare and aid to the poor needs to be abolished in favor of private charity, especially church-driven charity. Of course, they never meant THEIR church. They meant someone ELSE's church, someone ELSE's charity, someWHERE else... preferably nowhere if it could be managed.

Not In My Back Yard.

Of course, there's a simple solution: call Joe Arpaio. Joe, who has earned the love of Phoenix-area voters for being openly racist and for ignoring or openly defying the law to do what he wants, would simply wade in, arrest all the homeless and any church members he finds, haul them off to his tent-city jail, stick them in pink jump suits, and force them to work at hard labor for the county for weeks or months on two baloney sandwiches per day, until a court finally gets around to them, all the while claiming that "we don't need to mollycoddle terrorists."

Or, alternately, the rich white people of Phoenix can quit being such enormous assholes. But that's not likely to happen.

She'd have my vote, if I lived in New York...

2010-03-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

Eliot Spitzer's Madam Running as Independent for NY Governor

I can't add anything to that.

World's Most Endangered Senator Gets Primary Challenge

2010-03-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

And about damn time:

Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter made it official this morning, announcing he'll challenge Sen. Blanche Lincoln for the Democratic Senate nomination in Arkansas.

. . .

Halter could have a significant advantage in a general election Lincoln would not -- the support of national progressives and the Netroots. Lincoln's voting record over the past year has drawn the ire of national leaders on the left, who objected to her opposition to so-called "card check" legislation and the inclusion of a public option in health care reform. For months, progressive groups have been on the ground in Arkansas, building an organization to help a defeat Lincoln in a primary while urging Halter to run.

And more to the point, Lincoln is almost certainly going to lose by at least 60%/40% if she gets the nomination. There's no evidence Halter will do any better, except that his popularity in his home state is considerably higher than Lincoln's. On the other hand, he certainly can't do any worse- and if he pulls off the miracle twice, beating Lincoln in the primary and beating the Republican (probably Rep. Jon Boozman- yes, that really is his name), then the Democrats will have traded in a Blue Dog Republican-in-All-But-Name for a moderate liberal.

MoveOn.org agrees, and has come out for Halter.

MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben said in a statement they consider Lincoln "one of the worst corporate Democrats in Washington."

"With Bill Halter, our Arkansas members see a candidate who will stand up to special interests. Arkansans deserve someone who'll fight for them, not Wall Street," Ruben said.

And it probably says everything that needs to be said about what's wrong with the Obama presidency that he's backing the incumbent, Lincoln.

Bunning's Filibuster Creates 20% Cut in Medicare

2010-03-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

Remember when I mentioned Jim Bunning's filibuster against unemployment and health aid for over a million people- and how Republicans are moving towards supporting him?

Well, he's still blocking the same resolutions... and it turns out it's had a vastly more important effect- a 21% cut to Medicare payments to doctors.

The American Medical Association warned of this last week: "A Medicare meltdown now seems certain, as the U.S. Senate has left early for the weekend, abandoning seniors, military families and baby boomers," reads an AMA statement from Friday. "The Senate failed to repeal the Medicare physician payment formula that will cause a drastic 21 percent payment cut to physicians who care for Medicare and TRICARE patients. On Monday, the 21 percent cut goes into effect, forcing many physicians to limit the number of Medicare and TRICARE patients they see in order to keep their practice doors open."

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) put it this way: "By his actions, Bunning has prevented people from receiving Unemployment, health care access, transportation projects from going forward, and Doctors who provide Medicare services from getting paid."

Bunning, of course, claims he's only filibustering because the measure isn't paid for. Democrats have pointed out- quite accurately- that Bunning never worried about paying for Bush's tax cuts, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Medicare Part D. The former star pitcher apparently only cares about budget deficits if he can blame them on the other party.

And, of course, the true chutzpah of all this is: Republicans oppose the Senate version of health insurance reform because it would cut $500 billion of wasted and unnecessary medical practices ordered by overcautions or profit-seeking doctors and hospitals. Yet they are apparently quite prepared to let the "doc-fix" falter, and to filibuster the upcoming jobs bill that makes permanent the thirty-day unanimous-consent measure Bunning is doing his damndest to kill.

Of course, the Republicans also want to convert Medicare from a government-run insurance company to a voucher plan which gives seniors fixed amounts of money to buy corporate insurance with... if they can.

If the Democrats lose both the House and Senate in November, with the Republicans pulling shenanigans like this, they will have proven themselves useless not only as government officials but as an entire political movement.

But I'm predicting exactly that outcome... because these are the Democrats.

What's REALLY Important to Texas Republicans?

2010-03-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

So, last week during early voting, I voted- for the first time in my life- in the Republican primary.

At some point the slimy feeling will wash off my body.

I voted in the GOP primary for two reasons: to support a Justice of the Peace candidate who has been very helpful to my family in recent years, and because there is no Democratic candidate for County Judge from the Democratic Party. (And the only ballot-qualified third party in Texas, the Libertarians, is no longer functional in Polk County, and hasn't been since I quit that party.)

The County Judge, in Texas government, is effectively the chief executive of county government. He presides over the Commissioners' Court- four or more (always an even number) representatives of districts throughout the county, who are responsible for basic county services in those districts. The County Judge sets the agenda, drives negotiations with business, and does such few executive tasks as devolve onto county-level government.

The incumbent, John Thompson, changed from a Democrat to a Republican five years ago, foreseeing that if he didn't he'd lose his job. His opponent, Kathie Freeman, is the wife of former Republican Party chair Danny Freeman, a long-time Republican stalwart.

Kathie Freeman did not impress me much, especially her performance in debates and public events as presented in what passes for our local county news media. I apologize for the horrible formatting, or lack thereof, of the source material, but here's the important points about Kathie Freeman:

Kathie Freeman concentrated her remarks on the need for cuts to the county budget and her belief Polk County should look closely before accepting funds from state or federal agencies, and should move toward being self-sufficient. Money from the state and federal governments is not “free money,” Freeman pointed out, and it “ultimately comes out of our pockets. I hope we could survive without that and we need to cut it out."

"Now that more than a year has passed since Ike made landfall, maybe it’s time for people to take responsibility for themselves and stop waiting for people to give them money," Freeman added.

. . .

Freeman also took credit for creating the Polk County Republican Club, an issue that has ruffled the feathers of businessman Doug Borie who has documentary evidence that his mother, Eloise Borie, led a Republican club here in the 1980s.

Freeman’s answer to the final question of the night shocked several county employees in the audience. “It seems to me county employees don’t have pride in the county,” Freeman said. “They’re just working there and that’s it. They need incentives. Let them clean up the community. Maybe we can cut their hours. There are always things that can be cut. Without looking at their hours, I don’t know what people are doing.”

. . .

Answering questions about procedures at the Polk Central Appraisal District and the recent 20 percent value increase for waterfront property, Thompson said he would defer to Freeman to explain the process since she spent four years on the PCAD board of directors. Freeman said the board of directors’ authority is limited to hiring and firing the chief appraiser. Later Freeman said the board does vote on the PCAD budget and she had fought to cut that budget, but did not get support from other directors.

The Polk County Enterprise version of this story goes on to add that other members of the appraisal district board, who served at the meeting, disputed Freeman's claims during the debate, forcing her to backtrack- only, apparently, to lie yet again.

So... a liar who tells lies so blatant that they can be INSTANTLY refuted, then responds with new lies... and whose idea of "motivating" employees is to cut their hours, cut their salaries, and force them to go out on trash pickup duty...

... sadly, as the preponderance of letters to the editor of another "news" source indicate, there's a very good chance such a person is exactly what Polk County Republicans want. It's not just Sarah Palin, y'all; it's an entire political movement.

But we'll find out about that tomorrow. That's not why I'm writing this.

When I voted in that Republican primary, I also voted on the five resolutions the Republican Party put on their ballot. These resolutions are usually either trial balloons or rally-the-troops efforts ahead of the state convention, so that those who run the party can demonstrate the support their declared positions have.

Here, from this source, are the five resolutions:

Ballot Proposition 1: Photo ID

The Texas legislature should make it a priority to protect the integrity of our election process by enacting legislation that requires voters to provide valid photo identification in order to cast a ballot in any and all elections conducted in the State of Texas.

Ballot Proposition 2: Controlling Government Growth

Every government body in Texas should be required to limit any annual increase in its budget and spending to the combined increase of population and inflation unless it first gets voter approval to exceed the allowed annual growth or in the case of an official emergency.

Ballot Proposition 3: Cutting Federal Income Taxes

In addition to aggressively eliminating irresponsible federal spending, Congress should empower American citizens to stimulate the economy by Congress cutting federal income taxes for all federal taxpayers, rather than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on so-called "federal economic stimulus".

Ballot Proposition 4: Public Acknowledgement of God

The use of the word "God", prayers, and the Ten Commandments should be allowed at public gatherings and public educational institutions, as well as be permitted on government buildings and property.

Ballot Proposition 5: Sonograms

The Texas Legislature should enact legislation requiring a sonogram to be performed and shown to each mother about to undergo a medically unnecessary, elective abortion.

... well, of COURSE I voted against all of them. Want an explanation why? Good, because you're getting one.

1) PHOTO ID TO VOTE

This is just part of an ongoing effort to discourage non-whites from voting. You already have to show photo ID to vote if you forget to bring your voter ID card to the polls. You shouldn't need to show the ID if you also have your voter ID. The net result will be to discourage minority-race people, who (justifiably) fear harrassment by mostly-white Texas cops and officials, from showing up to the polls to vote... which, in turn, means white Republican rule is strengthened.

2) CONTROLLING GOVERNMENT GROWTH

This is the same snake-oil Grover Norquist and his ilk have been pushing for the past thirty years- and it doesn't work. Look at California, where the Republicans managed to institute a requirement that two-thirds of their legislature is required to approve tax hikes. The state, despite massive budget cuts, prison overcrowding, and neglect of infrastructure, is rapidly going broke. Expenses can rapidly outstrip the growth of inflation or of the population, even without an "official emergency." This cap on budget growth is an irresponsible effort to "starve the beast", where the beast is government... the eventual goal, of course, to kill the beast altogether, and vital services be damned.

3) STOP THE STIMULUS

Um... without the stimulus package, we would be in a new Great Depression right now. Sadly, my Congressman, Kevin Brady, recently released a press statement claiming that the Recovery Act caused the loss of over four million jobs in the year since its passage- which, although easily disproven bullshit, plays well with the Republican base. There is also the fact that these "stimulative" income tax cuts the Republicans propose are almost entirely for the highest tax bracket- and utterly ignore those poor enough to pay little or no income tax whatever.

4) PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GOD

The Republicans refuse to recognize a simple fact: that atheism, paganism, Islam, Buddhism, and other religions have the same moral right to respect as Christianity. As such, they see no reason whatever not to force people at government events to acknowledge God, or to spend taxpayer dollars to acknowledge God (and, as former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore did, to ban other religious or secular displays that would compete with monuments to God). In short, Republicans have no respect whatever for people who believe differently from themselves- and are quite happy to shove their religion into those people's faces.

5) SONOGRAMS

Not only is this a naked attempt to scare or intimidate women into not having abortions, but it's also a major expense added on to all abortions. Sonograms can cost from $500 to $2000 depending on who performs them. A basic first-trimester abortion costs, on the average, only about $500 to $1000 by itself. The most striking thing about this proposition is that, unlike other Republican positions of the past, it avoids calling for a direct, immediate and total ban on all abortions.

So, what's most important to Texas Republicans this election season? Abortion, enforced religion, cutting taxes for the rich while cutting services and aid to the poor, and keeping non-whites away from the voting booth.

Yes, nice to see that Republicans, face with fewer jobs, higher costs of living, more people falling into poverty, disintegrating infrastructure, underperforming education systems, and a gradual social and economic drift towards Third World conditions, knows precisely what they think is more important than any of those things.

What I don't know is this: why would I, or any halfway intelligent person, want these people running government?

(BTW, I voted- as promised- for Debra Medina for Republican nominee for governor. Tomorrow's primary day- if you haven't voted yet, by all means go and do so- and vote Republican, for the worst candidates you can find. Let's see if the Democrats can find one or two candidates who won't fuck up, who might actually manage to win... and then, once in office, actually spend time undoing all the shit the Republicans have been doing the past twenty-thirty years.)

Democrats cave... AGAIN... on torture.

2010-02-26T22:22:00.000-08:00

Today Andrew Sullivan had an essay on how obviously illegal torture was, and how horrible it is that we're even having conversations on whether or not it's illegal:

The whole point of Geneva and the UN Convention and US domestic law is that the infliction of "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to extract confessions is illegal under any circumstances, especially military emergencies. Anything that comes anywhere near this kind of treatment is barred. Much that falls short of torture is barred as well. Categorically. The expansiveness of the law is not the same thing as vagueness. It is a declaration that this is a third rail never to be gone near.

Somehow, no one had this debate about the lack of legal clarity about torture or inhumane treatment in the US before 2002. No one. Why? Because it was unthinkable.

What changed is that for the first time in American history a president of the United States chose to cross the Rubicon and under his sole and secret authority decided to torture prisoners under the mistaken belief that this was a way to get accurate intelligence. He did this not in the classic ticking nuclear bomb scenario as an emergency exception to the clear rule - but as an ongoing program with respect to individuals seized with no due process, innocent and guilty, in a war without end. This was not a close or even faintly ambiguous legal call.

Unfortunately, Andrew is, in this case, wrong. The legality of torture is very vague indeed these days... and the Republicans are still working to keep it that way.

In fact, the Republicans browbeat the Democrats into withdrawing an amendment to a spending bill which would have clearly criminalized specific tortures and set terms of imprisonment for the crime:

House Republicans were still hammering away at Democrats on Friday, one day after pressuring the majority to withdraw a controversial amendment to an intelligence funding bill that would have criminally punished intelligence officers for conducting harsh interrogations.

