It's not elitism. She's a witch. (And almost a Hare Krishna.)

The fact that people have issues with Christine O'Donnell's fitness for office is not elitism, it's reality. The woman is a nutjob. And the fact that Huckabee, who woos conservative Christians, doesn't have a problem with a woman who had a date on an altar that had some blood on it.... tell that to family values voters, Huck, that it's elitist to oppose witches who have dates on blood-stained altars. Then see if you get to be President.

The larger problem here is that the modern GOP simply has no standards, other than if you're intelligent, you're not welcome. Read More......

Cat attempts suicide after being dressed up in Halloween costume

Watch the entire video.
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AP-GfK Poll: One-third may still switch candidates

From what I read earlier today, usually folks who are undecided this late in the game, vote for the challenger. And with the Democrats defending far more seats than the Republicans, that doesn't bode well for our party.

AP:

One in three people has yet to lock onto a choice in the Nov. 2 congressional elections, according to an Associated Press-GfK Poll. Yet in this year of the fed-up voter, even these folks offer little hope to Democrats.

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Obama administration suddenly realizes that the bad guys are, um, bad

Glad to see it. Let's hope this spills over into other policy areas as well.

The Obama administration, facing a vexed relationship with China on exchange rates, trade, and security issues, is stiffening its approach toward Beijing, seeking allies to confront a newly assertive power that officials now say has little intention of working with the United States.

In a shift from its assiduous one-on-one courtship of Beijing, the administration is trying to line up coalitions — among China’s next-door neighbors and far-flung trading partners — to present Chinese leaders with a unified front on thorny issues like the currency and its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

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David Corn: How Obama lost the narrative

Great piece from David Corn, looking at what went wrong for the Obama administration that the voters are so angry. David's piece could have been written by Joe and me.

It wasn't just what Obama did, but how he did it. The president forfeited control of the narrative—as they like to say in Washington—because he blew several specific opportunities.

SIZE MATTERS. The "original sin of the Obama administration," says former labor secretary Robert Reich, "was to make the stimulus too small while giving out too much of it as tax breaks to businesses." By most estimates, the stimulus saved or created about 3 million jobs, but it did not keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent, as the White House had projected (PDF). A stimulus twice the size would probably have generated about twice the benefits, notes Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, meaning unemployment might actually have dropped to near 8 percent, and GDP growth would have been 3.4 percent or higher. Instead, the low visibility of the results provided Republicans an opening to dismiss the stimulus (which to some voters may have become conflated with the TARP bailout) as wasteful. They had an easy line of attack: You spent nearly $800 billion, and unemployment is higher than you said it would be. In the absence of a stronger case from the administration, the assault resonated with large swaths of the public.

White House aides—and my colleague Kevin Drum—will say that Obama obtained the biggest stimulus he could, given GOP opposition. But the president need not have accommodated his foes so readily. "He could've demanded more, and settled for less," says a senior Senate Democratic strategist. That would have at least established a useful story line: For more recovery, we need to do more. Instead, Obama was left hailing a stimulus that didn't do enough.

He goes on to explain the health care and financial reform debacles. Must reading. Read More......

Poll: Independents siding with Republicans

But are they really? These answer sound like they could have given by any Democrat I know.

On health care: 62 percent of independents hold an unfavorable view of the new law (compared to 52 percent overall). Only six percent of independents view the legislation very favorably.

On the economy: 66 percent of independents say the recovery legislation is not working (compared to 57 percent overall). The percentage saying the “stimulus” is not working spiked 12 points since Labor Day.

On the question of governance overall, 69 percent of independents say they have less faith in government now than they did just before Obama was elected. (See: Biggest campaign spending day yet).

Many of the independents who fell out of love with Obama have not fallen in love with Republicans: only 30 percent of independents think Republicans have offered more specific solutions than Democrats this year (compared to 39 percent in the full survey).

“Concerned” best describes the electorate’s sense about the country’s trajectory. It’s the word 34 percent of respondents picked to describe their mood. While 26 percent say they’re hopeful, a third said they’re frustrated or angry.

Right, health care reform is a negative because it's not doing what Obama promised. The stimulus isn't working well enough because Obama didn't ask for the amount he should have known we needed. I have less faith in government now than I did when the President was elected. And you'd better believe I'm "concerned" about the course of the country.

I'd written a long time back that the danger of the GOP being taken over by crazy people is that at some point the public will get fed up with Democrats and vote for the only alternative out there: Crazy Republicans. And that's in fact what's happening, IMHO. It's not just the economy, and it's not just the outside spending. The GOP is spinning a lie, to be sure, and the Democrats aren't fighting back nearly hard enough against that lie. But at its core, the President and the Congress didn't fight for what they promised, what they knew was needed - and normal people (i.e., not traditional Republican voters who think Obama is a socialist) aren't happy about it. Read More......

