Daily Kos

A quiet Friday night. Watch out for falling satellites.

Top Comments for today are here.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson In addition to stripping public workers of collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's infamous anti-union bill:

...also requires that unions go through yearly recertification votes to keep their official status rather than retain that status indefinitely after an initial vote creating the union, as had been done in the past. Unions can still exist without that official status, but government employers, such as schools and the state, don't have to recognize them or bargain with them over anything.

To win the recertification election, unions must get 51% of the vote of all the members of their bargaining unit, not just the ones who take the time to cast ballots—a much higher bar than state elected officials have to clear to win their offices.

This Thursday was the deadline for unions to file for a recertification vote, and most have decided to take a pass on the expense of holding an election across multiple sites and to such an anti-democratic standard. (The same standard, remember, that Republicans shut down the FAA in order to impose on union representation elections for air and rail workers.)

Mark E. Andersen had previously written about the decision of one union not to participate in recertification, because "'Investing resources in this process would divert resources from other forms of activism,' said Adrienne Pagac, co-president of the Teaching Assistants' Association," who also referred to the process as "illegitimate."

Other union representatives echo that:

Marty Beil, executive director of the 23,000-member Wisconsin State Employees Union representing largely blue-collar workers, said none of the units in his group will seek recertification.

"We looked at the law and we find the law at best an exercise in wasted resources," Beil said. "We've chosen to use our resources to organize our members and advocate for our members."

Some members of unions that are not going through the recertification process are paying their dues voluntarily. And indeed, their money is better spent recalling Scott Walker than running expensive, rigged recertification elections that still don't win them the right to bargain collectively over the vast majority of important issues.

Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is throwing his full support, and his grassroots mailing list, behind President Obama's effort to get the Super Congress focused on reforming the tax structure.

"I just want to say how pleased I am that the President is taking a strong stand with this Buffett rule," Feingold said in a Wednesday interview. "What excites me even more, is it's the only fiscally responsible approach."

Feingold's new advocacy group Progressives United will press the joint Super Committee to adopt the Buffett rule as part of a broader deficit reduction plan. In an email to supporters, Feingold will make it explicit. "[T]he influence of big corporations and the super rich is strong in Congress, and several senators -- including Democratic ones -- are already opposing this crucial effort," the solicitation reads. "Tell the super committee how important it is to make millionaires pay their fair share."[...]

"If those on the right continue to insist that the wealthy don't have to contribute at all, I think the President will have to take it to the people," he said. "I would prefer that they compromise and that we get back on the right track..but i do think that if they're going to take a hard line that we may have [to make this] the real central issue of the campaign."

In addition to this campaign to urge the Super Congress to make taxes more fair, Feingold's organization Progressives United has created a campaign to petition the Super Congress Democrats to follow the principles of tax fairness, no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits, and no ""giveaways to corporate interests."

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have been on a tear for months about the intelligence community’s reliance on secret interpretations of surveillance law, arguing that the Justice Department has allowed for a secret interpretation of the law that is beyond the bounds of the law and allowing for broad surveillance of Americans.

They're now accusing the Justice Department of "making misleading statements about the legal justification of secret domestic surveillance activities that the government is apparently carrying out under the Patriot Act."

The lawmakers — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both of whom are Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. calling for him to “correct the public record” and to ensure that future department statements about the authority the government believes is conveyed by the surveillance law would not be misleading.

“We believe that the best way to avoid a negative public reaction and an erosion of confidence in U.S. intelligence agencies is to initiate an informed public debate about these authorities today,” the two wrote. “However, if the executive branch is unwilling to do that, then it is particularly important for government officials to avoid compounding that problem by making misleading statements.”

The Justice Department denied being misleading about the Patriot Act, saying it has acknowledged that a secret, sensitive intelligence program is based on the law and that its statements about the matter have been accurate.

Wyden and Udall aren't buying it, as Marcy Wheeler explains.

They cite two examples of such mischaracterizations: First, when a number of Justice Department officials claimed,

that the government’s authority to obtain business records or other “tangible things” under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is analogous to the use of a grand jury subpoena.

[snip]

As you know, Section 215 authorities are not interpreted in the same way that grand jury subpoena authorities are, and we are concerned that when Justice Department officials suggest that the two authorities are “analogous” they provide the public with a false understanding of how surveillance is interpreted in practice.

What they don’t say, but presumably mean to suggest, is that the claim Section 215 is like a grand jury subpoena is false, since the latter are routinely used to collect the “tangible things” (and even ephemeral things like cell phone tracking data) of completely innocent people..