. . .

Earlier this week, the House Rules Committee added several amendments to the intelligence funding bill, including an 11-page provision that specifies criminal penalties for "any officer or employee of the intelligence community who, in the course of or in anticipation of a covered interrogation, knowingly commits, attempts to commit, or conspires to commit an act of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment."

The acts defined in the amendment include beatings, electric shock, waterboarding, deprivation of food, water or sleep and violations of the suspects religious beliefs. The intelligence officers would face up to 15 years in prison or life behind bars if the detainee dies.

When Republicans discovered the amendment Thursday during floor debate on the overall bill, they went on the offense.

(Texas Republican Mac) Thornberry said it was a "topsy-turvy land where we forget who the good guys are, who are trying to keep us safe, and who the bad guys are."

Rep. Michael Rogers, R-Michigan, said the amendment is too vague, failing to define such things as what constitutes lack of sleep or an infringement on religious beliefs. He maintained that it "will absolutely freeze the intelligence community's ability to go out and get information that they need."

. . .

After the provision was pulled, Jim McDermott, D-Washington, explained that his amendment "would have expanded upon the president's Executive Order to clearly define what constitutes cruel, inhuman or degrading interrogation so that it is unmistakable what kinds of techniques are unacceptable."

So why did the Democrats decide to strike the amendment? . . . (Republican ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Peter) Hoekstra said the Democrats did not have enough votes within their own party to pass the bill.

That last sentence is almost certainly true... and depressing. Certainly Obama did not lift a finger in defense of this amendment, or anything like it. Obama has never called for the repeal of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which among its provisions gives the President sole and exclusive power both to define what torture is and to prevent any federal official from being prosecuted for torture.

Obama's sole gesture towards ending torture was to overturn the executive orders of George W. Bush and order torture stopped- a measure which can, with a single stroke of a pen, be undone by any president who follows him. In every other respect Obama has acted to preserve torture- principally by preserving those who ordered it from any consequences for their actions.

But Obama's utter lack of leadership on making torture unambiguously illegal again does not excuse the Democratic leadership in the House. This vote should have happened. Every Congressperson should have been put on the record as clearly pro-torture or anti-torture.

Instead the Democrats chickened out.

There are only three Democrats who come out of this looking good. Jim McDermott authored the amendment- at least he made the attempt. Silvestre Reyes (of Texas- hooray, we're not all evil pro-torture bastards!) and Jan Schakowsky at least tried to defend it- when no other Democrats would. (Granted, Reyes was almost certainly the one who ordered the amendment's withdrawal, so he loses points there.)

But certainly every Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, if not the whole damn Congress, who remained silent when this went on deserves our utter contempt.

Cowards, all.

And torture, for all practical purposes, remains legal in the United States.

One Man Two Men v. 1.2 Million People.

2010-02-26T19:23:00.000-08:00

Last night Jim Bunning, soon-to-be-retired Republican Senator from Kentucky, single-handedly filibustered to death a bill that would extend federal aid for unemployment insurance and COBRA medical coverage for another month.

As Democratic senators asked again and again for unanimous consent for a vote on a 30-day extension Thursday night, Bunning refused to go along.

And when Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) begged him to drop his objection, Politico reports, Bunning replied: "Tough shit."

Bunning says he doesn't oppose extending benefits -- he just doesn't want the money that's required added to the deficit. He proposes paying for the 30-day extension with stimulus funds.

. . .

And at one point during the debate, which dragged on till nearly midnight, Bunning complained of missing a basketball game.

"I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00," he said,
"and it's the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they're the only team that has beat Kentucky this year."

Politico has more:

Reid has asked for unanimous consent to approve the package of provisions that expire Sunday, which also include 30-day extensions of flood insurance, highway funding and small business loans. But Bunning continues to object to the unanimous consent requests.

. . .

On the floor Thursday, Bunning complained about how the measures aren’t adequately paid for. And he criticized Reid for killing a bipartisan Finance Committee bill to address the unemployment rate and for “jamming” through other bills that he said would amount to a frivolous increase in spending.

. . .

“All the spending portions of that compromise of those programs that you’re talking about were paid for in that bill,” Bunning said. “Now explain that to the American people.”

. . .

"Remember now, this all could’ve been changed had not the leader of the Senate decided that a bipartisan compromise jobs bill was not as important as his partisan jobs bill that just passed just before all of this debate," he said in his final remarks.

Note: the "bipartisan" bill was in fact essentially a Republican bill, extending and expanding tax cuts for the mega-wealthy and corporations- while raising taxes on the middle class.

Now, up to this point Bunning was on his own. The renegade former baseball pitcher has been persona non grata in the Republican Senate Caucus for months now due to his often embarrassing conduct- and abysmal popularity in his home state, where his seat comes up on this year's ballot. It took some heavy arm-twisting, a total shutoff of campaign funds, and months of polls showing him going down to defeat to any Democrat you cared to name before Bunning finally announced he would not seek re-election.

But this morning, when Harry Reid made one last effort to get unanimous consent to pass the bill, Bunning found unexpected support- and the bill was killed until at least late next week:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) took the floor after Reid to stick up for Bunning. He noted that there is broad bipartisan support for extending benefits, but said Bunning was right to take a stand against adding $10 billion to the deficit. He also pointed out that the jobs bill that Reid scrapped two weeks ago, crafted by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), contained an extension of UI and COBRA.

"I admire the courage of the junior senator from Kentucky," he said. "Somebody has to stand up finally and say, 'No more inter-generational theft!'"

Yes, friends, that is the junior senator from Texas, the #2 man in the Republican Senate Caucus, the man responsible for getting Republicans in that body, John Cornyn, standing up and saying people should starve now so that their children won't pay higher taxes down the line. The fact that their children will go hungry, as children, RIGHT NOW cuts no ice with the Republicans... because, of course, they and their children are all well taken care of.

Before Cornyn opened his mouth, the Republicans could have written Bunning off as a renegade, and the extension of benefits could have passed next week after a simple (for a change) cloture vote. Cornyn, though, has made it more than one man: he's made it a campaign issue.

If Reid tries to pass this bill next week, expect a more intense filibuster, and a hard-fought cloture vote.

(Interesting: today Politico had an article on Republican threats to bring Senate business to a complete stop with amendments and procedural delays. My response: you mean, more of a halt than you're ALREADY bringing it to?)

Blatant Politics Trumps Justice in Justice Department

2010-02-25T20:23:00.000-08:00

As all of you should know, the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility finally issued a report stating that John Yoo, Jay Bybee and others committed legal misconduct in drafting legal opinions on torture not based on the law, but on what their bosses- George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and Cheney's chief aide David Addington- wanted.

And also as all of you should know, the assistant attorney general in charge over OPR, David Margolis, overruled the OPR investigation and said that since Yoo and Bybee honestly believed that the office of the President holds unlimited and absolute power, they were only guilty of being wrong- not of deliberate misconduct- and thus should suffer no penalty whatever.

Well, both the original report (heavily redacted) and David Margolis's sixty-seven page memo basically overturning the findings of the report are being reviewed by thousands of bloggers. Possibly the best review of both documents comes from David Luban of Slate, who completely demolishes the legal reasoning Margolis used to get Yoo and Bybee out of jail free:

Both the OPR report and Margolis agree that (in Margolis' understatement) "these memos contain some significant flaws." There they part company. The OPR report finds that Yoo and Bybee violated two rules of professional conduct: Rule 1.1, requiring competence, and Rule 2.1, requiring lawyers to "exercise independent professional judgment and render candid advice." Margolis rejects OPR's analysis and concludes that "poor judgment" rather than professional misconduct "accounts for the entirety of Yoo's work" on the torture memos.

But that's not the right characterization for memos that used extravagant legal reasoning to approve torture. It's like saying that Iago's advice to Othello showed poor judgment. OPR made a powerful case against Bybee and Yoo. In response, Margolis went after OPR like a defense lawyer, upped the burden of proof beyond what the ethics rules require, and minimized the liberties that Yoo and Bybee had taken with the law.

OPR's analysis changed between the drafts and the final report, and Margolis goes on for pages about that, quoting liberally and uncritically from Bybee's and Yoo's objections and insinuating that OPR's efforts to respond are worrying signs of "a shift in OPR's reasoning"—although he admits that he was the one who recommended that OPR solicit and review the objections. . . . In a catch-22, Margolis faults OPR for switching to the framework he insists is the proper one.

. . .

Bybee and Yoo objected that these standards do not come from the case law on Rule 2.1. That is true, because the case law simply has never dealt with lawyers tailoring their advice to yield the client's desired result: the lawyer as absolver or indulgence-seller. Margolis concludes that the absence of case law on standards of candor means that the standard is ambiguous. But that certainly does not follow. Otherwise, any law that has never been interpreted by a court would automatically be ambiguous.

Margolis also isn't even sure that standards of candor apply to OLC lawyers. He approvingly quotes Jack Goldsmith's testimony that it's an unsettled question whether OLC should offer "neutral, independent, court-like advice" or something "more like ... an attorney's advice to a client about what you can get away with. ..."

. . .

Yoo and Bybee are very capable, intelligent, and well-trained lawyers. If they produced an opinion riddled with weird arguments, cherry-picked quotations, and inexplicable omissions, the natural inference is that they weren't being candid. The famous "empty head, pure heart" defense simply doesn't wash when you are talking about OLC. Much of the OPR report tries to show—at elaborate length—that the arguments in the torture memos are so bad and so tendentious that lawyers of this caliber could not have produced them in good faith. . . .. Margolis' response is that the arguments in the torture memos are bad, but not that bad. . . .

Yoo cited legal authorities (often with dubious interpretations) to support his conclusions. Yet somehow he managed to omit all the authorities on the other side—dissenting judicial opinions, later opinions by the same courts he did cite, and even Supreme Court decisions. . . . Margolis reads all this as merely a failure to be "thorough" and responds that "the requirement to be thorough does not necessarily require that any memorandum setting forth the attorney's opinion communicate to the client every countervailing argument and every non-controlling fact." . . .Cherry-picking authorities so that you mention those on your side and leave out the rest is not a failure of "thoroughness." It is evidence of bias.

Sometimes Margolis uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to downplay instances in which the Yoo-Bybee memo states a position one-sidedly or omits opposing authority or (in one instance) falsifies what a source actually says. . . . Yoo's falsification of what a law review article said (it stated that the law of self-defense does not work for torture; Yoo cited it for the opposite proposition) is "too inconsequential to support a finding of misconduct in and of itself." The problem with Margolis' pooh-poohing is that all these separate grains of sand really do add up to a heap.

Margolis also makes short work of the Yoo-Bybee memo's strategic omissions. United States v. Lee is a 1981 case prosecuted by the Reagan Justice Department dealing with a Texas sheriff and his deputies who were convicted for water-boarding . . . Neither Bybee memo mentions the case, but this does not trouble Margolis, who blows off the omission of Lee because "the opinion does not describe the technique." True enough, but the government's brief in the Lee case does, and the brief is readily available on legal databases.

. . .

The second road OPR took to establish that Yoo and Bybee gave bad-faith legal advice allowing torture was to look at the circumstantial evidence. If Yoo and Bybee were under pressure from the CIA and the White House to produce an opinion that is as permissive and reassuring to interrogators as possible, the natural inference is that the opinions are shoddily one-sided because the lawyers needed to reach a desired result.

. . .

Margolis objects to OPR's inquiry into whether the OLC lawyers were being told what result their client wanted—after all, lawyers usually know what result their clients when they go to draft a legal opinion. Again, though, this misses the point. If the OLC lawyers were being pushed by the White House or CIA to reach a certain result, that would be evidence that the contorted lawyering in the memos was deliberate.

Of course, the best evidence of what the lawyers were thinking, who they were talking to, and what pressures they faced, might be their e-mail traffic. But the OPR report informs us that "most of Yoo's emails had been deleted and were not recoverable."

Unfortunately, Luban concludes that, even if Margolis hadn't been working quite deliberately- and shoddily- to defend Yoo and Bybee, nothing much would have come from it:

Even if Margolis had followed OPR's recommendation, the cases would almost certainly have wound up in the dead letter box. Nonetheless, this is a bitter outcome for those who think that torture devised at the highest levels of government disgraces us as a nation.

Scott Horton, who has been investigating the Bush torture regime and the Obama administration's cover-up of that torture regime, adds:

Over the past two years, I have consistently been told by insiders at Justice that an elaborate game was played to try to slow down or block the OPR’s report. Efforts were made to pressure OPR to rewrite its report, to adopt softer standards, to allow Yoo and Bybee to respond internally, and to require OPR to address the responses. I was told that one man was consistently behind these tactics: David Margolis. So, far from being an objective and impartial analyst, Margolis became engaged in the process at least by the fall of 2008, as an advocate for Yoo and Bybee and opponent of OPR.

The first question is simple: Why is a career Justice Department official with well-documented sympathies being put in the position of final reviewer? Margolis not only lacks serious grounding in professional ethics rules; his prior decisions reflect an attitude that borders on overt contempt for them.

. . .

Margolis makes a great deal of OPR’s changes in its text. He suggests that this reflects a lack of clarity in the process and standards they apply. This is a dishonest argument, because the changes in the text resulted very largely from David Margolis’s own prodding and perversion of proper procedure. He was, we can now clearly say, setting them up for the fall.

And Andrew Sullivan, where I saw all this first, has the perfect conclusion:

Remember: only the Lynndie Englands go to jail in America; their commanders get to go on NPR and spin.

It is for this sort of thing that Obama, I believe, will go down in history alongside Gerald Ford as one of the worst presidents on American justice we have ever had. Margolis might have pushed for this cover-up since the OPR investigation began in 2004, but Eric Holder gave him full latitude to keep pushing back release, and both Holder and Obama back Margolis's analysis, marking the case as permanently closed in their eyes.

