Hullabaloo

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

 
Redefining capitalism

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich isn't the only Republican hopeful trying to bring down Mitt Romney by way of attacking the "free" market. Rick Perry got into it with Sean Hannity yesterday as well:

Perry said, “There is a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism.” He went on to clarify, “The truth is the truth, Sean, and there’s no use in us trying to shy away from it. If we think for a minute that Barack Obama’s not going to attack this and talk about this, we might as well get it out in the open and discuss it right now and find out is this the type of conservative that we want representing us at the top of the ticket.”

Hannity challenged Perry, saying “I just think as a conservative to say that those people that are willing to invest their money for companies that have either been mismanaged, or they are headed for bankruptcy, and they come in and try to get them profitable again. To say they’re vultures and they’re unethical, I mean that’s about as severe a charge as you can make.”

Perry responded, “The fact is the folks in Gaffney, South Carolina and Georgetown, South Carolina agree with that, and I happen to think that if they were going to be real venture capitalists, they would come in and help clean up those companies, save those jobs, rather than coming in and picking their bones clean, which I think is exactly what they did.”

Perry is right: Romney is going to be destroyed on this issue in a general election where the Objectivist cult only comprises about a quarter of the nation's voters.
The Sean Hannitys of the world want to ram Objectivism down America's throat and force them to like it.

But while the Obama campaign won't frame it in these terms, modern capitalism itself will be on trial in this campaign. Many Republicans with less hubristic and shortsighted than Hannity understand that, and want to pretend that vulture capitalism isn't real capitalism (though it very much is, especially in a financialized, asset-based economy.) But it's too late for that now. Romney is going to be their standard-bearer, exposing the ugliness of Republican economics for what it really is.

And while progressives know that President Obama is light years away from being a socialist, the right-wing media empire will attempt to portray him as such, framing the 2012 election as a choice between nasty European Socialism and good old-fashioned American Free Market Capitalism. Obama vs. Romney is nothing of the sort, of course, but the truth of the matter is irrelevant to the rhetoric of the debate set by the right-wing and its enablers in the traditional media.

For a great many voters who don't know better, President Obama will represent "Socialism", while Mitt Romney will represent "Capitalism." So-called Socialism is going to win the day fairly handily in November 2012, and the wingers will have none but themselves to blame for it. Gingrich and Perry can whine belatedly all they want, but they made their bed and now they get to lie in it.


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thereisnospoon 1/11/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

 
The "A" Word

by digby

How many times can you say the word "abortion" in one ad?

And he thinks birth control is just fine too, so there.


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digby 1/10/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
"Pain. I've never felt that way in my life"

by digby

Just another New year's Day in America:

The traffic stop began peacefully three hours into New Year's Day 2010, with the woman driving the SUV telling the officer that she hadn't been drinking and her husband merrily exclaiming he was the source of the alcohol smell.

But the situation soured when Steven Kotlinski, 55, stepped out to watch his wife's sobriety test, provoking the Mundelein officers to order him into the SUV. He reluctantly obeyed, but one officer said Kotlinski had obstructed his efforts. He ordered him back out, then tried to pull him out.

Next came the electric crackle of a Taser, a sound heard far more often in Chicago and many suburbs than it was just a few years ago.

A Tribune analysis shows Taser use has jumped fivefold in the city since 2008 and suburban agencies that were surveyed were on pace to double their use, as departments equipped more officers with the devices. Chicago police were deploying Tasers at a rate of more than twice a day in 2011.

And oversight has not kept pace with the explosion in use. Departments are on their own in developing policies on when and how electroshock devices should be deployed, with no state regulation.

In Kotlinski's case, the engineer at Abbott Laboratories was removed from his SUV and pinned in the snow. He lost control of his body as an "intense burning sensation" accompanied the surreal feeling that he was floating over the ground, he said. He roared about his heart condition, then begged in a faint wheeze for someone to call 911.

"Pain. I've never felt that way in my life," Kotlinski said.

Sadly, most people that sort of thing happens to assume it's just the way things are --- that in America it's perfectly normal for police to shoot you with electricity if they feel you aren't cooperating regardless of whether you are suspected of a crime or posing a danger. That's just the way it is.

And it's becoming more and more common:

Like almost all states, Illinois does not track the weapons' use by local police, and departments have been left to monitor and govern electroshock devices with a patchwork of policies. In Chicago, the leap in the number of police carrying Tasers coincided with the scaling back of post-shock investigations by the Independent Police Review Authority.

In 2009, officers logged 197 incidents. A year later, after hundreds more weapons were passed out, Chicago police reported 871 incidents. As of fall, the department was on pace for 857 uses in 2011, which works out to 2.3 per day.

The growth in the weapons' use should not come as a surprise, given their rise in popularity.

Several companies make electroshock weapons, which override the target's central nervous system by firing wire-tethered probes that deliver electrical jolts. Arizona-based Taser International makes the most popular models. About 576,000 of the devices are used by more than 16,500 law enforcement and military organizations, nearly all in the United States, said spokesman Steve Tuttle. Only 500 or so agencies used the weapons in 2000, he said.

In Illinois, a little fewer than half of the municipal police agencies that responded to a 2007 survey reported they were using electroshock weapons, according to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, and more departments have since bought the weapons. Several suburban agencies contacted by the Tribune appear to have started using them in 2008 or 2009.

