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Sunday, September 06, 2009

Right-wing thuggishness triumphs again

Posted by Jill | 8:17 AM

Isn't it funny how the Republican party embraces its members who buy into the insanity about Barack Obama's citizenship, and "death panels", and the rest of the dogwhistling that is really just code for 'ZOMG THERE'S A [insert your own racial slur here] IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!", while Democrats throw the targets of the insanity under the bus in a vain attempt to silence voices that will only be silenced when everyone is marching under their theocratic Banner o'Hypocrisy?

Now we have another casualty of the Obama Administration's craven willingness to sacrifice everything that got this president elected because the right-wing noise machine is upset. The White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, has "resigned". Gawker, of all places, has a good rundown of what the fuss is all about and how the fall of Van Jones emboldens the right-wing noise machine to attempt to silence us all:

Here's the biography of Van Jones: he was a bookish black kid from Tennessee who went to Yale Law and moved to San Francisco and became a radical. Then he decided to use his law degree and smarts to clean up and make things better from inside the establishment.

He was, he openly acknowledges, a "full-on Marxist" in early '90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality. Then he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which combats over-incarceration, police brutality, and urban poverty and violence.

Running a civil rights group dedicated to producing real and immediate improvements in urban life will make a revolutionary Marxist a bit more pragmatic. Jones began focusing on job creation, and, with a bit of prognostic intuition that ought to put Thomas Friedman to shame, he decided, in the late-'90s, to focus on "Green Jobs." This is, you know, capitalism—he wants to create wealth, and use market forces to make the world and black communities better places!

And in 2008 he wrote a book called The Green Collar Economy, and it made the Times best-seller list, making him as much of a figure of the mainstream as Sean Hannity or Malcolm Gladwell.

So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself "a huge fan of Van Jones."

And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he's a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he's beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.

And that is one of the reasons he is now being ritually and savagely demonized.

To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.

Go read the whole thing.

If you watched Countdown on Thursday and Friday nights, with Keith Olbermann's masterful skewering of Glenn Beck's tirade against the "socialist-fascist" artwork in Rockefeller Center that was commissioned by that great socialist, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, in the 1930's, you should have a good idea of what we're dealing with in Glenn Beck. The only question is whether Beck is really as utterly batshit crazy as he seems, or if Beck is the second coming of Andy Kaufman and this is all a kind of gonzo performance art that's gone completely out of control. But does it matter at this point, when the Obama White House has shown its complete willingness to dance to the tune of a party that has become now the exclusive province of racists, thugs, religious nutjobs, and other people you wouldn't want to run into on a dark country road?

Why on earth does Barack Obama care about what these people say? Is there something in the water at the White House that makes Democrats shut off their ability for independent thought and turns them into hapless slaves of Republican Mojo Mind Control? What the hell is going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Whatever it is, it's infecting the outside world as well. I was just listening to "Morning Edition" on WNYC and heard Leann Hansen say in regard to health care reform that "There doesn't seem to be a lot of support for a public option". And this is National Public Radio, that old supposedly liberal bastion. Either Leann Hansen has joined the ranks of Laziest So-Called Journalists in America, or the corporations that help subsidize NPR have given their marching orders. Or both.

The reality is that when polls are worded with the word "choice" (because Americans are too damn stupid to know that "option" and "choice" are the same thing), support for the "public option" is at 77 percent. So is Leann Hansen saying that most Americans don't want a public option but they do want the choice of a public plan? What the hell is the difference? And why is Leann Hansen parroting this GOP talking point? Why is it that among the journalistic community, only Sam Stein, reviled by the Washington Press Weenie-Nibblers as being not a real journalist, has the gray matter in his head to point this out?

So now we have a Democratic Administration and Democratic Congress that has told its own foot soldiers to go fuck ourselves while it dances to Glenn Beck's tune.

Labels: Barack Obama, despair, right-wing hatemongers, spinelessness, utter horseshit, wussy-ass Democrats

7 comments

Friday, September 04, 2009

Attention U.S. Senators: This is how it's done

Posted by Jill | 6:53 PM

I wish Al Franken were my Senator:

Now maybe the teabaggers in this crowd were more inclined to listen to Al Franken because he's a celebrity. But the fact of the matter is that Al Franken, whom no one took seriously and everyone thought was a clown, had a serious conversation with people who were all prepared to disagree with him. He was prepared, he told them FACTS, he did it in a way anyone can understand, and while he might not have converted anyone, at least he made them think.

Al Franken may just be our next Lion after all.