Much of what Wyden and Udall are concerned about comes from the classified information they have access to as members of the Intelligence committee, but that they can't share in an unclassified letter. Which leads Marcy, an expert in this, to speculate: "[W]hile the bigger issue in this letter seems to be the government’s continued pretense that warrants for surveiling innocent Americans are just like warrants for investigating suspects, I’m beginning to suspect the bigger story is the unusual means by which the Administration got 'authority' to spy on innocent Americans."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Other than references to then-contemporary politicians and election dates, this JFK speech is just as relevant today as it was in 1960.

A snippet:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Read the full address below the fold.

Did CNN's partnership with the tea party diminish their (cough) credibility? American Journalism Review:

[T]eaming up to sponsor a debate is not the problem, says Kelly McBride, senior faculty for ethics reporting and writing at the Poynter Institute. Instead, it's the Tea Party Express's status as a PAC.

"They've partnered with the League of Women Voters and lots and lots of organizations," McBride says. "That's all well and fine. But a political action committee is expressly created to influence a process and further the agenda. That might be the difference." [...]

[J]ournalists such as Haynes Johnson, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with the Washington Post and now a professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, say the partnership was out of line. "I think it's a terrible precedent for any legitimate news organization to partner with a political group, especially one that takes such a strong stance as the Tea Party," Johnson says. "I think we shouldn't do it, and I think it's wrong."

He adds, "I think it's a bad idea for news organizations to partner with political groups, period. I think it's even more egregious to bring in someone as polarizing and ideological as the Tea Party and give them a voice."

Obviously, networks partner with groups all the time: Thursday's debate featured a (rather spurious) partnership between Fox News and Google, for example. But partnering with a group that is so unabashedly divisive seems a rather odd call for any outlet that is concerned with "credibility."

I think the short answer is that CNN, like other outlets, is much less concerned with "credibility" these days than in currying favor with different ideological groups. There is no actual news value to be gained by, say, hiring an Erick Erickson, but CNN has seemed to edge closer and closer to Fox News territory in an apparent attempt to ... well, what? Siphon off Fox viewers, perhaps, or perhaps their management has taken the Fox News success as a lesson that the hard right is the only available large audience, if you tell them what they want to hear.

It seems part of an ongoing process, for all the network outlets. After the debates, we get to hear "analysis" by people who either work directly for the candidates or are otherwise allied with them or against them: This counts as news for no discernible reason. It is the continuation of the Crossfire phenomenon, in which ideological debate is gradually degraded into mere partisan slapfight, and the goal of "news programs" is not to convey a firm truth, but to present a series of people who will purport to tell you what their truth is, and if the audience wants to find out which "view" most accurately reflects the real truth then they can go to hell.

I think partnering with an extreme ideological group (and one that is generally disliked by the rest of the public) made CNN look foolish, if nothing else. Whether or not it damaged their credibility hinges upon how much of it you believe the network had to begin with.

Newt Gingrich has zero chance of becoming president. Let's just stipulate that right up front. But Newt has never been one to let reality get in his way, and so he's already planning ahead (when I was six years old, I 'planned' how I would construct a robot dog capable of both showing emotion and eating entire automobiles, but I digress) for the day he imagines he will stride into the Oval Office and start presidenting and stuff.

Towards this end, Newt wants Americans to submit ideas for what he should do on 'day one' of a hypothetical Gingrich presidency. Specifically, what Executive Orders could Newt issue that would make the United States a more swell place to live? Or even more specifically, how best can candidate Gingrich pander to you, dear American? Because he's plumb out of ideas at this point.

To harness the wisdom and knowledge of the American people, Newt is now collecting ideas for executive orders that he would sign on the first day.  Newt.org will periodically release user submitted executive orders which will be added to the list he will sign on the first day of his presidency.

Oh. Oh my. Well hell, I'm feeling chock full of wisdom and knowledge myself, so let's do this thing. Here are some of my proposed Executive Orders for Newt to sign the first day.

• An order officially changing his first name to the more manly 'Salamander'.
• An order that declares that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction but Saddam gave them to this guy and stuff, okay, but then a unicorn stole them and took them to his secret unicorn dimension so that's why we couldn't find them and you should shut the hell up already. Oh, but the unicorn might be hiding in Iran.
• An order stating that from now on, all questions from journalists to the president will be considered 'gotcha' questions and will result in the reporter being transferred to Gitmo, especially if those questions relate to anything the president has previously said, done, or written in the last forty years.
• An order that turns the office of First Lady into a rotating position.
• An order declaring that Bill Clinton was once mean to him.
• An order bringing back the 1990's, because that's the last time anyone gave a crap about Newt Gingrich.