This is injustice- Yoo's and Bybee's injustice, Margolis's injustice... and Holder's and Obama's injustice.

Guilty of Drinking While Not White and Straight

2010-02-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

Adam Weinstein has a good, if short, article in Mother Jones about the public intoxication laws in Texas.

The comedian Ron White has a comedy bit, made famous in the movie Blue Collar Comedy Tour, with the following bit:

Now, at this point I had the right to remain silent, but I no longer had the ability. "I don't want to be drunk in pub-LICK. I WAS drunk in a bar, which is perfectly legal. THEY threw me into pub-LICK... arrest THEM."

The irony is this: Ron White, a Texan, was in his story just after being thrown out of a New York bar. Turns out, in Texas, it actually is illegal to be drunk in a bar. And cops may electively arrest people for being drunk in a bar without any blood or breath test whatever, without any complaint from the bartender, owner, or other patrons...

... and, as was shown in Fort Worth, Irving and Arlington last year, the cops can- and will- arrest you for being gay, or Hispanic, or black, with a beer in your hand.

A half-dozen police cruisers, an unmarked sedan, and the prisoner van slid to a stop in front of the Rainbow Lounge, Fort Worth's newest gay club, at about 1:30 a.m. on June 28, 2009—40 years, almost down to the minute, after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn with billy clubs and bullhorns. Inside the bar, the officers fanned out, grabbing and arresting six patrons for public intoxication. Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army vet, says an officer told him to put down his drink, then "bulldozed" him through the crowd to the paddy wagon but then let him go. "I'm 6'8", 250 pounds, and I had just finished my second drink," Guttery told a local reporter. "I might have had enough to have a loose tongue, but not a loose walk or anything like that." Another man alleges that he was slammed against a wall, elbowed, and fell on the ground, landing him in intensive care for a week with bleeding in his brain. He was charged with public intoxication and assault.

Unconstitutional? Illegal? Nope. State courts have not only signed off on the law in question, but actually EXPANDED it- giving police complete carte blanche to arrest anyone for anything, provided they're in a bar.

"Having no standard allows the police to arrest whoever pisses them off and call it PI," [defense attorney Robert Guest] says, adding, "If you have a violent, homophobic, or just an asshole of a cop and you give him the arbitrary power to arrest anyone for PI, you can expect violent, homophobic, and asshole-ic behavior."

Weinstein adds in a separate blog post:

When a magazine in Dallas offered me a job last summer, my wife and I jumped at the chance to settle in the city that Molly Ivins once painted red. We had visions of a Lone Star libertarian utopia, where there was enough open space and distrust of government to allow everyone some freedom in choosing their bliss.

Boy, were we wrong. From the hip neighborhoods of Lower Greenville and Deep Ellum to the grittier areas of South Dallas, what we experienced was an over-policed nanny state—exactly the sort of thing you'd expect pro-secession and anti-liberal Texans to hate. But they're not angry, because they're not the target: Few straight white Texans have anything to worry about. That's documented.

That's the Republican way: freedom for rich, white, straight Protestants; no freedom for anyone else.

If you're Texan and haven't voted in the primaries yet- I urge you to vote in the Republican primaries... for the worst, most insane Republican candidate you can find. With any luck one or more of them will get nominated... and a Democrat or three might actually win in November, and bring some sanity to this state.

Obama Kills the Public Option... AGAIN.

2010-02-24T10:54:00.000-08:00

So, thanks to the hard work of some progressive groups and certain highly endangered Democratic Congressmen, a drive began to get the public option- a government-run insurance alternative to private, for-profit insurance plans- a new vote in Congress.

The main stumbling block, of course, is the Senate- and even there a letter pledging to support a vote on the public option using majority-vote reconciliation rules (rather than the filibuster standard of three-fifths majority) was slowly gaining ground. Yesterday the letter gained its 23rd signatory, with only two Democratic senators- Tom Carper of Delaware and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia- declaring their opposition.

And then White House spokesperson Robert Gibbs said this: "We have seen obviously that though there are some that are supportive of this, there isn't enough political support in a majority to get this through . . . The president . . . took the Senate bill as the base and looks forward to discussing consensus ideas on Thursday."

So, in short, Obama wants the public option taken off the table- for good, this time.

Think I'm being pessimistic? Look closely at what Gibbs said again. There are some that are supportive of this... This is not the same at all as We support this or We'd like to see this. In fact, it's the exact opposite: the invariable follow-up to Some people support this... is, ...but I don't.

This is the third time Obama has killed anything resembling a public option. The first time, he scuttled a Senate compromise bill which would have had a public option that individual states could opt out of. The second time, he ordered Harry Reid to obey Joe Lieberman and scrap plans for a Medicare buy-in for people younger than 65 and non-profit insurance plans operated by for-profit insurance corporations. By now, it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that Obama does not just believe the public option is tactically unsound: he wants it dead, dead, dead.

Reactions, from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

The White House clearly played a role facilitating the on-going discussions between the House and Senate Democrats. They pounced on the Anthem health insurance hike in California. And they've done a pretty decent job boxing in the Republicans in this dance of bipartisanship over the last few weeks. Fundamentally though, it seems like the White House did hang back and was unwilling to commit itself in any serious ways until the chances of a victory seemed strong. They did not want to take a hit if another attempt failed.

And from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, who also wants the public option to die:

What's reasonably clear is that the Democrats were quite a ways away from having 50 firm commitments to the public option. How close they could have gotten if Obama and Harry Reid had done everything in their power to whip the votes for it, we don't know. Instead, it's been pretty obvious, from the reporting of people like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, that the White House regarded the latest reincarnation of public option as a nuisance that they hoped would go away.

My personal reaction is much, much simpler:

Whatever happened to, "Yes We Can"?

Kiss the Democratic Majority Bayh-Bayh

2010-02-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

With less than two days before the primary filing deadline, Democratic Indiana Senator Evan Bayh aborts his re-election campaign.

The sound you just heard was the rumble of the oncoming Republican control of both houses of Congress.

The utterly incompetent handling of health care reform in Congress, plus the complete absence of leadership from Barack Obama, had already made a Republican majority in the House of Representatives as good as a 50/50 proposition. Now, with the retirement of Bayh- who seemed about to coast to an easy re-election over weak Republican opposition- the road is wide open for Republicans to control fifty-one votes in the next Senate.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com points out that this is not certain or even likely, in his estimation, because there are several Republican Senate seats they have to defend. I say: bullshit. His most recent estimates of all Senate races for 2010 don't back him up- and they were written just after Scott Brown won in Massachusetts.

First, my count of the seats the Republicans will pick up in 2010 on the way to 51. They currently have 41 members in the Senate, so I'll start with #42:

#42: NORTH DAKOTA (open seat)- It was only a fluke that Democrats ever had this seat at all; no way can they hold it in such a rural red state.

#43: ARKANSAS (Blanche Lincoln)- Unless Lincoln gives up her re-election campaign or loses in the primary, the Democrats are toast here. Even her possible primary challengers don't have much of a chance.

#44: NEVADA (Majority Leader Harry Reid)- The Majority Leader always ends up being the least popular man in the Senate. So it is here. The Democrats would have a bit of a chance if Reid retired and allowed one of his opponents to run, but he won't retire and he'll spend his way to the Democratic nomination... so this seat is lost.

#45: DELAWARE (open seat)- Rep. Mike Castle is wildly popular in his state, and his sole Democratic opponent is a nonentity. This one's as good as gone, too, barring some sort of burnout.

#46: PENNSYLVANIA (Arlen Specter)- Both Specter and his primary opponent Admiral Joe Sestak poll behind Republican opponent Bob Toomey- who is a radical in the mold of his former patron Rick Santorum. Specter is regarded as a political opportunist and too damn old and unhealthy to continue in office anyway; Sestak, despite his military record, is regarded as too liberal. This one isn't certain, but it's good odds behind a Republican recovery.

#47: INDIANA (was Bayh, now open)- Bayh waited until the Republican field was limited to a weak candidate before retiring from the field. Unfortunately, by waiting until the Republicans couldn't pick someone else in a primary, he waited until the Democrats couldn't hold a primary at all, short of an organizational miracle. That means the Democratic candidate will be chosen by the state executive committee of the Democratic Party... and that, in turn, means the Democratic candidate will be an extremely weak nonentity with a vastly shortened campaign time compared to his Republican opponent. Bayh has, in essence, given this seat to the Republicans on a silver platter... unless their weak and relatively unpopular candidate botches it.

#48: COLORADO (effectively open)- Reaction has set in in Colorado to the Senator appointed to fill a hole created by Barack Obama's cabinet. Colorado may be trending more Democratic in the long term, but it has a lot of extreme Republican strongholds- including and especially Colorado Springs. Barring a massive (and not expected) decline in unemployment and jump in the economy, the Democrats lose this one, too.

#49: ILLINOIS (open)- The Democratic nominee is tarnished by association with impeached governor Rod Blagojevich. The Republican nominee is a moderate (by Republican standards) who is popular statewide. In my book- and Silver to the contrary notwithstanding- this one is going GOP.

#50: NEW YORK (Gillibrand- appointed to replace Clinton)- Gillibrand, in her short time as an appointed Senator, has become very unpopular in her state. Her main Democratic opponent, Harold Ford, is regarded as an arrogant carpetbagger with no credibility. If either of these two gets the nomination, they're badly vulnerable- and possibly facing a former Republican governor for an opponent. Another toss-up which, in the current environment, means a GOP pick-up.

"But wait," you say, "that's only fifty seats! In a fifty-fifty split the vice president gets a vote!" Well, leaving aside the fact that certain Blue Dog Democrats will vote with the Republicans a lot of the time... there's one man with a plan:

#51: CONNECTICUT (Joe Lieberman)- If you don't think Joe will flip parties the instant he can throw control of the Senate to the Republicans, you don't know Joe.

And if Lieberman doesn't flip, there's always Roger Pryor of Arkansas or Max "Negotiate With Republicans to the Death" Baucus of Nebraska who are also good bets to flip.

And as for the states Nate Silver thinks Democrats can pick up?

MISSOURI- Incumbent Roy Blunt is now five points ahead in the polls.

ARIZONA- The teabagger talk-radio host running against McCain still beats the generic Democratic opponent- and the Democrats have absolutely nobody to run against him to speak of. (Remember, Arizona is the state of Joe "I Break the Law to Uphold It" Arpaio- and the only state to oppose a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.)

OHIO- The open corruption of the Republican state government from 2000 to 2006 is already forgotten.

KENTUCKY- It doesn't matter if Rand Paul is an even bigger teabagger than his dad Ron Paul, and it doesn't matter that he has no experience whatever- if he wins the nomination, he's STILL ahead five points or more in the polls over any Democratic opponent.

FLORIDA- Rubio's got the teabaggers. Meek has... absolutely nobody. And Rubio's up as high as TEN points in the polls.

The best hope the Democrats have for a gain is New Hampshire- and that's only if the Republican establishment candidate falls to one of the teabagger/Free State candidates.

Democrats, if you want to accomplish anything at all- even getting to choose the pattern of the office drapes- you have to do it now. Because in 2011, the Republicans will be quite firmly back in control, with only a presidential veto standing between them and total power in Washington.

And when- not if- it happens, it will only be the Democrats' own fault. Democrats forfeited the message wars on the stimulus package and health care reform. Democrats caved in from the start to Republican demands and then, with a supermajority in the Senate and a commanding majority in the House, utterly failed to accomplish even one item in their long-term agenda. Democrats have shown themselves too internally divided, too spineless, and above all too incompetent to govern.

And, for lack of any other options on the table, that means the voting public will give the government back to the Republicans come November.

God help us all.

Dick Cheney Brags: "I'm a Big Fan" of Torture

2010-02-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

On national TV Sunday, Dick Cheney admitted to being "a big supporter of waterboarding, a big supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques."

"Enhanced interrogation techniques," of course, is torture. Under Cheney- and under his putative boss George W. Bush- Americans held hundreds of people imprisoned without either writ of habeas corpus or combatant status under the Geneva Accords- in other words, wholly outside the law. These people were beaten, waterboarded, held in stress positions for days until their muscles collapsed, denied sleep for days, put in total sensory deprivation or disorientation, and threatened with their death and the death of their loved ones, among many other techniques documented. These techniques were used by Imperial Japan, the Gestapo, the Khmer Rouge, and Saddam Hussein, among others- and in all those cases those responsible either were punished or are currently in the process of meeting justice.

Scott Horton, in the above link, makes it very plain:

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. . . What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants.

Glenn Greenwald brings home just how important prosecution is- and why it is imperative:

What would stop a future President (or even the current one) from re-authorizing waterboarding and the other Bush/Cheney torture techniques if he decided he wanted to? Given that both the Bush and Obama administrations have succeeded thus far in blocking all judicial adjudications of the legality of these "policies," and given that the torture architects are feted on TV and given major newspaper columns, what impediments exist to prevent their re-implementation?

But earlier in the same article, Greenwald pretty much admits that this is exactly what will happen- as soon as Obama leaves office, torture will resume.

In general, people who commit felonies avoid publicly confessing to having done so, and they especially avoid mocking the authorities who fail to act. One thing Dick Cheney is not is stupid, and yet he's doing exactly that. Indeed, he's gradually escalated his boasting about having done so throughout the year. Why? Because he knows there will never be any repercussions, that he will never be prosecuted no matter how blatantly he admits to these serious crimes. He's taunting the Obama administration and the DOJ: not only will I not hide or apologize, but I will proudly tout and defend my role in these crimes, because I know you will do absolutely nothing about it, even though the Attorney General and the President themselves said that the act to which I'm confessing is a felony. Does anyone doubt that Cheney's assessment is right? And isn't that, rather obviously, a monumental indictment of most everything?

