Get ready for the next GOP lie to defend the banks: The checkbook tax

The next lie that the Republicans will be using to defend Wall Street against reform has been revealed. From Greg Sargent via McJoan:

The Democrats supporting the current legislation have assured an anxious electorate that whatever funds are used to create whatever regulatory scheme created will come from the banks, not the taxpayers. Let me emphasize that so that even casual readers will catch it: the Democrats promise that you won’t pay for their legislation, banks will.

Really?

Since when have corporations ever paid taxes, fees or penalties? Employees end up paying in the form of lower salaries and benefits. Customers end up paying in the form of higher costs.

And in this case, every account holder will be forced to pay higher fees on their checking account and savings account. That’s you, my friendly reader. Can you say “checkbook tax”? I can, and I think lots of candidates will be saying it come November.

You'll be surprised to hear that it too is a lie. Read More......

South Park censors self over Muhammad

Ross Douthat in the NYT:

In a way, the muzzling of “South Park” is no more disquieting than any other example of Western institutions’ cowering before the threat of Islamist violence. It’s no worse than the German opera house that temporarily suspended performances of Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo” because it included a scene featuring Muhammad’s severed head. Or Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of a novel about the prophet’s third wife. Or Yale University Press’s refusal to publish the controversial Danish cartoons ... in a book about the Danish cartoon crisis. Or the fact that various Western journalists, intellectuals and politicians — the list includes Oriana Fallaci in Italy, Michel Houellebecq in France, Mark Steyn in Canada and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands — have been hauled before courts and “human rights” tribunals, in supposedly liberal societies, for daring to give offense to Islam.

But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.

In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Well, the radical Muslims actually kill people, so it's understandable why their threats are taken a bit more seriously. Read More......

Pelosi wants Obama to man-up on immigration reform

Apparently the President is relevent.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says President Barack Obama will have to lead the way on immigration reform if Congress is going to have any chance of passing legislation on the volatile issue this year.

In perhaps her sternest words on immigration thus far, Pelosi put the pressure on the president.

“As I said when President Bush was president, and I’ll say it when President Obama is president,” Pelosi said in her weekly news conference, “if there is going to be any movement in this regard, it will require presidential leadership … as well as the willingness to move forward in the Congress.”

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Wash Post: Gulf oil spill presents a political challenge to Obama's offshore drilling plans

Had the White House stuck to its guns, and kept to its previous opposition to offshore drilling, the current crisis would have worked to their advantage. Now I don't know what they do. From the Washington Post:

The oil spill, which occurred after an explosion on a rig operated by BP, threatens to highlight the environmental risk of offshore exploration -- a risk that critics have long warned about and that Obama tried to downplay last month when he announced the expansion of drilling.

In that speech March 31, he promised to "employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration." He acknowledged that his decision would provoke criticism from both those who decried the expansion and those who said it did not go far enough.

"Ultimately, we need to move beyond the tired debates of the left and the right, between business leaders and environmentalists, between those who would claim drilling is a cure-all and those who would claim it has no place," Obama said.

Now, the accident in the Gulf may provide more firepower to the critics on the left, who have for years lobbied presidents and Congress to keep in place federal moratoriums on further offshore exploration. Those moratoriums have now expired.

Now who's looking tired? Had the President sided with his friends and allies, with the people who got him elected, with his own promises, he wouldn't be in this mess. Read More......

Obama dampens hopes for immigration reform this year

First what the President said:

In a rare appearance in the press cabin on Air Force One, President Barack Obama sounded skeptical that he would sign comprehensive immigration reform this year.

Obama told reporters Wednesday night that he wants Congress to press forward with immigration reform but said he’s unsure lawmakers have the “appetite” to get it done and acknowledged it would be difficult to do without Republican support.

"So it's a matter of political will," Obama said. "Now, look, we've gone through a very tough year, and I've been working Congress pretty hard. So I know there may not be an appetite immediately to dive into another controversial issue. There's still work that has to be done on energy. Midterms are coming up.”

Here's the problem. When the President starts talking publicly about not being able to get something done, then it won't get done. You just don't telegraph these kind of things unless you simply don't want them to happen. It's difficult to understand what else is motivating the President since a strategy to win never begins with a public talk about how it's not clear if you can win.

Second problem, the President promised Latino voters that he would do immigration reform his first year in office. Now he's suggesting it won't happen in his second. And after the mid-term elections this fall, Democrats will likely have fewer seats, so if it can't happen this year, don't look to it happening next year.