Got any others?

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Michele Bachmann…On the Issues

HPV vaccinations:

"There's a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine. There are very dangerous consequences!"

Climate change:

"A polar koala bear came up to me outside the grocery store, and he said the Arctic ice caps are bigger than they've ever been before, and polar ice is forming so fast now that his polar koala bear family and friends are getting frozen into all this ice and they gotta use blowtorches to prevent their little handpaws and feetpaws from getting frostbite. Global cooling is the great environmental menace of our time!"

Immigration:

"I was on a airplane that was in flying mode when a gremlin appeared on the wing and peeked in my window. Obviously we couldn’t hear each other, so we played Pantomimes until his message became clear: we need more laser-toting prairie dogs and exploding tumbleweeds at the border. Also: Mexicans in Mexico need to start…speaking…ENGLISH!"

Gays:

"I was coming home from abstinence practice the other day when a man ran up to me sobbing. He said that the homosexuals had used their 'Gay-T-M' cards to withdraw all the town's money. Now everybody's hungry, the garbage is piling up by the curb, and they've totally banned polyester. This is what happens, people!"

History:

"A park statue of Founding Father John Wayne told me, 'Congresswoman, don’t let them fool you into thinking the Shot Heard Round the World was fired from Concord, Massachusetts!' He said that's a lie by the hard-left fringe to sanctify Massachusetts as a liberal shrine! So let's hear it for the real cradle of liberty: Concord, New Hampshire, located in Boston, Iowa!"

Of course, I'm not making any claims that she said most of these things. I'm just reporting what I told myself she said, and I have never been known to be wrong, according to my source, which is my mirror when I'm standing in front of it. (It also sometimes tells me I'm "lookin' snappy there, pard'ner!")

The autumn wind came blowin' in, and it smelled like pie! Your west coast-friendly edition of  Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Elizabeth Warren has had a remarkable first week in her Senate campaign:

1. She has taken the lead on Republican Scott Brown, erasing a 15-point deficit from June.
   
2. She has stormed ahead the Democratic primary for MA-Sen by a cavernous 46 percent.
   
3. She is closing in on 25,000 donors on Act Blue, and several thousand more directly through her website.
   
4. Not one, but two videos of Warren have gone viral. The first was her rebuke against Republican charges of class warfare, and the second was her stunning appearance on Morning Joe from Wednesday morning (the second one actually has 50 percent more views on Daily Kos than the first).

Scared by Warren's rapid rise, the forces of Wall Street have suddenly made her a top target. Here is the preposterous headline and lead paragraph from the Fiscal Times on the first week of her campaign:

Elizabeth Warren Campaign Already Hitting Snags

As she mounts a challenge to Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, former Harvard Law school professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren has tried to put her controversial days in Washington behind her – but it hasn’t been easy.

Elizabeth Warren's campaign is really struggling, according to the Fiscal Times. What a terrible week she's had! In addition to basically just recycling Republican talking points against Warren, the article actually goes on to cite the viral video when she rebukes GOP charges about class warfare as one of the reasons she is supposedly hitting snags.

Then there is this hatchet job from Politico:

Elizabeth Warren became a hero of the left for her unrelenting pursuit of accountability and transparency with big banks and Wall Street firms that took billions of dollars in federal bailout money in 2008.

But when it comes to how her own bailout watchdog committee spent more than $10 million in taxpayer money, Warren has been a lot less forthcoming.

Warren, who is seeking the Democratic Senate nomination in Massachusetts to take on Republican Scott Brown, has yet to break down exactly how her congressional panel spent the money on travel expenses, meals and consultants, and the panel never revealed how much Warren was paid while she served as chairman.

So one of the problems here is that Warren didn't disclose how much she was paid, even though the article admits that she did disclose that last year.

Warren did have to report her income from the panel on separate executive-branch disclosure forms — a total of $64,289 from 2009 to 2010 – when President Barack Obama appointed her as a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.[...]

Still, members of the public would not be able to find her panel salary unless they cross-referenced it with her executive disclosures, which are available through the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

So the scandal is that Warren actually did disclose how much she was paid, but that finding it out requires cross referencing. Calling that attack weak is a huge understatement.

More from the same article:

From October 2008 to March 2011, the TARP oversight panel received nearly $10.5 million in taxpayer money from Congress, public records show. In its final public report issued in March, the panel broke down expenses into general categories, including $8.7 million for salaries and benefits, and $768,851 for printing costs. But line-by-line itemizations have not been released to the public or lawmakers.

