US becoming more corrupt according to global index

This new survey is clearly bad news for the US and it will likely be flogged by the right to fit in with their already bizarre attacks on Obama. It's hard to argue against the key areas of corruption that are polluting the US though it's also not necessarily fair to blame the administration either. Without a doubt they could have and should have done more to increase regulation but the problems listed are more leftovers from the Republican era. Either way, we need to see an improvement though with the GOP takeover around the corner, we're more likely to move in the wrong direction.

Nancy Boswell, president of TI in the United States, said lending practices in the subprime crisis, the disclosure of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme and rows over political funding had all rattled public faith about prevailing ethics in America.

"We're not talking about corruption in the sense of breaking the law," she said. "We're talking about a sense that the system is corrupted by these practices. There's an integrity deficit."

Various financial scandals at state and city level had encouraged the impression that the regulatory oversight was weak and that influence could be bought, she added.

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UK economy at high end of expectations, but...

The budget chopping only just arrived, so these numbers are about to change rapidly. Also, it's fair to credit the last government with the last two quarters as the new Tory government had yet to implement any serious changes until now. The fact that the growth was also moving in a downward direction from the second to the third quarter should be a warning though traders are always looking for some small detail to pocket money. If only those trading benefits trickled down to customers, but that's not how the system works today.

The Office for National Statistics said Britain's economy grew 0.8 percent between July and September, down from the 1.2 percent registered in the second quarter but at the very top end of economists' forecasts.

Sterling jumped against the dollar and the euro and gilts tumbled as investors reckoned BoE policymakers would struggle to make the case for more monetary stimulus next month, even if growth is expected to slow sharply at the start of 2011.

"It's much stronger than expected," said Alan Clarke, UK economist at BNP Paribas.

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NPR receives bomb threat, suspicious timing right after Juan Williams is fired

The right wing hate machine is out in force this week, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's linked. After all, the GOP thrives on violent rhetoric - it's only a matter of time before their followers get the message. Read More......

FRC's Tony Perkins: Gay kids know they are 'abnormal,' that's why they kill themselves

This is the man the Washington Post, incredibly, gave space for an op ed on bullying.  The same man who for years has promoted the "Nazi" science of a known "hate group."  You now know all you need to know about America's religious right.

And no Tony, gay kids kill themselves because of people like you. Read More......

Man who stomped on woman's head is Rand Paul volunteer and multi-thousand dollar donor

Wonder if he's keeping the donation. Read More......

Hendrik Hertzberg: The 'mini coup d'état' that gave us Clarence Thomas

Citizen's United, the gift that keeps on taking, and its true fathers, Clarence Thomas & Antonin Scalia, can't stay out of the news. (Seems that this child has two daddies; who'da thought?) It will be interesting to see where all this ends up.

Yesterday I asked if one of those daddies had something he needed to confess. Since then, the calls for a reckoning have been a lot more numerous (I'll let you search them out for yourself). And Article III of the Constitution does allow for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justices:

Article III, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly states that a Supreme Court Justice that “lacks good behavior” can be impeached. This is not an ambiguous, subjective term. It has been interpreted by the courts to equate to the same level of seriousness as the ‘high crimes and misdemeanors” clause that unequivocally mandates that the House of Representatives initiate impeachment proceedings against any public official, or federal judge in violation of that provision.

In the process of that search, I ran across this excellent piece on Justice Thomas and Ms. Hill by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker — from 2007, on the occasion of the publication of Thomas's book, My Grandfather's Son. Hertzberg's title is appropriate: "A Cold Case". It starts (my emphasis, but Hertzberg's excellent prose):

Jeffrey Toobin has read Clarence Thomas’s memoir so you don’t have to. Not that you were going to read the book, but if you haven’t yet read Jeff’s sharp, lively, and deeply knowledgeable New Yorker review, you should—preferably in the printed magazine but, if you insist on digitally freeloading, here. You won’t come away from it any happier that Thomas—this strange, sad, humorless man, driven half-mad by a frightening combination of rage and self-pity—will probably be inflicting himself and his neurosis-based views on our national life into the 2040s.

It was obvious to me at the time of Thomas’s confirmation hearings in October of 1991 that Anita Hill was telling the truth about the nominee’s crude behavior during his time as her boss at the E.E.O.C.—Long Dong Silver, the pubic hair on the Coke can, and so on. A made-up story would have been both less weird and more damaging—instead of bizarre remarks, it would have featured wandering hands or worse.

"Half-mad [with] rage and self-pity." Nice qualities in a judge. After telling the story of the committee hearings, and telling it well, Hertzberg closes:

Thus ended the mini-coup d’état of 1991, and thus was made possible a more audacious coup nine winters later, when Associate Justice Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore.