Cheney is taunting Obama- but more to the point, he's saying to his base: Obama knows, in his heart, that I'm right- torture is NOT immoral or illegal, and that's why he'll never, ever prosecute me or anyone else for it. He knows we were right all along, or else he'd do something about what we did. And since torture is right, that means as soon as we regain power, we'll start it up all over again.

If Obama doesn't change his mind about this and begin proper investigations and prosecutions of those who violated American and international laws against torture, then his legacy on the subject will be limited to one immediately-overturned executive order- in other words, completely empty.

He will be remembered as a president who, when faced with evil, did nothing.

GOP: Pollution Controls are a Socialist Conspiracy

2010-02-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

So, the lower house of the Utah legislature- overwhelmingly composed of the most radical conservative Republicans in America outside the Confederacy- voted a resolution claiming that athmospheric carbon dioxide is harmless.

And that's after the bill was edited to make it less radical:

The original version of the bill dismissed climate science as a "well organised and ongoing effort to manipulate and incorporate "tricks" related to global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome". It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a "gravy train" and their efforts would "ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty".

In the heat of the debate, the representative Mike Noel said environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion.

The bill claims not only that global warming is not caused by humans, but that there is no such thing as global warming- and therefore that proposed anti-carbon regulations being considered by the Environmental Protection Agency should be put on hold "until a full and independent investigation of climate data and global warming science can be substantiated".

Just in case the EPA isn't paying attention, Texas governor Rick Perry is suing in federal court to block any such regulations.

Texas said it had filed a petition for review challenging the EPA's "endangerment finding" with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Texas has also asked the EPA to reconsider its ruling.

"The EPA's misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association also said on Tuesday they filed a petition challenging the EPA in federal appeals court.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. iron and steel makers have also signaled they would file lawsuits.

This isn't just ignorance, mind you- at least it's not in most cases. There's a lot of big money that doesn't want to pay the cost of controlling the release of carbon dioxide into the athmosphere. Big Oil, Big Steel (well, such as is left in the US) and Big Coal, to name three industries, want to keep pollution nice and regulation-free.

And in order to do this, they're pumping billions, with a B, of dollars into public relations, think tanks, and junk science to discredit climate change at every level- just like tobacco companies used to do to combat medical studies that showed the direct link between smoking and lung cancer. They're not just playing on the general ignorance of the voting public- they're ADDING to it by promoting false information, conspiracy theories, and false blanket statements on the nature and reliability of climate science.

And Utah, I'm pretty sure, is just broadcasting the new message for the Republican base: environmentalists are the enemy. Environmentalists are evil. Anyone who wants to reduce pollution, or who worries about climate change, is a Commie bastard who wants to kill your unborn children and take away your freedom.

This is an extension of the old Southern belief that anyone better educated than you are is by definition evil and not to be trusted. It's beyond suspicion- it's actual hatred of expertise and training. It's a call to believe in the superiority of the righteously ignorant.

And it's being done not for the benefit of the country, but merely for the benefit of the extremely rich.

What's sad is, these days he IS an intellectual in the GOP.

2010-02-12T14:05:00.000-08:00

You want to know how bankrupt the Republican argument is about evading a Senate filibuster to pass health care reform?

They brought out Dan Quayle to oppose budget reconciliation as a tactic for passing it.

"They're gonna go to budget reconciliation, which I believe would set a very bad precedent, because essentially -- if they could do it, and I don't know if they can do it, but if they could do it -- what you have done, effectively, is to take away the filibuster in the United States Senate," Quayle said. "So, therefore, you have 51 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. That is not the constitutional process."

... oh, WHERE to begin with this? The fact that there are more than 51 votes in a House majority, the fact that the Constitution says nothing about a supermajority for the Senate to pass most bills, the fact that the Senate was originally appointed by state legislatures instead of by popular election and therefore we don't have anything like the Senate the Founders originally intended, or the simple fact that the Senate filibuster was not even invented as such until 1837, and the modern form not created until 1917...

... nah. How about I begin, and end, with the fact that the best expert on the Constitution they could find is Dan "Potatoe" Quayle?

Thanks for playing, FOX News and the Republican Party. I'm sure there's some wonderful parting gifts waiting for you just behind the curtain somewhere...

It comes from the dead... CORN FLAKE FRIDAY!

2010-02-12T13:36:00.000-08:00

When I was still waffling about staying or going re: the Libertarian Party, I did a series of posts here under the header, "CORN FLAKE FRIDAY!" in an attempt to educate and/or shame then-fellow Libertarians into rethinking just how far they were willing to go, and who they were willing to support, to get a toehold in the greater political world.

To recap: a Corn Flake is a person who embarrasses the Libertarian movement, or associated political movements, by doing something egregiously stupid in public. (Blog posts and the like don't count- it has to be in "meatspace".)

And this week we have someone who qualifies, even though I have not only lost all interest in trying to reform the Libertarian Party, but have gone pretty firmly into opposition on most libertarian economic policies. I just had to bring Corn Flake Friday out of retirement for this:

The Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent "Armageddon" appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a "righteous 'Mission from God,'" as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society.

As we reported yesterday, Gregory Girard, a Manchester technology consultant, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, say police. They believe Girard, who pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, was "preparing for domestic and political turmoil," and feared martial law would soon be imposed.

. . .

Girard's apparent apocalyptic anxiety about a coming effort by federal thugs to crack down on personal liberties surfaced frequently on his Tea Party page. His writings may shed light on the mindset that allegedly led him to assemble his arsenal.

For instance, just last week, after another Tea Partier wrote a post railing against gun registries, Girard responded by invoking a potential "murderous rampage" by "state and Federal gangsta's (sic)," trying to take his weapons.

Federal efforts to take away guns during emergencies were outlowed (sic) after the Katrina incident. And at all times, the Constitution would prohibit such a thing. So, one can know that any such effort is against the Constitution and against specific laws regarding states of emergency, and thus the effort, if it involved breaking into your home, would be no different than any felonious breaking and entry by one or more armed assailants. The Castle law in one's state, or simply the common law of the right to self defense, would ensure that close range discharge of double-ought buck from a 12 ga at the assailant's face (from behind cover!), would be a perfectly legal defense in response to an attack of armed assailants tearing the door from your home and threatening with deadly force, in the form of loaded rifles pointed in your direction. The hard part is not preventing the confiscation, but surviving the murderous rampage of the state and Federal gangsta's (sic) that would almost certainly be very enthusiastic about gunning the defending homeowner down.

. . .

In Girard's view, only one person can save us: Sarah Palin. Later in the lengthy post, he wrote:

I believe that the ONLY ----- ONLY ------ potential presidental (sic) candidate I have seen with the sheer force of will and God-insprined (sic) rightous (sic) determination to bringdown (sic) this "War Powers" evil is Sarah Palin.

So, let's see- a gun rights nut building his own arsenal, expressing enthusiastic anticipation of the opportunity to gun down Federal agents if they try to arrest him or take his guns, a teabagger and worshipper of Sarah Palin, turned in to authorities by his wife after this:

Girard's wife said her husband had recently told her: "Don't talk to people, shoot them instead," and "it's fine to shoot people in the head because traitors deserve it."

And yes, folks I knew quite a few Libertarians who talked- and presumably still do- EXACTLY like this.

This guy is the poster child for weapons bans. This guy is exactly the sort of thing those of us who support the Second Amendment and the right to use deadly force in self-defense do NOT need.

For being so eager to kill law enforcement and other government officials in Armageddeon that his own wife turned him in:

Gregory Girard, this week's Corn Flake!

Obama Surrenders on Recess Appointments

2010-02-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

So, Barack Obama threatened recess appointments for the sixty-three nominees currently languishing in the Senate under either single-Senator holds or open filibusters.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) responded by allowing votes on twenty-seven of those nominees. Obama responded by, in essence, backing away from his threat:

Today, the United States Senate confirmed 27 of my high-level nominees, many of whom had been awaiting a vote for months.

At the beginning of the week, a staggering 63 nominees had been stalled in the Senate because one or more senators placed a hold on their nomination. In most cases, these holds have had nothing to do with the nominee's qualifications or even political views, and these nominees have already received broad, bipartisan support in the committee process.

Instead, many holds were motivated by a desire to leverage projects for a Senator's state or simply to frustrate progress. It is precisely these kinds of tactics that enrage the American people.

And so on Tuesday, I told Senator McConnell that if Republican senators did not release these holds, I would exercise my authority to fill critically-needed positions in the federal government temporarily through the use of recess appointments. This is a rare but not unprecedented step that many other presidents have taken. Since that meeting, I am gratified that Republican senators have responded by releasing many of these holds and allowing 29 nominees to receive a vote in the Senate.

While this is a good first step, there are still dozens of nominees on hold who deserve a similar vote, and I will be looking for action from the Senate when it returns from recess. If they do not act, I reserve the right to use my recess appointment authority in the future.

(Why 29? Either two get voted on today, or two got rejected by the Senate yesterday- that I don't know.)

The important points here are:

(1) Obama has, in this statement, essentially agreed NOT to use the recess appointment power during the coming two-week Presidents' Day recess.

(2) 63 - 29 = 34. That means Obama has, to all practical purposes, surrendered on getting up-or-down votes for over half his remaining appointees.

(3) And finally, Obama presents the recess appointment power as "a rare but not unprecedented step," when in reality it is absolutely nothing of the sort.

I generally have a low opinion of Ezra Klien over at the Washington Post, but this time he hits it right on the head:

As if to thank them, the White House promptly shot itself in the foot... At this point in his presidency, George W. Bush had made 10 recess appointments. Over the course of his presidency, he would make almost 200. Bill Clinton made about 150. In describing recess appointments as "a rare but not unprecedented step," Obama made it harder to actually make any, because he's defined the procedure -- which, unlike the hold, is a defined constitutional power of the president rather than a courtesy observed in the Senate -- as an extraordinary last-resort. He also promised, later in the statement, that he wouldn't make any appointments this recess.

. . .

Worse, why explain the recess appointment as some sort of emergency measure? At what point does the administration accept that its success is dependent on finding ways to avoid being filibustered? Reconciliation can't be considered a nuclear option and recess appointments can't be saved for special cases. George W. Bush understood this and used reconciliation and recess appointments routinely in his first year. That meant it was no story when he used the processes for his next seven years. Obama is making the very consideration of these measures a story, which means any decision to actually use them will be a big deal and will make the president look like a bare-knuckle partisan.

And this, I think, is the nub of the matter. Barack Obama's version of rolling back the imperial presidency is NOT divesting the presidency of the unconstitutional power seized by George W. Bush and his predecessors of both parties. Instead, it's an attempt to yield more power to Congress- power to craft legislation, power to approve or reject executive branch officials, power to- in essence- determine the whole agenda of the federal government.

Put another way, Obama believes that a president should not be a leader. He's extremely loathe to take the initiative on ANYTHING, and he will go out of his way, even damaging or outright repudiating his proclaimed policy goals, to leave decision-making power to Congress...

... which has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it CANNOT lead, CANNOT make decisions.

Obama is acting as if he's still a US Senator.

We need a PRESIDENT.

And I don't think we've got one just now.

Tea Party- hard core ignorant.

2010-02-12T12:52:00.000-08:00

So, CBS and the New York Times polled themselves some people, focusing on people who self-identify as Tea Party activists.

Notable findings:

(1) Teabaggers are almost exclusively white- 95%, as opposed to 75% of Americans generally (including Hispanics as white, apparently).

(2) Economically, teabaggers are no more likely to be rich or poor than other Americans.

(3) Teabaggers are more concentrated in the South and West:

TEA PARTY IDENTIFICATION BY REGION

All Americans Tea Partiers
Northeast 23% 16%
South 32 37
Midwest 22 19
West 24 29

Interesting side note: the poll shows nearly a third of all Americans are Southerners now. That's... a bit frightening, quite frankly, considering how alive and well bigotry, deliberate ignorance, and hatred of expertise is down here.

Anyway, onward:

(4) Teabaggers are generally older than the average- 59% over 45, as opposed to 50% for all Americans.

(5) Teabaggers love Republicans (62% approval rate), and Republicans love Teabaggers (42% favorable, 2% unfavorable, 56% undecided). Teabaggers despise Democrats (9% approval), and the feeling is mutual (3% favorable, 47% unfavorable, 50% undecided). Independents who have actually heard of the teabaggers favor them by about two to one... but...

(6) Half of all Americans have heard little or nothing about the Tea Party movement at all. (And, considering the media push, especially by FOX News, this alone should be sufficient to throw the entire poll into question.) Furthermore, of the half of Americans who have heard of the Tea Party, 40% have no idea what the Tea Party's actual positions ARE. If you take the actual numbers and put them together, you end up with only 27% of Americans knowing both about the Tea Party movement and what it represents. (And 18% of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters. THAT should keep you awake nights...)

(7) Out of the half of Americans who have heard of the Tea Party movement, over half have no opinion, positive or negative, about them. 26% favorable, 20% unfavorable.

Now for the true ignorance which defines the teabaggers:

(8) Teabaggers' opinion of Obama: 80% unfavorable. (Fair enough, on its face, but...)

(9) Whereas 41% of Americans as a whole blame Bush for the current bad economy, among Teabaggers Obama is more to blame, and Congress most of all:

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR FEDERAL DEFICIT?

All Americans Tea Partiers
Bush admin. 41% 16%
Obama admin. 7 19
Congress 24 33
All 10 15

(10) Nearly half of Teabaggers think Obama has already raised taxes; the other half think he's kept them the same. (Hint: about one-third of the Recovery Act- that's the 2009 emergency stimulus package to you- was tax cuts and credits.)

(11) More Teabaggers oppose increasing regulations on banks (48%) than support it (42%).

So, what we have here are generally people ignorant of the facts- or, more likely, who get their "facts" from FOX News and nowhere else.

I, for one, would be interested to see a couple of poll questions that were asked all the time in 2008 and the first part of 2009, but haven't been asked recently, and see how many Teabaggers answer yes:

"Do you believe Obama is a Muslim?" and

"Do you believe Obama is a born American citizen?"