It's health care reform all over again. The President stakes out a promise, then begins to publicly cave at the beginning of the process rather than at the end. If he doesn't have the votes, he should fight for the votes first - just like he did during the presidential primary. You didn't see candidate Obama telling the press that he probably couldn't win. He changed the dynamic, he fought, so that he could win. It's the exact same thing with legislation. You count the votes, then you fight to get more votes. You don't count the votes and then go public with your concerns that maybe you just can't win. It's not terribly smart, or presidential. Read More......

Midterms

Adam Bink at OpenLeft thinks Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic is out of line. I'm split between the two of them.

Marc:

The new Democratic platform does little to recognize this demographic. The party is getting annihilated among whites, even in states like California. Declaring that the Democrats are the party of accomplishments is one thing, but it really does not matter to swing voters in all those House seats straddling the Appalachian Trial, the industrial Midwest and the Rocky Mountain region that the U.S. is once again beloved in the world, that Obama is a man of science, or that he appointed a Latina to the Supreme Court.

Adam:

Shorter Ambinder: Lots of midterm voters think you suck and no message will dissuade them of that. And this is new how, exactly? No "message" in the world will reach some of these voters.

I, for one, am willing to see if the strategy Tim Kaine outlined as the DNC effort- reach the 15 million voters who registered and turned out for the first time in 2008- works. I think that's a much better idea than trying to find a "message" that will reach voters who are unlikely to support you, or governing from the start to try and make sure they support you.

The other thing I would say is that what all the how-to-win-the-midterms hullabaloo misses is this: to some extent, what happens in the midterms is out of everyone's control. Villagers use the public simply being in, as Mike Lux puts it, a foul mood about the economy, and the strong likelihood that Democrats will lose seats, to point to Obama and say "aha! Proof that the Obama style of governance, with its mommy-states and ethics reform and Latina justices isn't working!" I think that's reaching for a message just a bit too far.

Yes, by tradition we should lose seats this fall. And yes, people are ticked about the economy. But what they're ticked about in particular are GOP talking points that the Democratic, including the White House, never adequately responded to.

1. The stimulus was a waste of money we can't afford during a crisis.
2. The health care bill was a socialist take over of our medical system that won't help people like me.

Then we have the ancillary lies:
1. Obama has filled his cabinet his Maoists.
2. Obama is a socialist.
3. Obama is the most liberal president ever.
4. Obama is trying to do too much.

There are more lies, but those are the biggest that I can think of, and they're the ones that seem to most be ticking people off. And the top two, especially - stimulus and health care - exist because the Democrats refused to defend themselves forcefully enough.

Yes, people are ticked about the economy, but the economy would be doing better had we passed the stimulus that numerous economists said we needed, not the much smaller one the President pushed from the beginning. I know it upsets the White House to hear this, but it's true. And now the jobs recovery is flat, and people are pissed. So political moves absolutely have an influence on the public mood.

And finally, as for DNC chair Tim Kaine's strategy of going after newly register 2008 voters for the midterms, I'm not entirely sure that's the wisest strategy. I can't think of anyone more dispirited than people who voted for the first time, and who voted for fundamental change. They didn't get it. And they know it. That's a large part of the reason people are pissed. Read More......

SPLC on racist Arizona law: 'a civil rights disaster and an insult to American values'

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), one of the nation's most forceful fighters against hatred and bigotry, weighed in on the new Arizona law. Here's the brutally harsh assessment:

Arizona’s newly adopted immigration law is brazenly unconstitutional and will undoubtedly trample upon the civil rights of residents caught in its path.

By requiring local law enforcement to arrest a person when there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally, Arizona lawmakers have created a system that guarantees racial profiling. They also have usurped federal authority by attempting to enforce immigration law.

Quite simply, this law is a civil rights disaster and an insult to American values. No one in our country should be required to produce their “papers” on demand to prove their innocence. What kind of country are we becoming?

Good question. Read More......

Rumors about Obama more likely to be false than rumors about Bush

From Jed at DailyKos:

J.L. Bell runs the numbers on Snopes.com's database of internet rumors and finds out that President Obama has been the target of many more rumors than President Bush -- and that rumors about Obama are far more likely to be false than rumors about Bush:

After eight years in the White House (with Snopes.com around all that time), George W. Bush has been the subject of 47 internet rumors. After less than two years in office, Barack Obama has been the subject of 87, or nearly twice as many.

Even more telling is the relative accuracy of those stories. For Bush, 20 rumors, or 43%, are true. Only 17, or 36%, are false. The remainder are of mixed veracity (4), undetermined (4), or unclassifiable (2).

In contrast, for Obama only 8 of the 87 rumors, or 9%, are true, and a whopping 59, or 68%, are whoppers. There are 17 of mixed veracity and 3 undetermined.