Spot on, Mr. Hertzberg. Couldn't have said it better myself. Add one more coup to the list.

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Banks appeal order requiring disclosure, Fed won't join appeal

Finally, some encouraging news from the Federal Reserve. The banks are all about hiding details whether it's the money that they are forking over to the Chamber of Commerce or the details behind loans to troubled banks. There is absolutely no reason for the Fed to join this shameful appeal though it hasn't always been that way in the past. Now more than ever, we need transparency and the banks are against it across the board. They're terrified that their dirty little secrets will get out.

The Federal Reserve won’t join a banking industry trade group in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let the government continue to withhold details of emergency loans made to financial firms in 2008.

The Clearing House Association LLC, a group of the biggest commercial banks filed the appeal today. The Federal Reserve won’t file its own appeal, according to Kit Wheatley, an attorney for the central bank.

The banks are appealing a lower court order requiring the Federal Reserve to disclose lending records to Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News. A federal judge ruled in August 2009 that the Fed had to disclose the names of banks that borrowed from its emergency lending programs.

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Woman thrown to ground, and stomped on head, by Rand Paul supporters has concussion, sprained shoulder and arm

Stunning.  And note Rand Paul's not exactly "condemning violence" response this morning on - where else - FOX.

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Report: Treasury Department hid AIG losses

So the former President of the NY Fed who helped implement the bailout may have done his best to gloss over this ugly bailout that everyone hates during his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury? You don't say. Why would anyone ever create such a clear conflict of interest in what is supposed to be an era of transparency? It's almost impossible to expect any other end result in these circumstances.

The United States Treasury concealed $40 billion in likely taxpayer losses on the bailout of the American International Group earlier this month, when it abandoned its usual method for valuing investments, according to a report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“In our view, this is a significant failure in their transparency,” said Neil M. Barofsky, the inspector general, in an interview on Monday.

In early October, the Treasury issued a report predicting that the taxpayers would ultimately lose just $5 billion on their investment in A.I.G., a remarkable outcome, since the insurance company was extended $182 billion in taxpayer money in the early months of its rescue. The prediction of a modest loss, widely reported as A.I.G., the Federal Reserve and the Treasury rushed to complete an exit plan, contrasted with an earlier prediction by the Treasury that the taxpayers would lose $45 billion.

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White House threatens gay orgs before key DADT meeting - don't mention DADT ct cases or meeting is over

So much for that "charm offensive." I guess in the Obama administration, threatening your allies is about as charming as it gets.

Kerry Eleveld at the Advocate has obtained a White House email to gay organizations participating in today's high-level DADT summit at the White House.  The summit was hastily called as part of the White House's larger "charm offensive" to woo the left pre next week's elections.

In the email, the White House liaison to the gay community, Brian Bond, outright threatened our key national organizations that if any of them dare mention the DADT court cases - the ones the Obama administration keeps defending and appealing, even though they don't have to - the White House will immediately end the meeting.

Charming. Read More......

MoveOn woman kicked & stomped by 'Libertarian' Tea Baggers outside Rand Paul debate

It's starting.  The thugs are showing up at Teabagger events. Let's see if they can spin this as "disaffected loner" material — if so, this "loner" brought friends.

Thanks to Joshua Green at The Atlantic for this (h/t Ian Welsh, who wants their names published):

A Kentucky reader sends word that according to the local Fox affiliate, a young woman affiliated with MoveOn.org was brutally attacked--stomped in the head--outside the debate by a Rand Paul supporter [actually more than one].

Here's the local news video. It's short and to the point:



Thank God those were sneakers. Really ugly stuff. If a movement gives permission and makes excuses for violence, the result is violence. Willkommen.

(If you like, pay attention to how the Big Boy news handles this; watch to see if they walk too fine a line.)

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Duping Tea Party 'populists'

NOTE FROM JOHN: Please welcome Gabriel Arana, a new contributor to AMERICAblog and AMERICAblog Gay. Gabriel is a great writer, and we're very excited to have him join us as a regular contributor.  He is the assistant Web editor at The American Prospect and writes about gay-rights issues, immigration, education, and media culture. His pieces have appeared in The Nation, Slate, The Advocate, the Daily Beast, and other publications. He is a graduate of Yale University and a native of Nogales, Arizona.
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George Monbiot at The Guardian on the big money backstopping the Tea Party:

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related. ...