If those questions didn't get high YES responses from the Teabaggers, I'd be very greatly surprised.

I go Medina

2010-02-11T15:59:00.000-08:00

Well, my mind's made up: I'm crashing the Republican primary this year to vote for Debra Medina for Governor.

Why? Because of the three candidates, she's the most likely to lose in November.

Think Rush Limbaugh's pro-Hillary operation in reverse, on the state level. If the Republicans want to do it to Democrats, they should be prepared to have it done to them, right?

Of course, given just how crazy and unelectable Medina is, it probably won't work- especially after Glenn Beck tried to "out" her as a 9/11 Truther.

Radio host Glenn Beck, saying he was responding to e-mails he got from listeners, asked Medina in a national interview this morning whether she believed the U.S. government was involved in the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“I don’t have all of the evidence there Glenn so I’m not in a place, I have not been out publicly questioning that,” Medina said. “I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard, there are some very good arguments and I think the American people have not seen all the evidence there, so I have not taken a position on that.”

When Beck asked whether any of her advisers believed the government was involved, Medina said none of them did to her knowledge. He then asked whether she would disavow any advisers who did.

“That’s a federal issue,” Medina said. “We’re very focused on issues in Texas on Texas state government. I’m certainly not into mind control or thought-policing people. We’ve got a very diverse team in this state and it’s because Texans are standing shoulder to shoulder to support and defend the Constitution. I frankly don’t have time to go through and do psychological testing on people and know every thought or detail that they have. I don’t see us having a team of radical individuals if you will.”

After the interview, Beck, who holds sway with many Republican primary voters, said, “I think I can write her off the list.”

Beck, who has been critical of Gov. Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, added, “Let me take another look at Kay Bailey Hutchison if I have to. Rick, I think you and I could French kiss right now.”

Now, the kindest thing that can be said of this performance is that Medina has no business being interviewed in public or in the media, period. Maybe Beck was deliberately trying to ruin her in order to help Rick Perry; maybe not. If so, then Medina might as well have read from a script written for her by Beck for that explicit purpose. She dug herself in deeply.

Although she's since disclaimed 9/11 Trutherism and is attacking Beck for twisting her words, the damage is done. Texas is big 9/12 Movement territory- 9/12 is Beck's personal "revolutionary" political movement, full of people who believe in conspiracy theories Beck approves of, such as birtherism, one-world-ism, and Obama-is-a-Commie-ism.

But not Trutherism.

Still, I'm voting for her in the primary. Election Day is March 2; and on the GOP side, may the worst person win.

More on Paul Ryan's Republican "Roadmap for America's Future"

2010-02-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

So, a few days ago I mentioned the "shadow budget" Republican Representative Paul Ryan has crafted, which basically puts Social Security and Medicare on death row.

Christina Bellantoni of Talking Points Memo has done an in-depth analysis of that budget outline, and here's what she's found so far:

* Abolition of the capital gains tax.

* Abolition of the estate tax.

* Abolition of the corporate income tax.

* Abolition of income tax for income derived from interest on bank deposits and investments.

* Abolition of the top three income tax brackets, leaving a maximum 25% tax on households making $50,000 or higher, 10% on people making less, with a larger standardized deduction.

* Creation of a new national 8.5% sales tax, with absolutely no type of merchandise exempted- food, medicine, printed matter all included.

* And, if you've forgotten, privatization of Social Security and the replacement of Medicare with vouchers to buy private corporate-run insurance.

Two lines Talking Points Memo quotes from the original document are astonishing in their bare-faced chutzpah:

"Lower {tax} rates reduce disincentives to work and increase earnings," the roadmap proclaims.

Ryan writes in the roadmap the changes are to keep the federal tax burden at its current level.

First, lower tax rates reduce disincentives on the rich to "increase earnings"- that is, to take as much as they can grab and leave nothing for anyone else. Why on Earth do the immensely rich, or even the comfortably-well-off, need incentives to make MORE money? And why, above all, do we want corporations to make as much money as possible- and pay taxes on absolutely none of it?

Consider: under the Republican plan, corporations pay no taxes. People who earn money buying and selling corporate stock pay no taxes, because that's capital gains. People who earn dividends from preferred stock pay no taxes. The only taxes levied under this plan are on wages- the wages of the working middle-class and the poor, not the rich- and on the necessities of life, which everyone must buy but not everyone can afford.

This plan is, put bluntly, a Republican ploy to ensure that "only the little people pay taxes." This is trickle-down economics at its most extreme- and brazen.

On to the second item: "keeping the tax burden at its current level." This is, put bluntly, bullshit- but, for the Republicans to claim that it will balance the budget, it's necessary bullshit. The Republicans somehow got a fig-leaf letter from the Congressional Budget Office which says:

The Roadmap, in the form that CBO analyzed, would result in less federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid as well as lower tax revenues . . . Federal spending for Social Security would be slightly higher than under CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario for much of the projection period, but the system would become sustainable as revenues increase and traditional benefits decline. The budget deficit would peak at 5 percent of GDP in 2034 and then decline. By 2080, the Roadmap would generate a budget surplus of about 5 percent of GDP. . . . debt is projected to peak at 100 percent of GDP in 2043 and to decline thereafter, reaching zero by 2080.

So, best case scenario: deficit spending continues for twenty years, and doesn't end until every last one of you reading this is long dead.

Except, as TPM's Brian Beutler reports, Ryan ordered the Congressional Budget Office to cook the books for this analysis:

For their analysis Ryan provided CBO with a remarkable assumption: he asked CBO actuaries to assume that the major tax cuts he calls for won't create any change in federal revenue over the next two decades--at all.

Here's how they put it, in budget-ese: "As specified by your staff, for this analysis total federal tax revenues are assumed to equal those under [current fiscal policy]," the analysis reads.

. . .

In 2008, the Tax Policy Center analyzed a similar GOP plan and determined it amounted to the biggest tax cut in history.

Whether Ryan was knowingly engaging in sleight-of-hand, or whether he was using an inaccurate supply side model to correlate tax cuts with increased revenue is unclear. But what is clear is that if CBO had based its analysis on an official accounting of the ways in which his proposed policy changes would impact revenue, they would have come to a different conclusion.

So, in short, the Republican plan is the bunk. And that's being kind to it.

Now, I would prefer a flat income tax with a very high individual deductible and no complex credits or exemptions, myself. I would prefer that estate taxes apply only to liquid assets- money, bonds, and stocks. And I'd prefer a sales tax or value added tax to income taxes as a whole- provided certain necessities are exempted and/or the poor get a rebate or "pre-bate" to make up for what they can't afford.

But this package? It's bullshit. Outrageous bullshit. This is the wealthiest among us, the corporations and the mega-wealthy, trying to evade taxes altogether- and put the burden on the rest of us- while throwing the poor and needy out on the street to root, hog, or die.

And yes, it might seem like the Republicans are backing away- after all, even the author of the "Roadmap" says it's "very different from an actual budget"...

... but don't be fooled. This is the same man who calls Social Security and Medicare "collectivist."

"We have an opportunity to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case," he told Reason, a libertarian magazine, in December.

. . .

And despite GOP attempts to frame these entitlement reforms as something other than privatization, Ryan has been clear on the point.

"Rather than depending on government for your retirement and health security, I propose to empower people to become much more self-dependent for such things in life," he said in a speech to the Hudson Institute last June.

Or, put bluntly, you're on your own- and that's how it ought to be. Let the poor and unlucky die.

This is the Republican Party, plain and simple: more wealth and power for the rich and powerful, and nothing for anyone who can't pay for it themselves.

EDIT: Apparently Democrats are hammering Republicans on the "Roadmap"- and a few, including Arizona Rep. John Boozeman and Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston, are defending it.

Boozeman: "Congressman Ryan is working to cut the deficit spending and I appreciate his commitment to putting our country on the road to fiscal responsibility. His proposal may not be perfect, but I think he is making a thoughtful and serious effort to prevent Congress from driving our country into financial ruin."

Kingston: "We need to go in, and we need to cut duplicate programs, programs that are inefficient, programs that are expanding the entitlement mentality. I think we should go back to Social Security, take it off budget, dedicate the funds, put personalized accounts on it. On Medicare, I think something like vouchers, where people actually have an incentive to save money for the government, and they're rewarded for doing so."

Fiorina: Maybe California Should Go Bankrupt

2010-02-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

Carly Fiorina, Republican candidate for US Senate in California, suggests the state would benefit by going broke.

Fiorina's rivals jumped on comments she made to local business leaders in the Southern California city of Colton as quoted by the Riverside Press-Enterprise: "Whether that is the right approach now, I don't know. I think bankruptcy, as a possibility, at the very least focuses the mind on what has to be done to salvage a situation." They attacked her as unprepared since states under federal law cannot declare bankruptcy.

I don't know- seems to me that Carly's plenty prepared... quoting from Wikipedia...

In July 1999, Hewlett-Packard Company named Fiorina chief executive officer succeeding Lewis Platt . . . Fiorina was forced out of HP in 2005 after its stock price had fallen in value by half. . . . The company's stock jumped on news of Fiorina's departure.[37] . . . When Fiorina became CEO in July, 1999, HP's stock price was $52 per share, and when she left 5 years later in February, 2005, it was $21 per share—a loss of over 60% of the stock's value.[39] During this same time period, HP competitor Dell's stock price increased from $37 to $40 per share.[40][41]

Seems to me Carly has plenty of experience... at bankruptcy, and at running large enterprises into the ground.

Typical Republican, in other words.

The Minnesota Crazy Rides Again.

2010-02-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

Talking Points Memo's Eric Kleefeld reports on two, count 'em, TWO examples of the shining wisdom of the US Representative for Minnesota's Seventh District, Michele Bachmann.

First, Bachmann actually goes beyond the rest of her party in calling for the complete and total abolition of Social Security and Medicare:

Bachmann spoke this past weekend at the right-wing Constitutional Coalition in St. Louis, Missouri, and put forth her plan. "So, what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don't have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off," said Bachmann. "And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can't do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is."

And then we find out that Bachmann fears America will be cursed if we don't unquestioningly follow, obey and support Israel...

"I am convinced in my heart and in my mind that if the United States fails to stand with Israel, that is the end of the United States . . . [W]e have to show that we are inextricably entwined, that as a nation we have been blessed because of our relationship with Israel, and if we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play. And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis [Genesis 12:3], we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel. It is a strong and beautiful principle."

With insanity as blatant as this... what can I add?

(Except despair that this woman was actually ELECTED to office...)

Rick Perry's Record on Unemployment, Ctd.

2010-02-09T17:16:00.000-08:00

A quick follow-up to my prior post on Rick Perry's Texas Enterprise Fund: when I wrote that, I'd completely forgotten about the fact that Rick Perry had refused half a billion dollars from the 2009 stimulus package to relieve the Texas unemployment insurance program. His grounds, at the time, were that the bailout came with strings attached- requirements for Texas to reform its unemployment insurance program.

So, instead, Perry went to the feds not for a free handout, but for a loan.

And then another.

And another.

And now Texas's unemployment fund is $1.5 billion in the red.

And because of that, the Texas unemployment insurance tax will automatically triple in 2010 to make up the shortfall and pay the interest on the loans.

Way not to raise taxes, Mr. Perry. Good show of fiscal conservatism.

Thanks to 3horn.org for pointing this aspect out to me.

Torture: Is it Emanuel, Not Obama?

2010-02-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

This New Yorker article about Eric Holder's attempts to get a trial for Khalid Sheik Mohamed in civilian courts is fascinating reading, and I strongly recommend it.

But I want to focus on one little piece:

Emanuel viewed many of the legal problems that Craig and Holder were immersed in as distractions. “When Guantánamo walked in the door, Rahm walked out,” the informed source said. . . . But Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions. Holder authorized Durham to determine whether the agency’s abuse of detainees had itself violated laws. Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community. But Holder, who had studied law at Columbia with Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, was profoundly upset after seeing classified documents explicitly describing C.I.A. prisoner abuse. The United Nations Convention Against Torture requires the U.S. to investigate credible torture allegations. Holder felt that, as the top law-enforcement officer in the U.S., he had to do something.

Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/15/100215fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all#ixzz0f5gj78gX

So, the question is: is it Rahm Emanuel who has Obama's ear regarding torture issues? Is it Emanuel, and not Obama, who strongly believes that accountability is less important than getting along with the Republicans?

Both Rahm and Obama have records of bipartisan collegiality- Obama in the Illinois legislature, Rahm in the US House. Both probably share the same belief in the importance of good relationships with the opposition. (The problem, of course, is that the opposition put no importance in that at all- Republicans want all their opponents destroyed, and have never been shy about saying so since Nixon.) Given their mutual desire to "play nice" with the enemy, combined with Emanuel's reported hard-ass tactics against his allies, the fact that either, or both, would seek to protect their "friends" across the aisle from the consequences of their own actions makes sense.

If Obama is allowing Emanuel to be his Cheney- the power behind the throne- then the ultimate responsibility is still the President's. Still, it would be interesting to know if Emanuel's influence is the dominant factor in Obama's decision to block all investigation of or prosecution for war crimes, particularly torture.

Because Emanuel, at least, can be fired without an election.

The True Face of the Tea Party...

2010-02-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

As noted here, here and here, this past weekend's National Tea Party Convention opened its arms wide to the very worst the conservative movement in general has to offer.

If I quote, I'll end up quoting the entirety of both of the above links, so I'll just summarize:

THEOCRACY and ANTI-HOMOSEXUAL BIGOTRY: Judge Roy "Only Christians Have First Amendment Rights" Moore and Pastor Rick "I am a Christianist" Scarborough were prominent speakers; both bashed homosexuals, with Moore calling Obama's Gay Pride Month "elevated immorality to a new level."