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Increasing pressure for baseball boycott of Arizona

Robert McCartney in the Washington Post:

I vote to start with baseball, and I'm not alone. National and local Latino groups are actively discussing whether to urge people to boycott Arizona Diamondbacks games. One reason: Some of the team's owners are big donors to politicians who backed the bill.

They also want to move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Phoenix, and they might push to relocate the spring training Cactus League.

"Major League Baseball has been identified immediately as a major target," said Jeff Parcher, communications director of the Center for Community Change. "There's not only Latino players but also Latino attendance."

Arizona's been through this before. A conventions boycott pushed the state to resume recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1992. That was also the price for getting the 1996 Super Bowl.

Until reform arrives, we need to show Arizona how much its law offends us. My Washington Nationals schedule shows the Diamondbacks come to town Aug. 13 for a three-game series. I expect I'll have something else to do that weekend.

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Nevada GOPer Sue Lowden's chicken policy continues to dog her candidacy -- even GOPers are attacking

Sue Lowden's retro health care plan of using chickens as payment is still making news. And, it's become an issue for her GOP primary opponents. How could they not?:

Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden has seen her momentum slow in recent weeks as she has struggled to defend her claim that a bartering system — such as paying doctors with chickens — can lower the cost of healthcare.

Lowden remains the leading Republican vying to face Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), but her comments on healthcare have been widely ridiculed — including on late-night talk shows like “The Colbert Report” and the “Tonight Show.”

“Before we all started having healthcare, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor,” Lowden said during a recent TV interview on the Nevada-based program “NewsMakers.” “I’m not backing down from that system.”

The quote has left Washington-based Republican strategists scratching their heads — bartering is not part of the GOP’s playbook for attacking the Democrats’ healthcare bill. And it might have opened the door for her primary rivals to seize the nomination.

Yep, even GOPers in Nevada are attacking Lowden for this inanity. But, she'll still probably win the GOP nomination on June 8. I suspect we'll be hearing a lot about Lowden's chicken policy until November. It's just too good:
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Ben Nelson's excuses for voting against Wall St. reform met with 'widespread skepticism'

Remember how the DNC gave over $500,000 to the Nebraska Democratic Party to run ads on behalf of Ben Nelson after he voted for the health care bill last December? We broke that story here.

After Nelson repeatedly voted for the GOP filibuster of the Wall Street reform bill, lots of people started asking why. It sure seems that when controversial votes are on the floor, Nelson's vote is impacted by money. On health care, it was from the DNC. On Wall Street reform, according to the Washington Post, it's from Berkshire Hathaway:

Nelson has repeatedly said his objections center on the impact the legislation could have on businesses beyond Wall Street.

But there has been widespread skepticism on Capitol Hill about Nelson's public explanation for his dissent, and the bill's sponsor, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), added further doubts by saying that Nelson raised concerns about a provision concerning exotic financial instruments called derivatives.

That provision has drawn fire from Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha-based company of billionaire Warren Buffett, and Nelson's biggest donor over the past decade. (Buffett is a director of The Washington Post Co.)

Berkshire Hathaway or individuals associated with the company have contributed $75,550 to Nelson's campaign war chest since 2000, according to records filed through the end of March and analyzed by OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. One Berkshire company, MidAmerican Energy, also contributed $9,600 to Nelson's Nebraska Leadership PAC.

I still think the DNC should get its money back. Since that health care vote, Nelson votes against the Democratic agenda every chance he gets. And, there will be plenty of other races this fall that could use an extra $500,000. Nelson isn't even on the ballot til 2012. Read More......

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Well, the Senate Republicans caved. Harry Reid played hardball and the GOPers couldn't take the pressure. There's a lesson here. Let's hope the Democrats learned it. And, perhaps if the President hadn't been so conciliatory to the intransigent GOPers over the past year, he'd be further along in pushing his agenda. It's been painfully obvious to everyone outside the bubble of those buildings at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue that the Republicans had no interest in bipartisanship. Their goal has been obstruction -- and destruction of the Democratic agenda (although, the traditional media types sure lapped out that bipartisan BS. Patsies.)

It is fun to see the Republicans cry "Uncle." Let's see more of that. As the debate over Wall Street reform gets underway in the Senate, the GOPers will still be trying to weaken the law on behalf of their big bank benefactors. But, they'll have to do it in the light of day, not behind closed doors.

This morning, the President will deliver that eulogy at the funeral of Dorothy Height. She is a legend and really helped change America for the better. In the afternoon, Obama will honor the teachers of the year from across the country.

What else is on the agenda? Read More......