Labels: Al Franken, health care

4 comments

Why Every Republican Ought to be Made to Sit In the Waiting Room of a Harlem Free Clinic

Posted by jurassicpork | 5:17 PM

This is what it comes down to: Our elected lawmakers, starting with the so-called Gang of Six (renamed "the Bipartisan Six", as if they were the heroes of a bad Yul Brynner movie) are eating filet mignon with asparagus spears and almonds, scalloped potatoes and baked Alaska and are arguing over the cost of the cat food they're planning on giving the rest of us.

But Republicans, because they're feeling the stings on their jiggling backs from their corporate whip masters who are bombarding Congress with an average of 6 lobbyists per congresscritter, are especially egregious and hypocritical because they've been been going to Bethesda Naval Hospital on the sly while decrying the inefficient way that the government runs health care. Of course, as those of us in the know know, it has nothing to do with smaller, less intrusive government and all that Republican populist bullshit. They have incumbency at stake and those who are owned by these insurers and Big Pharma (which is to say all of them) know damned good and well they have tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions at stake if they drop the ball on this one.

Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post makes a good point but he's wrong about one thing: The government didn't fuck up health care at Walter Reed. Most of the care given to our troops at Walter Reed is top-notch except in places such as Building 18. Where the government fucked up as far as Walter Reed goes was in outsourcing patient care to private industry (including Bush cronies), which right then and there gives you another reason to distrust the private sector and to renew a call for a single payer system, perhaps an all-encompassing expansion of Medicare.

But we'll never see a universal, single payer system. We'll never see an all-encompassing expansion of Medicare, despite the fact that doing so would greatly streamline and simplify a Gordian Knot of compromises (including secret White House deals with Big Pharma just to get their tacit approval) that are solely intended to keep the HMO's on the gridiron, despite the fact that the administrative costs for Medicare is only 3.6% instead of the 30-50% that we see in the private sector (largely because we give them through our premiums, co-pays and huge deductibles the means with which to pay $1.4 million a day in lobbyist fees).

Congress likes what it has and they have no intention of sharing that which we gave to them by electing them in the first place. So while they enjoy their 5 star bill of fare on fine china and crystal plates, the rest of us are left wondering if it'll be Fancy Feast or just 9 Lives in a crusty bowl for the next 60 years.

0 comments

Someone will become Senator from Massachusetts. Who will become the liberal lion of the Senate?

Posted by Jill | 5:25 AM

I keep getting weepy over the death of Ted Kennedy. It isn't that I'm one of those Kennedy cultists. I happen to come from perhaps the only home in America that had liberal parents in the 1950's and 60's who never forgave John Kennedy for defeating THEIR chosen political deity, Adlai Stevenson. But I keep going back to Kennedy thundering "What is it about working people that drives you so crazy?" In doing so, Kennedy ripped the façade off the empty Republican blather about "ordinary Americans." It's as if someone had the guts to point out that in using the words "kill" and "Obama" in the same sentence, Republicans were advocating the murder of the President. I'm not so sure that had Kennedy still be around, he wouldn't have done that. But I look around and I wonder which of the genteel milquetoasts who populate the Democratic side of the Senate is going to have the guts to do this? Who is out of the pockets of lobbyists enough to take over?

Oh, there are Democrats whose hearts are in the right place; people like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Barbara Boxer, and a few others. Perhaps Al Franken may rise to the occasion, though Franken is far less liberal than those who demonized him when he was doing the "Oy Oy Oy Show" on Air America would believe. And so far Franken has taken his status as most junior member of the Senate quite seirously, not rocking the boat. It's hard to imagine him becoming the next Paul Wellstone, but it's too early to say.

One candidate for Lion that I'll be watching is Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Now I have to admit, I was skeptical about Brown for quite a while, after Chuck Schumer and yes, Rahm Emanuel, tag-teamed to strongarm the highly charismatic Paul Hackett out of the race that put Brown in the Senate. It was an ugly start to Brown's Senate career, given that he'd said he wouldn't run and then changed his mind, with the help of Messrs. Schumer and Emanuel, after Hackett decided to run. But lost in that whole foofarah, which was in many ways an indication of how Emanuel "does business" and how he is so able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, is that Brown had, and still has, a reliably liberal voting record.

Brian Buetler at TPM reports on a conversation he had with Sherrod Brown this week, in which Brown doesn't unequivocally say that he would vote against a bill that's simply a windfall for insurance companies, but he did get to the crux of the matter:

"I don't know for sure if I would support it with out a public option but it would be hard to get there.... We're not going through this to write some namby pamby bill so we can check a box and say we did health care reform."