WaPo: Tea Party 'is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings'

Now there's a shocker.

[A] new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

The results come from a months-long effort by The Post to contact every tea party group in the nation, an unprecedented attempt to understand the network of individuals and organizations at the heart of the nascent movement.

Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

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McConnell says top priority for GOP congress is to make Obama a one-term president

That's always been their top priority. But it's nice of them to finally admit it. The White House spent two years reaching out to people who want to destroy them, and still want to destroy them. And, to ice the cake, the public doesn't even realize that Obama bent over backwards for the GOP, and watered down some of his most significant campaign promises for them (and for conservative Democrats).

It should raise the question as to whether such efforts were worth it, and, if you're going to get blamed for being partisan anyway, perhaps you should make the best of it and take the bastards on.

Of course, I suspect the White House already thinks it takes the GOP on on a regular basis.  And there's the rub.  Not only are they afraid to fight, they don't seem to understand the overall concept of what constitutes fighting back.  Hint: It's not giving a speech and amping up the ire from zero to 1 on a scale of 100.

Here's McConnell:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

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The unasked question—Did Clarence Thomas perjure himself in his confirmation hearing?

With all the Clarence Thomas news and counter-news, there's an unasked question in the air. Did Clarence Thomas perjure himself at his congressional confirmation hearing?

I'm not asking this to be provocative, though provocative it is. And I know the question is not new; it was asked at the time of his confirmation. But in light of new revelations, the question at least has to be acknowledged.

To review:

First, Movement Conservative activist Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calls Anita Hill to ask for Hill to apologize for, and explain, "why you did what you did with [sic] my husband." The request is left on Hill's answering machine.

To clarify, what Anita Hill did was accuse Clarence Thomas, under oath at his 1991 judicial confirmation hearing, of sexual harassment, and then offer specifics. Thomas, also under oath, denied the charges. What Virginia Thomas must then mean is that Anita Hill lied — perjured herself before Congress. No less provocative term fits.

Second, the voicemail makes a splash in the press, presumably for its OMG factor. It's being handled like other "weird news from Conservatives" — like Sarah Palin's latest doings, Joe Miller's hired thugs, and Christine O'Donnell's fresh-faced bigotry.

Third, the world responds, as it often does, in the form of stories about Clarence Thomas from people who knew him "back in the day." In particular, Lillian McEwen, in several stories in the Washington Post and another in the New York Times, alleges that Hill's story is 'totally consistent with the way he lived' and that 'he was obsessed with porn'.

She later said, “The kind of Clarence I knew at the time that these events occurred is the kind of Clarence that did not emerge from the hearings, I’ll say that. It was not him, and he probably would not have been on the court if the real Clarence had actually been revealed.”

It seems only reasonable, therefore, given Mrs. Thomas's implied accusation of perjury against Anita Hill, that the same question be asked of her husband. Did Clarence Thomas commit perjury to acquire his seat on the Court?

The question is hanging in the air, just waiting for a response, whether anyone "important" is asking it or not.

By the way, while researching a separate article, I came across this from David Brock, in an interview with CNN:

CARVILLE: Clarence Thomas, you wrote a book about Anita Hill. Did Clarence Thomas tell the truth under oath?

BROCK: No. When I found out two years later that he had done many of the things that Anita alleged...

CARVILLE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) children. We have a man on the Supreme Court that lied under oath?

BROCK: That's right.

Brock is a former Movement Conservative activist himself, one who had a central role in both the Bill Clinton Troopergate story and the Anita Hill story. He's extremely well-positioned to know what he's talking about. There's more from David Brock here, just one place of many. And much more in Brock's 2002 book, Blinded by the Right, still a great read.

Someone's lied. It was either Hill or Thomas, each under oath at the time. It could be Hill. But if the liar is Thomas, we are truly facing a "revolutionary force" — one capable of a stunning degree of hypocrisy.

GP

UPDATE: It seems that Robert Parry of Iran-Contra fame has many of the same questions. Read More......

Robert Reich: 'We're losing our democracy'

While all the evidence has been in plain sight for months, Robert Reich does a good job of summing the pieces.

He says the danger facing our democracy is a "perfect storm." The first part of the storm is the income disparity, where "[a]lmost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans" and "[t]he top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us." It's worth memorizing those numbers.

The second part is our friend, the Citizens United decision (my emphasis):

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. [sic] Chamber of Commerce, a third.

More on Citizens United in a moment.

The third part of the storm is the deep hole most Americans are in. Yet at a time when people are looking to government to tide them through a horrible rough patch, Washington tells them there's no money:

No money? The marginal income tax rate on the very rich is the lowest it’s been in more than 80 years. Under President Dwight Eisenhower (who no one would have accused of being a radical) it was 91 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. Congress is even fighting over whether to end the temporary Bush tax cut for the rich and return them to the Clinton top tax of 39 percent.