So Warren did disclose how the panel spent money, but the scandal is that there hasn't been a line-by-line itemization. Politico also fails to point out that staff salaries on the panel were capped at the level of congressional staff, which means no big salaries will be found in such an itemization. The article does, however, quote an anonymous source attacking her at length on an unverifiable charge.

In addition to thee Fiscal Times and Politico, overtly right-wing media has begun piling on direct attacks against Warren. Pajamas Media calls her a "mob boss"; Rich Lowrey has dedicated his latest column entirely to going after Warren's comments about class warfare. Rush Limbaugh went off on a vile three-minute rant:

When was the last time there was much much national right-wing venom being spewed at a Democratic candidate for Senate more than a year before she actually stands for election? I'm guessing never.

These attacks, including the incredibly thin pieces from Politico and the Financial Times, are a direct response to the deep vein of enthusiasm Warren is tapping. Her meteoric rise is freaking out a lot of right-wing and establishment institutions because her message, and her ability to deliver it effectively, make her a real threat to their agenda.

This fight has quickly turned into a lot more than a single Senate campaign. Please, if you have not done so already, head over to ElizabethWarren.com, and sign up with team Warren.

TPM:

The Justice Department said late Friday that based on their preliminary investigation, a congressional redistricting map signed into law by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry appears to have been "adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of diminishing the ability of citizens of the United States, on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group, to elect their preferred candidates of choice to Congress."

DOJ's Civil Rights Division is specifically contesting the changes made to Texas Districts 23 and 27, which they say would not provide Hispanic citizens with the ability to elect candidates of their choice.

Ordinarily, you might say a presidential candidate wouldn't want to be accused of violating minority rights ... but with Mitt Romney lambasting Rick Perry for allowing the sons and daughters of undocumented immigrants to attend Texas colleges and universities, maybe this is just the thing he needs to convince the Republican base that he hates brown people as much as they do.

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ….

• Laurence Lewis will discuss capital punishment.
• Armando will write about his conversation with Bill Clinton about financing energy efficiency projects. It'll be more interesting than it sounds.
• Georgia Logothetis will explore decades of asymmetrical warfare against the middle class and what it means now that Democrats appear ready to fight the good fight on behalf of the other 98%.
• As part of an ongoing series, Latinos in the U.S., Denise Oliver Velez will explore the history, culture and political status of Puerto Ricans evoked by the words of Nuyorican Poet Laureate Pedro Pietri's seminal poem, "Puerto Rican Obituary."
• In the wake of the tragic case of Troy Davis, Dante Atkins will explore his evolution from a supporter of the death penalty into a firm abolitionist.
• A Republican president, Majority Leader McConnell and … Speaker Pelosi? Steve Singiser will advise you not to laugh. Absent big changes, he’ll explain why that exact post-2012 scenario might be a better bet than you think.
• Mark Sumner knows that Republicans want to turn Solyndra into a dark cloud for Obama, but says we shouldn't let it obscure the ray of sunshine this story reveals.

So, this is what passes as statesmanship in the modern-day GOP.

Appearing on Fox Business last night, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) told Lou Dobbs that his party's commitment to ideology over legislative accomplishment has benefited the nation, and that "each and every one of these fights" has been "good for this country." Reflecting the frustration apparent in one GOP senator's comment that "The new definition of success around here is just keeping the lights on," Dobbs asked Walsh to consider how gridlock over relatively small levels of spending looks from outside the beltway:

DOBBS: There's an old expression that I was taught, 'Just don't let it get reduced to principle.' [...] If I'm one of the 25 million people in this country who doesn't have a job and I hear a congressman, a billionaire, I hear anyone say to me the solution is something that's gonna take two to three years to get done, I'm gonna be gut-sick. And I think we've got a higher responsibility to the country than that, all of us, as citizens, let alone you folks elected to office.

WALSH: Well we do, Lou, but understand, we're in a bind. The House Republicans are in a bit of a bind here because we were sent to Washington to really try to undo everything this president's done, which we believe has destroyed this economy. It's caused a bumpy road. But I think each and every one of these fights that we have—and the super-committee and the debt ceiling's gonna come up again, and there'll be appropriations fights—I take a contrarian view, I think these are good for this country. The country's paying attention. They want us to come together on something, but they want us to be fiscally disciplined.

Good for the country. Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that Walsh would take such a cavalier attitude toward whether or not the federal government is funded. This is the guy who refuses to fund his own family.