Now all that said, Sherrod Brown is no Ted Kennedy. For one thing, he comes across as not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. For another thing, at times he has a disconcerting facial resemblance to the most recent former occupant of the White House. For a third thing, as one wag noted, his speech cadences are often more reminiscent of Billy Mays than of Ted Kennedy:

Perhaps Brown seems like pretty weak soup after the thundering oratory of Ted Kennedy and that of that other warhorse of the Senate, Robert Byrd (cue Barry or someone like him to post a comment about Robert Byrd's long-ago KKK association, which he has long since repudiated; yes, he's that predictable). But I'm not sure they even make orators like that anymore. The question is whether Sherrod Brown or Al Franken or someone else will pick up the mantle of liberalism not as something to be ashamed of, but as something that brought most of the programs that Americans, even though currently shrieking at Town Halls about "Obamacare", like and take for granted.

Labels: Senate, Sherrod Brown

5 comments

Thursday, September 03, 2009

We Are All Flounder Now

Posted by Jill | 5:24 AM

Labels: Barack Obama, health care

3 comments

What about health care reform is so hard to understand?

Posted by Jill | 5:15 AM

This guy from Iowa explains it all in a way even white guys should be able to understand:

(h/t)

Labels: health care

4 comments

Government By Leak

Posted by Jill | 4:43 AM

We're starting to see a troubling trend coming from the Obama administration. It's a trend of floating trial balloons that they must know are going to infuriate the Democratic base -- you know, those people who provided those millions of dollars in individual contributions and the shoe leather to get Barack Obama elected -- followed by a denial that the trial balloon is true.

We saw that Wednesday, when Politico reported that President Obama was backing off from insistence on a public health insurance option in an attempt to gain Republican support that anyone with half a brain who is paying any attention is simply not gainable.

As John Amato said yesterday in a post you simply must read, "I didn't vote for Rahm Emanuel, did you?" But Rahm Emanuel is what we've got. It almost seems as if Rahm is Obama's Karl Rove. He might not be Obama's brain, but he's Obama's spine, and unfortunately that spine is in thrall to corporate interests, not to the actual citizens who voted this Administration into office. Just as Rove used George Bush's insecurities about his manhood to manipulate policy, so does Rahm use Obama's issues about playing nicey-nice with everyone to serve his own corporate masters.

Now it seems that someone in the Administration read enough blogs yesterday to know that Barack Obama will lose one hell of a lot of foot soldiers in 2012 if he caves on the public option, for the New York Times today indicates that it's not dead (yet):

Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.

But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.

Anyone paying any attention at all knows that the proposal WILL be jettisoned, because Democrats want their cash bribes from health insurers in their re-election coffers just as much as Republicans do. But once again, we're seeing the Democrats showing their weak hand and their willingness to be rolled by a party which was resoundingly repudiated in the last election.

It's hard to imagine how anyone could think, after all the subliminal dog-whistling Republicans are doing to their constituents by using the words "kill" and "Obama" in the same sentence, that any Republicans, even Olympia Snowe, are going to negotiate on good faith. Barack Obama and Senate Democrats have shown themselves to be wusses who can be rolled simply by threats. They are reminding me of that Family Guy episode in which Chris becomes part of the Cool Kids Club at school because the prettiest girl in school is pity-dating him. They think they're going to be accepted, but they never will be. The question, as it is in any high school, is just who anointed the Cool Kids and what on earth have they done, short of intimidating and bullying everyone else, to earn such bowing and scraping.

On Wednesday, Dan Savage came about as close as we've seen to pointing out how Republicans don't just want health care dead, they want Obama dead, and the Democrats have to (quoting Michelle Bachmann) man up and find their spines:

Indeed. If Obama thinks he can do business with people like this, then he's delusional.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democratic sellouts, health care, Rahm Emanuel, spinelessness

2 comments

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Somehow I think the name "Lori Klausutis" will never come up if he does

Posted by Jill | 5:17 AM

Andy Ostroy thinks Joe Scarborough is going to run for president:

The ever-shrinking right-wing-nutjob base can have Sarah Palin. My early money for the Republican Party's next presidential nominee is MSNBC pundit and former Florida congressman Joe Scarborough.

In case you haven't noticed, this Joe has been more ubiquitous lately than a cup of Starbucks Java on a New York morning. He's everywhere these days, all dressed up (suits vs fleece) with only one place he'd probably love to go: the White House. And if he plays his cards right, he could give President Barack Obama a very difficult challenge in 2012.

Andy could be right. I'm not convinced that Joey "Dead Girl in Office" the Scar is planning a run, but he could find himself under pressure to run, because he puts a friendly face on extreme wingnuttia, and he's had a nice 3-hour daily forum from which to work.