RACISM: Tom Tancredo, longtime anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic politician from Oklahoma, advocated a literacy test in order to qualify to vote. (For those of you who missed this in civics class, literacy tests were routinely used to keep undesirables- especially non-whites- from voting in various places, mostly and most notoriously in the South.) "People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

And quoting David Neiwert's writeup:

But as always with Tancredo -- as with his audience -- the real motivation comes down to defending white culture:

Some things we can deal with in just a political way -- which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture -- and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don't!

[Applause]

That's who we are! That is who we are! And if you don't like it, don't come here! And if you're here and you don't like it, go home! Go someplace else!

CONSPIRACY THEORY: The publisher of World Net Daily announced his intent to keep pushing for the unveiling of Barack Obama's original long-form birth certificate.

And then, at the end, there was the truth-challenged, thought-impaired guest of honor, Sarah Palin, whose speech will likely be best remembered for its apparent call to abandon rule of law altogether.

Palin also ranked on at length about Obama's supposed weakness in the "war on terrorism," particularly in the case of the Underwear Bomber, who she believes should not have been allowed to "lawyer up." These attacks brought her some of her longest applause. Palin, like a lot of right wingers, seems to believe that the Constitution applies only to American citizens -- even though the Constitution itself is quite clear that it applies to anyone under U.S. jurisdiction.

And then they tell us that they're all about preserving constitutional values. Right.

Of course, the whole line of argument on the Underwear Bomber was really just an excuse to deliver cute lines slagging Obama:

Palin: Treating this like a mere law-enforcement matter places our country at grave risk. Because that's not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this -- they know we're at war! And to win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern!

Andrew Sullivan's critique:

It was and is pure sophistry - a string of crowd-pleasing slogans with no content whatever, except for an endorsement of a global war on Islam, tax-cuts, populist attacks on Wall Street, a subtle but scary attempt to politicize the military as belonging to one party, cooptation of one religion in America, and, with the exception of nuclear power (I'm with her on that) a desire for more carbon energy, not less (as long as it's developed in the US). She has literally no serious plans commensurate with the health care crisis and no intent to cut spending in any serious way at all.

But she sure can make a speech. It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

And to all this and more: applause. Loud, long applause. No dissent, no objections, merely overwhelming agreement to every last bit of it.

After his speech, a middle-aged female delegate with a twang stood up and said, during the Q&A, “All the media types are asking us why we’re here. Here’s what I say. We’re all here for a little R&R — revival and revolt. If you’re not a Christian, and a person of faith, you just can’t understand what we’re doing!!” She got a standing ovation.

Andrew Sullivan's summary of the event, and the movement:

So why are they really there?

They want their country back. That's what they tell us. I watched a CNN segment where one woman explicitly described Obama as Satan's agent...

This is about Christianism, permanent war against Islam, rounding up illegals (did you hear Tancredo?) and a culture war against the cities and "unreal Americans". Unreal means not Christianist.

Know fear.

He could have added, "Unreal means not white, not straight, or not in favor of an American global empire."

I don't think Andrew has ever lived in the South (at least, not farther south than Fairfax County, Virginia). And I say, on my own: this is how Southern conservatism has always been.

All my life, and long before, this has been the Southern way: blame someone else for what is wrong in society. Fear the Other, fear the unfamiliar, fear that which is not identical to us. Believe the worst of everyone who is not just like us. And, because We are Right and They are Wrong, never be afraid to force others into adopting our ways whether they like it or not.

Oh- and always give respect and obedience to your betters, and never question their motives or veracity.

It is this combination of fear, hatred, and mindless obedience to any authority that looks or sounds like the rest of us that has controlled the South, from the Revolution on down to today. It was obedience to the planter class, fear of blacks and hatred of abolition that brought on the Civil War. Fear, hatred and obedience brought in Jim Crow and lynch law after Reconstruction. Fear, hatred and obedience kept the Dixiecrats in power until, beginning in the 1960s, they began their migration to the Party of Lincoln.

It was fear, hatred and obedience that kept most Republicans silent as Bush and Cheney proceeded to gut America of everything Republicans claimed to stand for- fiscal frugality, international noninterventionism, moral authority on issues like torture, transparency in government, and support for the troops in harm's way.

And now fear, hatred and obedience are all the conservatives have left. The Tea Party, in all its forms, is a warning to Republicans: if you become different from what we are, we will hate you, fear you- and destroy you. The Tea Party has found new authority to follow- Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the most radical and insane voices of the right.

The Southern mode of conservatism has taken over. The Goldwater flavor is dead; likewise the secular conservatism of the old Northeast. Fear, hatred and obedience are all the conservatives have left- all the Republican Party has left, to be honest.

The last time such a combination succeeded in taking over a government, its leader wore a toothbush mustache.

Regulatory FAIL: cel phone bans don't work.

2010-02-04T08:07:00.000-08:00

A study of states where talking on handheld cel phones is illegal shows absolutely no reduction in car accidents.

The organization found that claims rates did not go down after the laws were enacted. It also found no change in patterns compared with nearby states without such bans.

Adrian Lund, the group's president, said the finding doesn't bode well "for any safety payoff from all the new laws."

Now, caveat: only six states, at present, ban handheld cel phones, so MAYBE the sample size is too small. Two of those states are California and New York, though- between them slightly less than one-fifth of the entire population of the United States- so I doubt it.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this?

(1) The law is unenforceable. Cel phones are just too ubiquitous in our society, and being able to talk on the road too useful for people to give up. It's just like speed limits on freeways; there aren't enough cops for strict enforcement, so they have to settle for targeting Mr. 100-MPH and leaving a hundred people driving 75 alone. In the case of cel phones, it means ticketing people after the fact- after an accident has already happened, or after they've been pulled over for some other violation (drunk/erratic driving, speeding, etc.).

(2) Cel-caused risks are overhyped. All the studies about the risks of driving while on the phone stem from laboratory conditions- where test subjects are deliberately put in high-risk driving environments where full attention is needed on the road, told to drive much faster than they're comfortable driving in such conditions, and then told, "Now talk on your phone while doing all this." This is like force-feeding a mouse a five-pound bag of sugar to prove that sugar causes cancer; you'll get the desired result, but it bears no resemblance whatever to reality. In reality, most people in a hazardous driving environment would DROP THE DAMN PHONE.

(3) The benefits of hands-free phones over handheld phones are overhyped. Those studies I just complained about all say the same thing: it is the act of conversation, not of having a phone in one hand, that causes the additional risk. Talking on a hands-free device is absolutely no safer than talking on a handheld cel phone- and neither is more risky than holding a conversation with a passenger in the car with you. Despite this, no ban on hands-free devices is seriously being contemplated- because nobody (except the National Safety Council, which has no vote in Congress or state legislatures) wants to give up entirely on mobile phones.

As you can guess, I believe all three of these possible explanations are valid, and you may take any of the three you like for yourself. Ray LaHood, our current Secretary of Transportation, has a different explanation- the typical explanation of Republicans when confronted with uncomfortable facts:

(4) The study is bunk.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood also has been campaigning against texting and cell phone use while driving. In a blog post Friday, LaHood dismissed the new study's conclusions as irresponsible and said the study will lead people "to wrongly conclude that talking on cell phones while driving is not dangerous."

"At this early stage in our work against distracted driving, no one should be discouraging strong nationwide efforts to make our roadways safer," LaHood wrote. "Unfortunately, a study released by the Highway Loss Data Institute casts doubt on the reality of this epidemic."

Bear in mind that LaHood would also like to see radios removed from cars and drive-through restaurants abolished.

For myself, I suspect the study is spot-on. The law can't be enforced regularly or evenly; the studies supporting it do not conform with real driving conditions; and there is no political will to actually go after the core cause of the distraction, which is conversation in any form. With these conditions unresolved, it's no wonder that banning handheld cel phones while driving hasn't done anything to reduce accidents.

Banning handhelds may make your constituents feel better, and might help your re-election campaign... but as highway safety, the first evidence says it's just another useless law.

And useless laws should either be fixed... or repealed.

What hope for change in Texas?

2010-02-04T07:56:00.000-08:00

In the last state legislature, the lower house was divided thus: 76 Republicans, 74 Democrats. (The state senate was 20-11 Republican.)

In 2011 the state legislature and United States House of Representatives districts will be redrawn, most likely by the state legislature. Current projections are that Texas will gain four- count them, FOUR- new representatives in Congress. (Those same projections show no other state gaining more than one.)

If the blatant gerrymandering rammed through by Tom Delay and Rick Perry in 2003 is to be reversed, then the Democrats need to take control of at least one house of the state legislature in THIS election. With national Democratic popularity plummeting due to the bungle which is the health care reform debate, this will be an uphill climb... but, given Rick Perry's own general unpopularity outside hardcore Republican circles and simple demographic shifts within the state, the Dems do have a chance to take two seats and win the state House.

Things like this do NOT help those chances.

State Rep. Terri Hodge, D-Dallas, pleaded guilty early this morning to lying on her tax returns in connection with the FBI’s Dallas City Hall public corruption investigation, an act that ends her 14-year political career.

Ah. So, Mrs. Hodge, you knew this was coming for quite some time. Yet you RAN FOR RE-ELECTION in one of those rare things in Texas, a safe Democratic seat. You waited until it was legally too late to get your name taken off the ballot before finally admitting, "It's a fair cop," and throwing in the towel.

Which means, Mrs. Hodge, your name is still on the ballot for the March Democratic primary, with only one Democratic opponent. If you beat that opponent, then the Democratic Party gets to name your replacement nominee...

... but the Republican Party gets to name a candidate, too.

Up to now, no Republican was going to run against you. But thanks to your attempt to hold on to power despite being caught in a corruption probe, you've opened the door to giving away a seat in the legislature that Texas Democrats absolutely, positively, definitely could not afford to lose- because the Dems can't afford to lose ANY of them.

Again, we need something else. We can't fight one corrupt party with another- it just won't work. A third party is desperately needed- and so far I don't see any viable options stepping to the plate.

GOP Committee Chairs Hate Term Limits They Enacted

2010-02-04T07:46:00.000-08:00

Back in 1994, the Contract with America included a proposal for term limits on Congresspeople. As soon as Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and their crew took power, of course, that pledge was thrown away- "How can I serve my constituents if I leave just as I'm getting things done?"

On one point, though, they fulfilled their pledge: they imposed term limits on chairmanships (or, if in the minority, the ranking party member) for Congressional committees. This was done not from idealism, but from pragmatism- it got rid of old chairmen so they could be replaced with people loyal to the lockstep, zero-dissent tactics Gingrich and DeLay used, and which the Republican Party has continued to use, to advance their own agenda and destroy any other.

And now even this feeble gesture to what Republicans claimed as an ideal is proving too onerous for them to sustain.

Texas Rep. Joe Barton, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee who would be term-limited out of a chairmanship, called the limits that apply to ranking members “counterproductive.”

“Don’t ask me to do a good job in the minority and make a rule that says you can’t continue to do a good job as chairman,” said Barton.

Leaving aside the fact that Joe Barton is a birther and a known nutcase even by Republican standards, he speaks for most of the ranking Republican members of various Congressional committees. However, fear not: House Minority Leader John Boehner has announced that some exceptions will be made to the rule.

Exceptions, he does not have to say, solely for Republicans who are utterly loyal to him, who are utterly in lockstep with his commands.

Irony: that a measure purported to help prevent corruption and abuse of power is being used by the party that enacted it to ADVANCE corruption and abuse of power...

More details on the Republican alternative budget...

2010-02-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I mentioned how the Republicans are seeking to destroy Social Security and Medicare.

Well, Paul Ryan has delivered the detailed plan- with some additional cute little touches.

Before we get into the details here, it's important to note this point:

The official line from House Republican leadership is that Ryan's budget is not the GOP alternative. Leadership aides pointed TPMDC to last year's far less specific budget proposal and stressed their plan will be presented during floor debate that is likely to happen this spring. Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, will write that plan too.

So yes, so far the Republicans are not OFFICIALLY backing this... but Paul Ryan is their go-to guy for budget issues. They specifically chose him for this task- and therefore what he produces is definitely their responsibility, and almost certainly their actual thoughts. Quoting Josh Marshall from the front page of TPM:

Now, Minority Leader Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Whip Cantor (R-VA) have been sort of dancing around the Ryan draft. They're both saying they're putting forward a detailed budget plan and then simultaneously refusing to say Ryan's plan is endorsed by the conference. But Ryan's their budget writer. So this is a bit like (White House Budget Director) Peter Orszag releasing a budget document and having Obama and (WH Chief of Staff) Rahm (Emanuel) saying he's just speaking for himself.

Exactly.

So, taking it as read that this is a serious Republican proposal until and unless the Republican leadership specifically rejects it, here are the salient points:

Social Security benefits will be reduced for those younger than 55, and the retirement age will be increased.

The budget plan states, "All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts. Those who choose the personal account option will have the opportunity to begin investing a significant portion of their payroll taxes into a series of funds managed by the U.S. government."

. . .

Another big cut is to Medicare - starting in 2021, new enrollees would be given vouchers to purchase private health insurance.

. . .

The plan . . . offers a mix of tax cuts as well as changes to Social Security and Medicare.

It also eliminates income and payroll tax exclusions for employment-based health insurance starting next year.

... limiting malpractice award settlements and rescinding the unspent funds from the 2009 $787 billion economic stimulus plan.

It also includes the same discretionary spending freeze (for 10 years) that Republicans mocked President Obama for proposing last week.

And Ryan's defense:

On Social Security, the Roadmap provides seniors with the option either to stay in the traditional government-run system or to enter a system of guaranteed personal accounts. Neither option is privatized. In the personal-accounts system, the accounts are managed and overseen by a government board -- not a stockbroker or private investment firm. People choosing the reformed system select from a handful of low-risk, government-regulated options -- just as members of Congress and federal employees do.