The Kochs have lavished money on more than 30 other advocacy groups, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the George C Marshall Institute, the Reason Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. These bodies have been instrumental in turning politicians away from environmental laws, social spending, taxing the rich and distributing wealth. They have shaped the widespread demand for small government. The Kochs ensure that their money works for them. "If we're going to give a lot of money," David Koch explained to a libertarian journalist, "we'll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don't agree with, we withdraw funding."

Most of these bodies call themselves "free-market thinktanks", but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt. The thinktanks that the Kochs have funded devise the game and the rules by which it is played; Americans for Prosperity coaches and motivates the team.

To me, this has always been the central irony of the Tea Party movement: Its members rail against preferential treatment for bailed-out Wall Street firms, but largely support a Republican party that has made this sort of preferential treatment for capitalist cronies -- the élites who profited even as they ran their institutions into the ground -- a central component of its platform.

Under Republican tax and trade policies over the last 20 years, income inequality has soared and, in the transition to a service-based economy, the manufacturing jobs that once supported the middle class have been outsourced. These developments have benefitted highly skilled workers in industries like finance, but have made life tougher for most Americans; wages for Americans have stagnated since 2000 -- for all except the very rich. Current frustration with the economy is understandable, but the Tea Party's answer is for the government to keep its hands off the Wall Street firms that steered it to the brink of collapse and engineered the broad structural changes that have made it much tougher to find well-paying work as a high-school grad in the Rust Belt than it was in the 1970s.

It's nothing if not incongruous to see middle-aged Tea Partiers rallying with Republicans against the bank bailouts and then hear that the bailed-out banks have sent the largest chunk of their political donations to Republicans. Read More......

Despite all the money, unclear if GOP side has an effective GOTV operation this year

I've been wondering about this for awhile. The GOP-allied groups have spent millions and millions and millions on t.v., but do they know how to turn out voters? That's unclear. I know how sophisticated the operation on the Democratic side is. In mid-term elections particulary, effective GOTV really matters. The Los Angeles Times thinks the Democrats have an advantage here -- and I think so, too:

With money and momentum on their side, Republicans are considered competitive in dozens of districts once thought to be out of reach. But races are tightening, and the voter mobilization program could determine whether the election provides better than average midterm gains for the GOP.

"There is a sense now that Republicans may not be able to capitalize on the backlash against [President] Obama and the Democrats because they lack the well-organized voter ID and get-out-the-vote effort that they have had in the past," said Lawrence Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political scientist who has been comparing the ground game of both parties. There is enormous variation now state to state, he said.

Democrats and allied groups are spending most of their $200-million political budgets in the largely invisible effort to turn out sympathetic voters.

The party was shocked to lose control of the House in 1994 in the so-called Gingrich Revolution. Since then, Democrats and labor have emphasized personal voter contact to win close races. In Pennsylvania last week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said his organization planned to "touch" every union member in the state 25 times with mail, phone calls and personal visits in the campaign's final weeks.

Meanwhile, there's no trust among the right-wing groups. In some places, they're not sharing lists.

With so much money being spent, pundits and politicos overlooked the failings of the RNC and the efforts by Rove and others to bypass that organization. But, the RNC was the hub of GOTV -- and now it's not:

For the GOP, this year's patchwork approach is a dramatic departure from the last decade, when a single well-organized entity — the Republican National Committee — ran sophisticated voter mobilization programs that were years in the making. But the RNC has faltered in funding and organization recently, and outside groups have stepped up efforts, many of them starting only recently.

If you want to help with GOTV, PCCC has "Call out the Vote" and MoveOn has a call from home program, too. Read More......

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Well, there's just one week left of the 2010 election cycle. What a wild ride. Early voting has been underway in several key states and everyone is trying to glean what that turnout means. Polls are popping up all over the place. I'm relying more and more on Pollster.com and Five Thirty Eight. Nate's numbers and predictions aren't nearly as fun as they were back in 2008. Taegan at Political Wire and the ever helpful Swing State Project are also providing a steady flow of good info.

Obama doesn't have much on his public schedule. He is meeting with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at 4:30 PM. In an ideal world, Obama would tell Gates that the DOJ is no longer defending DADT in the courts because Obama thinks DADT is unconstitutional. But, we don't live in an ideal world. And, Robert Gates is calling the shots on DADT. The White House, however, is convening a meeting on DADT with leading gay groups. According to Kerry Eleveld, the meeting is focused on "legislative repeal" and "senior White House advisor Valerie Jarrett and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina are expected to be present."

The Veep is out on the road campaigning today. He's doing an event with Rep. Tim Bishop in the early afternoon and one for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand later today. She's really emerged as a true champion for LGBT equality in the Senate and is sailing towards reelection. That's one bright spot on the electoral horizon.

Okay, one more week... Read More......