There's money all right, Reich is saying; just none for us. His conclusion is spot on:

The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.

About that Citizens United decision: It has occurred to many that perhaps the reason the case was brought had less to do with defending the airing of a Movement Conservative attack film than something else — a Movement Conservative attempt to bring just such a challenge to election funding before the Supreme Court.

If so, the Court certainly responded, and in spectacular fashion: Instead of issuing a ruling on the film's airing, as expected in June of 2009, it called for the case to be re-argued with an expanded set of questions, including the constitutionality of limiting any corporate political donations at all. In other words, the Court took a case about whether the airing of a film counted as an independently-produced campaign ad, and turned it into a "radical" expansion of the concept of corporate personhood.

And now, according to Think Progress, we have many of the elements of Reich's trifecta in coordinated planning meetings. The billionaires who have benefited from the income disparity are, thanks to Citizens United (a Antonin Scalia–Clarence Thomas special, I might add), meeting to figure out how to further leverage their advantage over the rest of us. And then there's this:

Past Koch meetings have included various Republican lawmakers, including DeMint, and Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia as speakers.

Let's not forget Ginni Thomas (yes, that Mrs. Clarence Thomas), of Liberty Central, a secretly-funded Tea Party organization, who may be bringing their own challenges to the Supreme Court. If you were David Koch, would you fund Liberty Central?

Are we really "losing our democracy" to a revolutionary force?

GP Read More......

Bank of America discovered mistakes in their foreclosures

Of course they did so no surprise there. At least they can admit the mistake and though it's hard to imagine how they failed to find any wrongful foreclosures since a number of them were widely published in the media.

Bank of America acknowledged some mistakes in foreclosure files as it begins to resubmit documents in 102,000 cases, the Wall Street Journal said.

The bank found errors in 10 to 25 out of the first several hundred foreclosure it examined starting last Monday, the newspaper said.

The problems included improper paperwork, lack of signatures and missing files, as well as cases in which information about the property and payment history being unmatched, the Journal said.

The bank told the newspaper that some of the defects seem relatively minor, and the bank has not found any evidence of wrongful foreclosures.

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Reporter told Dem. running for RI Gov. that Obama won't campaign for him

So, we're all supposed to be urging Democrats to vote, you know, not whine and gripe and groan. Then, we see something like this:

President Obama will not endorse the Democratic candidate for governor, Frank T. Caprio, when he comes to Rhode Island to support other Democratic candidates, the White House said Sunday.

The president’s decision “is a victory for Linc Chafee,” the Republican-turned-independent who is Caprio’s opponent in the race for governor, said Chafee spokesman Mike Trainor, who said he was quoting Chafee’s own stated view. Former Republican Senator Chafee endorsed Mr. Obama for president in 2008.

Caprio was unaware that the president would not endorse him until his campaign was told by a news reporter, according to his campaign manager, Xay Khamsyvoravong. Khamsyvoravong said Caprio is not embarrassed that he did not get a courtesy call from the White House before the president’s decision was made public.

The Caprio campaign shouldn't be embarrassed. The White House political operation should be. Caprio should be aggravated.

This is a tight race. Nate Silver thinks Chafee has a 50.4% chance to win. Caprio's chances are at 42.0%. His prediction is the final vote will be 35.2% for Chafee and 34.3% for Caprio. Pretty damn close. Read More......

Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

The President is heading to Rhode Island today. First, he's doing an event on small business and the economy at the American Cord & Webbing in Woonsocket. Then, he's heading to Providence to do two events for the DCCC. There's an open seat in Rhode Island and the Democrat is the gay mayor of Providence, David Cicilline. There's also a three-way race for Governor in Rhode Island. According to the Providence Journal:

President Obama will not endorse the Democratic candidate for governor, Frank T. Caprio, when he comes to Rhode Island to support other Democratic candidates, the White House said Sunday.

The independent is Lincoln Chafee.

The Veep is heading to Florida. He's the keynote speaker at the conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). Back in the 90s, when I worked in gun control, IACP was our best ally. The NRA hated them. That was classic how the NRA loathed law enforcement.

Biden is doing two political events for two of the best progressive candidates today. While in Florida, he's campaigning for Alan Grayson. Then, he's heading to New Hampshire to Annie Kuster. Biden's office wants us to know "This will be the Vice President’s 100th event for 2010 candidates." Okay.

Eight days left. Read More......

Karzai confirms cash from Iran

Dump Karzai and the entire country now. If Iran wants to fund Karzai and Afghanistan, let them go ahead and waste their money but anything is better than wasting ours there.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has acknowledged that his office has received cash from Iran, but insists it was part of a "transparent" process.

Mr Karzai was responding to a report in the New York Times that Tehran had been passing bags stuffed full of cash to Mr Karzai's aides.

The cash was intended to promote Iran's interests in Kabul, the report said.

However, Mr Karzai said the money was not for an individual but to help run the president's office.

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