Yeah. The problem is, under Republicans the government board would be made up entirely of stockbrokers, and the regulators would be the same people who came up with credit default swaps. And, more to the point, the investment of Social Security WOULD be in private stocks, and revenue WOULD be dependent on how those private stocks do, and there WOULD be corporate middlemen taking a cut on the transactions.

So, if not privatization, the next best thing.

And replacing Medicare with insurance vouchers? Even if you could get insurance corporations to accept senior citizens without a legal mandate (which Republicans oppose), the vouchers would be for a fixed value- which means that, as retirees age and premiums inevitably rise, the vouchers would soon fail to provide enough help for the retirees to continue buying insurance. This undermines the whole purpose of Medicare- to provide health coverage for senior citizens who can't afford it.

And, of course, when the vouchers stop being used, Republicans will pare down that part of the budget, aiming towards an eventual elimination of the program altogether- have no doubts on that score.

And the other notable points?

Lower taxes for the rich, but a tax hike on people who get insurance as part of their employment package- in other words, higher taxes for working people, and ESPECIALLY higher taxes on union members.

Limits on malpractice awards- not just pain-and-suffering limits, but OVERALL limits, so if you are permanently crippled or require lifetime medical care because of a botched operation, TOUGH.

And, of course, a spending freeze for ten years, not just three as the President proposed- and was mocked for by the Republicans.

Let's recap. Republicans attacked health care reform for proposing $500 billion in "cuts" to Medicare- cuts that would come from eliminating wasteful spending, not in actual health care provided. Yet at the same time they propose a program that would inevitably lead to Medicare's total destruction.

Republicans want to balance the budget by cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on the working classes.

Republicans want to revive George W. Bush's privatization plan for Social Security- except Bush only proposed an initial 2% privatization, whereas this program goes much farther.

This proposed budget would actually eliminate the deficit... in 2060.

And yet the only way we could punish Democrats for their fecklessness on so many issues- torture, health care, financial reform, Israel, Iran, Iraq- is to replace them with the same people they keep caving in to.

We can't reward Democratic cowardice... but we can't reward Republican greed and evil, either.

We desperately need another option.

And Let's Not Forget Their True Goal

2010-02-03T10:28:00.000-08:00

It isn't about marriage.

It isn't about the "special bond between soldiers."

It's about outlawing gays, PERIOD. No quotes- just go read, and go watch the video clip.

Remember, the Republican Party as a whole- not just this one guy on Hardball- wants Lawrence v. Texas overturned and anti-homosexuality laws restored throughout the United States. If they can't get that, they'll do anything and everything in their power to make the laws punish people for being gay- keep them out of schools, keep them out of uniform, prevent them from marrying or adopting.

Anyone who says this is not bigotry is a liar. End of discussion.

Join the Futanari Army!

2010-02-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

Remember Duncan Hunter- possibly the flakiest of the 2008 Republican candidates for President?

He hasn't gone away.

Talking about the military, Hunter said, "there has to be a special bond there, and I think that bond is broken if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians."

Well, first and foremost: WTF?

Second: Really, what's the problem? Representative Hunter, you're going to have to do better than, "Because they're icky poo and they don't belong in our club," to justify keeping them out.

Third: transgender and transvestite I'll give you, to a certain extent... but hermaphrodites? Hermaphrodites, as separate from transgendered people? Are there really so many multi-gendered individuals in the United States that any particular soldier would be likely to encounter one in his or her whole LIFETIME?

(And I think, if there were, (NSFW LINK ALERT) WLP's comics would sell much better than, alas, they do...)

Seriously, Mr. Hunter, although sex is a major primary motivator of human beings, it's neither the sole motivator nor the most powerful. Just as most male soldiers do not rape female soldiers (although rape in the army IS much, much higher than in the general population, and needs to be stomped upon heavily), most gay or lesbian soldiers will not rape straights. In fact, in most cases gays and lesbians won't even proposition most of their fellow soldiers- because, just as straights are not attracted to absolutely everything of the opposite sex, so gays are not attracted to absolutely everyone of the same sex they encounter.

And I'm quite certain that any functional hermaphrodites of military age in the United States will be making far too much money in the porn industry for the military to be attractive, so Mr. Hunter can quit worrying about that, too.

(Note: Yes, there are genetic hermaphrodites, and people who are born with sexual organs for both genders. However, in virtually all cases one or the other set of organs is effectively nonfunctional- and quite often BOTH sets of organs are nonfunctional. And usually one set or the other dominates the development of the rest of the body- which means, with clothes on, such persons tend to look predominantly male or female. And all of these cases are quite rare, which means the problem of military service isn't all that likely to arise. Fully functional born hermaphrodites are rare to the point of myth- and surgically created hermaphrodites almost equally rare- which makes it all the more curious why Rep. Hunter is so worried about them in particular...)

The Daily KOS Republicans Poll: How Insane/Evil Are They?

2010-02-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

EDIT: DISREGARD THE CONTENT OF THIS POST. Since it was written, Daily KOS has not only fired Research 2000 and repudiated all the results of their polls, but have gone so far as to sue Research 2000 for fraud in their polling.

In short, the numbers below, according to Daily KOS, were made up entirely out of whole cloth.

And since my conclusions in this post were based entirely on these numbers, I doubt there's much of any value remaining in this post. So... ignore this one, and look at some of the others instead. - Kris

* * * * * * * *

I've said it repeatedly: the Republicans are the Party of Evil, the Democrats are the Party of Caving In to Evil.

Markos Moulitas, founder of the Daily KOS, commissioned the polling firm Research 2000 to poll 2,000 self-described Republicans. His goal: to demonstrate that not just the Republican elected officials, but the Republican Party base as a whole, was too stupid, too evil, too batshit insane, and too uniformly in opposition to the Democratic Party for bipartisanship to have any chance at all of success.

The results can be summed up in two words: overwhelming success.

The three frontrunners for the 2012 GOP nomination for President are Sarah Palin (16%), Mitt Romney (11%)... and Dick Cheney (10%). 42% are undecided.

39% of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached.

36% of Republicans are "birthers."

53% of Republicans believe Sarah Palin- whose lies are legion and whose self-serving nature abundantly clear- is better qualified to be President than Obama.

31% of Republicans believe Obama is a white-hating racist.

23% of Republicans want to secede from the Union.

There's more, but these numbers, as I've just presented them, are a bit misleading. There's a couple of vital points to the survey that deserve attention. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com points out one: that on most of the questions in the survey, there is very little variation in demographic tabs- men and women, different regions, different races, etc. The Republican Party is at its most uniform in makeup in history.

Of course, Nate's article misses the obvious reason, as shown in the demographic breakdown of the survey- the GOP is becoming a regional party. Research 2000 did random national calling, hitting pretty much every state... and, to get their 2,000 self-described Republicans, they ended up getting 846, or 42% of the total, from the South- the old Confederacy minus Oklahoma, minus West Virginia, minus Missouri, plus Kentucky. Twelve states, representing maybe one-quarter of the nation's population, make up over two-fifths of Republican supporters. Southerners dominate the Republican Party- and thus southern beliefs dominate Republican Party beliefs.

But there's something else to consider here, which Nate Silver missed. Markos Moulitas wrote the questions for this survey. With only a few exceptions, by the liberal viewpoint the questions have a right answer and a very, very WRONG answer. On such questions, the southern-region demographic tab is invariably strongest in giving the wrong answer. For example, on the question of secession, fully one-third of Southern respondents supported secession- with only 52% opposed. No other region broke 20% in favor, and all other regions were over 60% opposed.

More to the point, with most of the questions there is a large "don't know" response- usually in the double digits, often a majority of all respondents. That means a lot of Republicans might not openly give the outright wrong answer, but they're open to it- they fail to give the RIGHT answer.

So, instead of showing just how crackpot the Republicans are by showing the percentage giving the wrong answer, let's go down the list of questions in the poll for which one of the two options is quite definitely wrong (by liberal standards, if not by all non-Republican standards), and show just how little hope there is for redeeming the Grand Old Party.

Only 32% of Republicans believe Barack Obama should not be impeached.

Only 42% of Republicans definitely believe Barack Obama was born a United States citizen.

Only 43% of Republicans believe Obama does NOT want the terrorists to win.

Only 24% of Republicans believe ACORN did NOT steal the 2008 election.

Only 36% of Republicans believe Obama is not a racist.

58% of Republicans oppose secession.

Only 26% of Republicans support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Only 26% of Republicans support allowing homosexuals to serve in the US military.

Only 7% of Republicans support same-sex marriage; only 11% support allowing gay couples the same legal benefits as married couples, with or without marriage.

Only 8% of Republicans support allowing homosexuals to teach in public schools.

Only 42% of Republicans want sex education in any form- even abstinence-only- allowed in public schools.

Only 15% of Republicans believe that the Book of Genesis should not be taught in public schools as the explanation of how the world came to be.

Now for a run of good news:

76% of Republicans believe marriage is an equal partnership.

56% of Republicans believe contraceptives should be legal.

48% of Republicans believe birth control medication is not abortion.

86% of Republicans believe women should work outside the home.

So... a little bit of hope for gender equality, but otherwise pretty dismal- and I'm deliberately leaving out questions where the right and wrong answer is clearly debatable outside of Republican circles.

For my final point, let's go back to the demographics. It's no surprise that the elderly dominate responses- first, we already knew that older people vote Republican; second, this is a land-line phone poll, which skews to the elderly in any case.

But there are other things to note here. First and foremost is race. Nationwide, white/Caucasian/European makes up slightly less than half of the total- call it 45% of Americans are white.

89% of Republicans in this survey are white. Only 11% of Republicans said they weren't- and this category includes, "refused to state," which means that the total percentage of white Republicans is almost certainly higher than 89% in reality.

And if you look at the non-white response to the questions, you see some major differences with the rest. 80% of non-white Republicans are undecided as to a Presidential preference (Palin being their frontrunner at 8%). They're 41-31 against impeachment. 51% oppose the birthers. Two-thirds oppose secession. By 45-42 they favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. 31% oppose creationism in public schools. Only on issues touching on homosexuality does the non-white Republican response fall in line with the overwhelming white majority.

So there you have it: the Republicans are dominated by white Southern bigots and theocrats, profound in their ignorance, who basically regard anyone not like themselves as an enemy to be destroyed for that reason alone.

Nothing I haven't known for quite some time, of course, but Barack Obama doesn't seem to have learned it yet...

Israel- an apartheid state?

2010-02-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

Remember when we levied sanctions on South Africa for its racist apartheid regime?

Well, what will we do when Israel institutes it?

Defense Minister Ehud Barak's comments came in an address to a security conference north of Tel Aviv.

. . .

"The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic. ... if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

Technically Barak is calling for renewed peace negotiations... but only on Israel's terms, i. e. no ban on continued Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands. This is pretty obviously setting peace talks up to fail, by setting a condition that Israel knows the Palestinian Authority cannot accept.

And let's not forget Avril Lieberman, the openly racist minister of state in Benjamin Netanyahu's government. He's called for the forced expulsion not just of the Palestinians, but of all voting citizens of Israel who aren't Jewish. And Netanyahu himself is a long-time opponent of peace talks and advocate of a "hard line" approach to the Palestinians.

Barring a change in government- which won't happen for at least four more years, which is how long Netanyahu can postpone holding new elections for Parliament- we're either going to see an apartheid Israel...

...or, and I suspect this is much more likely, someone in Netanyahu's government is going to suggest a final solution to the Palestinian problem.

Will we continue to bow and scrape to everything Israel wants when this happens? Or will we, for a change, stand up for the American ideals we claim to believe in- the rule of law, equality, and justice?

GOP: Privatize Social Security, Abolish Medicare

2010-02-02T14:10:00.007-08:00

No, I am not making this up.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) appeared on Hardball... and advocated balancing the budget by privatizing Social Security and cutting benefits for those now under 55.

"You can get better health care and better retirement security if you go to a defined contribution plan. We had this debate in Social Security a few years ago," Hensarling said...

A "defined contribution plan" means the amount contributed to the plan on the front end is fixed. Social Security and traditional pensions are "defined benefit plans," where the amount paid out on the back-end is fixed according to a formula.

Throughout the interview, the congressman said Social Security benefits should be kept the same for those already receiving them, or those over 55.

"You mean cut Social Security benefits as a way of balancing the budget," Chris Matthews said.

Hensarling rejected Matthews' wording, but continued to call for privatization and reduced benefits for those under 55.

At the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has been getting a lot of attention (including shout-outs of a sort from OMB Director Peter Orszag) for his proposed budget plan. But Ryan's plan too harkens back to earlier Bush proposals, with a call for private accounts...

Yeah, I didn't trim much from that article, really. It's mostly meat.

Something needs to be laid on the table right up front: if George W. Bush had had his way in 2005, and partial privatization of Social Security- his so-called "Ownership Society"- had gone forward, then many if not most retirees today would have been utterly wiped out after the bankruptcy of AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, General Motors and Chrysler- to name the major names. Even if a particular retiree had managed to steer clear from these stocks- which in 2005 looked solid as Gibraltar- the market as a whole took a 50% plunge from January 2008 to February 2009, starting at a peak near DJIA 15,000 in 2007 to a low point of just under DJIA 7,000.

And the Republican response? Well, if you were irresponsible enough to not be rich, you deserve to lose everything.

Let's not have any illusions here: the Republicans are trying to ~~buy the Red Car so they can dismantle it~~ privatize entitlements so they can be killed entirely. Their end goal is to relieve the corporate employers who support them (and whose stock they own in significant quantities) of employer taxes to support these entitlements. Of course, if these taxes vanished, the money would NOT go to higher wages, no matter what Republicans tell workers about "it's really your money."

And, as the article shows, this is not just one Congressman. Even if it was just Jeb Hensarling, it would be more than just a lone Congressman. Hensarling was one of the very few people chosen by the Republican leadership to ask a question of Barack Obama in that disastrous (for the GOP) televised Q&A session on Friday. (He used the opportunity to basically give a campaign speech on how the deficit is 100% Obama's fault.) He is not a flake or a lunatic by Republican standards; he's a leader.