Of course, if Scarborough does decide to exchange the cushy life of a pundit for the equally cushy life of being a Republican president with a lot of friends in the media, I'm sure that one thing we WON'T be hearing is questions about the dead intern found in his Florida office during that summer of 2001, when everyone else was obsessed with the dead girl who was linked to Gary Condit.

Labels: Joe Scarborough

4 comments

Before it's all over they'll have people believing that 9/11/01 occurred on Bill Clinton's watch

Posted by Jill | 4:45 AM

And perhaps they'll even have the teabaggers believing that George W. Bush was never president; that we morphed somehow right from Bill Clinton from Barack Obama. How that's going to fit together with the Golden Reign of Dick Cheney, I have no idea, but I'm sure they'll find a way.

In the wake of the WSJ editorial echoing the longing of the right to have Biggus Dickus run for President in 2012 (with its accompanying longing for a nice attack on this country in order to help the effort along), Olbermann poked the appropriate fun at the whole idea on Countdown last night:

(Fellow Morning Sedition fans will find themselves wondering if the "Jonathan Larsen" credited as the writer of the mock ad is the same Jonathan Larsen who used to produce the late and lamented morning radio show.)

Chris Kofinis may have been beside himself with laughter, but I'm not sure you can discount the idea. George Bush liked the trappings of power, but when the going got tough, he started wanting to just go home and hit the bottle again. But Cheney needs power; he needs the power to implement wars and commit enough mayhem so that enough people die to fill the black hole in himself which he needs to keep stocked at all times with fresh human souls. And with the Republican field right now seemingly limited to a boring and undistinguished governor of Minnesota, the Pillsbury Doughboy's evil twin, and two insane women, I wouldn't count Cheney out.

Cheney's "We kept this country safe after 9/11" meme is insulting to those of us with half a brain. There's no longer any hiding that Richard Clarke and others were trying to get the Bush Administration to take seriously the threat of another attack. We all know now about the Presidential Daily Briefing that made pretty clear that something was about to happen. We all know about the curious coincidences in the days before the attacks that have kept conspiracy theorists hopping ever since. There's no legitimate excuse Cheney can make for these attacks playing out the way they did. And yet there is such hunger on the right for a stern, authoritarian father figure that they are eager to have Cheney come out from the hole under the stairs even during the day just to rescue their country from Scary Negroes™ and others who don't think authoritarianism is synonymous with freedom.

I think it's premature for Olbermann and Kofinis to be laughing, though. Because if the economy does not improve; if health care reform turns out (as I fear it will) to be nothing but a mandate to buy crappy insurance from companies who won't pay claims and $4000 in tax increases for every family with family coverage through their jobs as they are taxed on the entire value of the premiums; if there are still no jobs and if foreclosures are rampant, Americans would vote for Satan himself. And in Cheney, they just might get their chance.

Labels: Dick Cheney

0 comments

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Always Something There To Remind Me

Posted by Tata | 1:11 PM

Every so often, you read something heartwarming that also pisses you off.

Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. In the gilded haste of the past decade, bankers handed out millions of mortgages — with terms good, bad and exotically ugly — then repackaged those loans for sale to investors from Connecticut to Singapore. Sloppiness reigned. So many papers have been lost, signatures misplaced and documents dated inaccurately that it is often not clear which bank owns the mortgage.

Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.

“If you are going to take away someone’s house, everything should be legal and correct,” he said. “I’m a strange guy — I don’t want to put a family on the street unless it’s legitimate.”

Grr. Grr! I love this man.

Last year, he chastised Wells Fargo for filing error-filled papers. “The court,” the judge wrote, “reminds Wells Fargo of Cassius’s advice to Brutus in Act 1, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”

Where do I send my gooey fan letter?

“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”

Aw, crap.

A spokeswoman for OneWest Bank acknowledged that an official, confronted with a ream of foreclosure papers, had mistakenly signed for two different banks — just as the Deutsche Bank official did. Deutsche Bank, which declined to let an attorney speak on the record about any of its cases before Justice Schack, e-mailed a PDF of a three-page pamphlet in which it claimed little responsibility for foreclosures, even though the bank’s name is affixed to tens of thousands of such motions. The bank described itself as simply a trustee for investors.

Why is the NYTimes profiling this guy? Is this love letter penned in poison ink?

The judge burrowed into property record databases. He found banks without clear title, and a giant foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, representing two sides in a dispute. He noted that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, made more than $11 million in 2007 while the company’s total returns fell 12 percent.

“Maybe,” he advised the bank, “counsel should wonder, like the court, if Mr. Stumpf was unjustly enriched at the expense of W.F.’s stockholders.”

If something happens to this guy, all of Wall Street should be fingerprinted.

1 comments