But it's not just him. It's also Paul Ryan, who has his own plan separate of and different from Hensarling's proposal.

And when there's two Congressmen in agreement on generalities but with different ideas on the specifics, it's a safe bet there's more than two.

And they're not lunatic at all for suggesting this. Consider a comment made to the article:

The 55 cutoff is about voting demographics. The 55-and-over demo is large, votes in high numbers, and votes Republican. Any "plan" that cuts benefits to that demographic is electoral suicide. A plan that preserves benefits for that demographic might not be rejected by those who won't get hurt by it.

This is 100% true. On average, nationwide, if you're over 55, you're Republican; if you're under 55, you're Democrat. And, as we've seen with so many other issues- torture, habeas corpus, healthcare, employment, etc.- if your ox isn't the one getting gored, odds are you couldn't give a rat's ass about what Congress does about it.

Another comment is a bit over the top... but not much.

{Republicans} HATE democracy. Ask Ronald Reagan, right? He said it. "Government does not solve problems; government is the problem."

Right?

We-e-e-ell, if We the People are the government, he is saying we can not solve our own problems but rather, we are the problem. And we must be gotten out of the way.

The full comment is an attack on corporatism, and it ignores the fact that there really are some things no majority democratic vote should be allowed to do. But the core of it is quite accurate: Republicans believe the rich should have power, the poor none... and they're working to make that reality.

Everybody Spread the Word, Too

2010-02-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

I'm writing the following letter to my local newspaper. I encourage all of you to do the same sort of thing. This really, REALLY needs to make the rounds. so that those who still advance the ignorant view that vaccines are bad for you have one less excuse for their position.

Dear Editor;

On Tuesday, February 2, 2010, the medical journal The Lancet retracted and disavowed a 1998 study conducted by Dr. Andrew Wakefield which claimed a connection between the mumps-measles-rubella vaccine and autism.

The Lancet retracted the study, originally published by them, for three reasons: first, that Dr. Wakefield had conducted his study in an unscientific manner, basically "cooking the books"; second, no subsequent study attempting to reproduce his results has been able to do so; and third, Dr. Wakefield's study was conducted in such an unethical manner as to inflict pain and suffering on children in such a way that showed callous disregard for their welfare.

Since Dr. Wakefield's study, over twenty other studies into a possible link between vaccines and autism have been conducted. None of them found any connection between the two. Dr. Wakefield's study was the sole bit of evidence to support that connection- and it has just been completely invalidated.

I write this to make certain that everyone in our community hears the truth- that there is no credible evidence to show that vaccinating children causes autism or any other lasting harm. Those who oppose vaccinations put their unfounded paranoia ahead of the health of their children- and other parents' children as well.

Vaccination is not merely the best way to protect your child from potentially deadly disease- it is the best way to push those diseases to extinction, as we have done with polio and smallpox. We can protect not just today's children but all future children from these diseases- if only we put unfounded fears aside and trust our doctors to know what they're talking about.

Sincerely yours,
Kris Overstreet

Obama's Job Bomb

2010-02-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

So: in this post I'm going to connect two recent posts: the review of Rick Perry's ~~handout to contributors~~ TEF money-for-jobs program, and Obama's killing the return to the moon and American spaceflight in the new budget.

The link for them is the $100 billion in Obama's proposed 2011 budget designated as his "jobs program." One link is obvious, but the other not so much so- but be patient, I'll get there.

So, we established in the Rick Perry piece that handing free money to employers and trusting that they'll create the jobs they promise just plain doesn't work. So, what's Barack Obama's approach?

Hand free money to employers and trust that they'll create jobs.

Leaving aside the simple fact that it doesn't work and has never worked, Richard Posner of the Atlantic spots the main flaw at once:

The Keynesian theory of stimulus is that if private demand for goods and services falls substantially below the economy's productive capacity, government can replace the shortfall in demand by increasing its own demand. It can buy roads and airports and military equipment with borrowed money...

The job-stimulus plan is not aimed at increasing demand, and therefore is unlikely to increase employment. For think: if a company is producing 1,000 widgets a year with a work force of 30, and it adds a 31st employee and thereby earns a $5,000 tax credit, the company's total costs will have risen by the wages and benefits that he pays the new employee minus the $5,000. But his sales will not have risen. Participating in the job-subsidy program will actually reduce his profits (revenue minus cost).

So... $30 billion... which won't increase the demand for jobs one iota, and which will almost certainly go into the pockets of corporations whose lawyers and accountants are best at gaming the system. This is one hundred percent wasted money.

And as Derek Thompson reports, we tried this before- under Gerald Ford:

After the 1973-5 recession the New Jobs Tax Credit gave firms a tax break if they increased total employment by at least two percent. The policy was too complex for many firms to apply, and later studies struggled to agree that the tax credit boosted jobs by a significant number. A Department of Labor report ultimately concluded that it was impossible to observe what hiring would have been done without the credit.

Really, I knew Obama was imitating Ford by effectively pardoning his predecessor for all their many and egregious sins... but isn't this carrying imitation too far?

But the aspect of all this that truly intrigues me is this: in order to fully fund Projects Constellation, Orion and Ares for return to the moon by 2020, NASA requested a mere $3 billion per year above current budget for the next ten years.

That adds up to... oh... $30 billion.

And that money, I might remind you, WOULD create a demand for jobs- people building the rockets and spacecraft, people designing the systems involved, people overseeing the launches and spaceflights and tests, and all the knock-ons that would involve.

(Oh, wait- Obama is adding $6 billion, spaced out over five years, to NASA's budget, mostly to extend the space station's life to 2020 and to encourage private spaceflight to take over from NASA. So actually, fully funding NASA would be CHEAPER than Obama's $5000/head new-hire tax credit... and would almost certainly create and protect more actual jobs.)

More of Obama Continuing the Bush Legacy...

2010-01-31T16:04:00.000-08:00

... this time in the drug war.

Remember when Obama said that it didn't make sense to expend federal resources on marijuana prosecutions in states that had passed medical marijuana laws?

Well, his new nomination for head of the DEA knocks that in the head- it's Michele Leonhart, who has been the acting director since 2007 and was assistant director since 2004:

...a career DEA agent who has been the agency's deputy administrator since March 2004 and its acting administrator since November 2007. That means she oversaw all those gratuitous raids on medical marijuana providers in California, continuing well into the Obama administration despite his promised change of course.

Last February The Washington Times reported that Obama planned to suspend the DEA's raids once he "nominates someone to take charge of DEA, which is still run by Bush administration holdovers." Leonhart was the most conspicuous and important of those holdovers. The Times quoted a White House spokesman who said, "The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind." Although that assurance did not, strictly speaking, constitute a promise to change the senior leadership at the DEA, that's the way it sounded. Now what? It certainly seems implausible that the hard-line drug warrior who was all for circumventing state medical marijuana laws when she was only the acting DEA administrator will have a change of heart now that her position is more secure.

But maybe she might moderate her position somewhat under Obama? Don't bet on it:

...it was Leonhart who overruled a DEA administrative law judge's recommendation that University of Massachusetts at Amherst scientists be allowed to produce marijuana for research, a function currently monopolized by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is more interested in showing how dangerous marijuana is than in exploring its medical utility.

And it's not just marijuana, as this follow-up article states:

She was also enthusiastic about the federal government's crackdown on raves, telling The New York Times in 2001 that "some of the dances in the desert are no longer just dances, they're like violent crack houses set to music." But the most disturbing detail mentioned by the Chronicle is Leonhart's steadfast defense of Andrew Chambers, "who earned an astounding $2.2 million for his work as a DEA informant between 1984 and 2000" but "was caught perjuring himself repeatedly."

. . .

Another Leonhart statement on Chambers is even more shocking, as much for what it says about Leonhart as for what Leonhart says about Chambers. "The only criticism (of Chambers) I've ever heard is what defense attorneys will characterize as perjury or a lie on the stand," she said, adding that once prosecutors check him out, they will agree with his DEA admirers that he is "an outstanding testifier."

That's right- Obama has nominated a law enforcement official who supports suborning perjury for the sake of a conviction- to the tune of, in one "informant's" case, over $2,000,000.

Today, friends, I really am not seeing the Change I voted for. Not an ounce of it.

Lincoln and Douglas are Still Dead

2010-01-31T11:32:00.000-08:00

I didn't watch the Republican gubernatorial debate the other night- didn't really feel a need to. I haven't decided for certain yet which primary I'm going to vote in- vote for the best Democrat or the worst Republican- but I already knew how I felt about all three of the people seeking to be the chief executive of Texas.

That said, the Houston Chronicle's account of the debate is a bit interesting.

Gov. Rick Perry spent most of the evening defending his promotion of the Trans-Texas Corridor, toll roads and the spending of $380 million to attract businesses to move to Texas. Perry said he would not have done anything differently during his nine years in office.

I hope the Democrats have THAT little clip in hand for their fall ads. "If you hated the last nine years of Republican rule, how about four more?" Or better yet, "If this man has his way, someday all Texas roads will be toll roads- including the street on which you live."

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison again tried to square her “94 percent pro-life” voting record with her support for the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. She also took the brunt of anti-Washington rhetoric.

Dead campaign walking. In this environment, nothing other than "the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth" is going to satisfy the radical right organization that the Texas Republican Party has become.

Hutchison restated her promise to quit the Senate no matter whether she wins or loses the governor's race.

So what's keeping you?

Please don't say manana if you don't mean it...

Activist Debra Medina had to distance herself from statements she made last year that if efforts to promote states' rights fail, the nation may need a “bloody war” of secession. Medina said she is against secession. She said she wants the state to be able to nullify federal laws...

So, you don't support secession, you just support the thing that led to secession a hundred fifty years ago.

Debra, dear, don't be ashamed of your pro-secession views. Rick Perry shares them, remember?

But very few concrete ideas were offered by the candidates on how to resolve a possible $17 billion shortfall in the state's budget over the next two years or how to pay for an expected $300 billion in highway construction needed over the next 20 years.

And this is the fundamental point of the debate. The Republican Party has forgotten how to even HAVE ideas. They've lost their brains and have nothing left but their campaign reflexes- fight, and fight dirty.

It's ironic that almost the only idea of any solidity came from the teabagger outsider, Medina:

She offered one of the more direct proposals of the evening: replace the property tax with increased sales taxes — even if that means the sales tax rate would have to go to 14 percent.

I actually ran with this as my main platform plank when I sought a seat in the legislature as a Libertarian, back in 2006. I still think it's not a bad idea, provided you make most necessities of life tax-free and provide some mechanism to ease the pain on the poor.

But it's not really a Republican idea, and never has been, because it requires that one tax be raised to offset the abolition of another. No mainstream Republican has the honesty to admit the need to do this; instead, it's "cut taxes" forever, and to hell with balancing the budget or maintaining minimum services for the worst off among us.

It's sad that a pro-secession, lunatic-fringe teabagger candidate appears to be the most honest and most sensible of the Republican options. It's also not a little bit frightening. Right now the empty suits like Perry and Hutchinson are the only things standing in the way of an open (and possibly armed) revolt by the people who Debra Medina represents. If they don't come up with better policies- or, more to the point, better candidates- then the old Republicans will sink...

... and something new, and much more savage and ruthless, will rise in its place.

Smart Politics: SotU 4th Dumbest in History

2010-01-31T11:24:00.000-08:00

Well, my title is a little misleading, but not much:

'Professor' Obama? President's State of the Union Address Notches 4th Lowest Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score Since FDR

Unlike the criticisms hurled at his predecessor, however, few have ever charged that the President, a former senior lecturer in Constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, has written or spoken too simplistically or catered his words to the lowest common denominator.

However, a Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama's speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President.

. . .

Bush averaged a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.4 across his seven State of the Union Addresses - or nearly two full grades higher than Obama's speech. Bush's speeches also averaged 2.4 more words per sentence than Obama, at 19.0.

In other words, the text of George W. Bush's speeches are expected to be understandable (in written form) by an average sophomore in high school, whereas Obama's speech should be understandable by a junior high school student.

(bold/italics theirs, not mine, for a change)

So, the point you're making is... Barack Obama is talking too stupid for the American people?

The author of this article must not be aware that, for some time now, there's been a game show called Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?... and nine contestants out of ten, the answer is No.

The Obstruction of Justice on Torture Continues

2010-01-31T10:54:00.000-08:00

The as-yet unreleased Office of Professional Responsibility on the torture memos has been altered to remove any claims of misconduct on the part of those who wrote those memos.

Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

In short: "You're really crappy lawyers, but you did nothing that was actually wrong."

Wanna bet?

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo... Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

This is pretty damn clear evidence of legal misconduct- ruling not on the actual law, but on what those in power want to be legal.

But Margolis- and almost certainly his bosses Holder and Obama, given this White House's acts thus far on torture- is deliberately ignoring this evidence. Instead he- and Holder, and Obama- have decided to protect those who ordered torture from any possible legal sanction. No jail time, no disqualification from public office, no impeachment in Bybee's case- not even disbarment for being crappy lawyers.

It is just barely possible that Margolis is covering his own ass in some fashion; he was an assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, and almost certainly the torture argument came across his desk long before this.

It's much more probable, though- especially considering how many times Eric Holder himself has delayed the release of this OPR report- that orders came from the top to ensure that, whatever came out in the report, those responsible for the torture of prisoners in American custody would be whitewashed.

These orders have been coming down since the very beginning of Obama's presidency, and there is no sign of any change of heart now.

	All Americans	Tea Partiers
Northeast	23%	16%
South	32	37
Midwest	22	19
West	24	29

	All Americans	Tea Partiers
Bush admin.	41%	16%
Obama admin.	7	19
Congress	24	33
All	10	15