Taser International and police departments have faced lawsuits over safety. And though many fatalities following electroshock weapon use have been attributed to other causes, human rights group Amnesty International has counted 490 deaths after electroshock device use in the U.S. since 1990, said Debra Erenberg, Midwest regional director for the group. In some 50 cases between 2001 and 2008, coroners listed the weapons as a cause or contributing factor in a death.

You got a problem with that?


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digby 1/10/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Pulling punches on Romney's Wall Street connection

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich hits Romney where it hurts:

“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” [...]

The former Speaker is making the case that, in contrast to good old fashioned businesses who make stuff, Romney and his ilk have instead gamed the system to create a soulless machine that profits from the misery of others. [...]

“I am totally for capitalism, I am for free markets,” Gingrich assured reporters on Monday. “Nobody objects to Bill Gates being extraordinarily rich, they provide a service.” What he instead is concerned about is when an investor receives “six-to-one returns, and the company goes bankrupt.”

I've talked about Newt's free market heresy in attacking Romney before, which is a development I think is far more encouraging for democracy in this country than anything Ron Paul might do.

But mistermix at Balloon Juice points out another important dynamic.

I haven’t seen a Democratic attack on Bain phrased this crisply. Democrats attack Romney’s math on job creation and they are using Randy Johnson, who was laid off in Bain’s gutting of Ampad, as a spokesman. While it’s true that Bain laid people off, the fact that they did so doesn’t in itself make Bain a bad business. Good companies sometimes lay people off. Newt’s attack has more bite because he’s putting Bain in the same boat as the rest of the hated Wall Streeters who almost took this country to ruin and haven’t been punished for their actions.

If Democrats can make this connection, which seems to be an obvious one, they can harness some of the anger that remains over the mortgage crisis and the resulting Great Recession. I might have missed it, but I don’t see that happening. I wonder if it’s because Democrats are afraid of offending deep-pocket Wall Street donors, or because they are afraid of being cast as socialists, or simply because they’re generally inept. But so far, Newt is doing a better job than the DNC.

As with so much else, it's hard to know whether it's a question of corruption, cowardice or incompetence. I'm not particularly convinced that Democrats are somehow more beholden to Wall Street cash and interests than Newt freaking Gingrich.

I think part of this is that Gingrich can get away with making the connection precisely because he's a Republican, in an "only Nixon could go to China" kind of way. Dems feel they would be labeled as Communists for doing likewise, as if not making the charge would somehow prevent Rush Limbaugh from saying it, anyway.

But the most likely explanation to me is that Republicans like Newt have an instinct for making the visceral emotional connection that resonates with voters, while Democrats are generally awful at doing this. Republicans play for the heart; Democrats play for the head. It's totally stereotypical for Democrats to be playing sterile, bloodless numbers games with Mitt Romney's job creation record and worrying about whether Mitt was being taken out of context on "liking to fire" people. Even now there are critics saying that we should be attacking Mitt's ideas, not his method of expressing them.

Putting Mitt's record at Bain Capital and statements about healthcare in the context of Wall Street fat cats and leveraged vulture capital seems like an unfair cheap shot. In high school debate class, Romney's record at Bain is best assessed by a dispassionate look at job creation and job elimination numbers, and his statements about healthcare policy are a separate issue.

But the real world isn't high school debate class. The real world runs on emotional understanding. Context and associative responsibility are everything, and Republicans like Newt get that. Most Democrats simply either don't, or feel too morally superior to make use of that understanding.


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
State rape

by digby

Maddow on the "birth control" question:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The current Republican presidential field is hostile to birth control? Yes, in fact, they are.

Oh, and down in Texas --- legal state rape:

One of the worst laws in the "war on women," Texas's mandatory ultrasound law, currently being fought in the courts has gotten the go-ahead from an appeals court--which means Texas doctors may now be forced to deliver particularly invasive ultrasounds and read out information to abortion-seeking patients, no matter what they themselves or their patients want.

Freedom is thus defined:

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 88 percent of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Because the fetus is so small at this stage, traditional ultrasounds performed through the abdominal wall, "jelly on the belly," often cannot produce a clear image. Therefore, a transvaginal probe is most often necessary, especially up to 10 weeks to 12 weeks of pregnancy. The probe is inserted into the vagina, sending sound waves to reflect off body structures to produce an image of the fetus. Under this new law, a woman's vagina will be penetrated without an opportunity for her to refuse due to coercion from the so-called "public servants" who passed and signed this bill into law.

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digby 1/10/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
When Republicans attack (each other)

by digby

Greg Sargent says:

This general election will turn heavily on a battle over the two candidates’ visions of capitalism and the proper role of government in regulating it. Yet the leading GOP candidates are on record arguing that Romney’s practice of it — which he regularly cites as proof of his ability to create jobs, as a generally constructive force and even as synonymous with the American way — is not really capitalism at all, but a destructive, profit-driven perversion of it. Thanks to them, this is no longer a left-wing argument. As the GOP candidates have themselves confirmed, this argument reflects concerns about Wall Street excess and lack of accountability that are thoroughly mainstream, and you’ll be seeing plenty of footage of these Republicans making it in battleground states this fall.

Do you think that's how it's going to go? It's certainly pretty to think so. But it will only happen if the media can restrain themselves from chasing the shiny objects that the campaigns throw out there.

The problem is that nobody likes any of the people making the criticism any more than they like Mitt, so I don't know how much weight their criticisms really carry. It's always fun to have Republicans tearing each other apart but I'm just not sure that it will do anything but reduce GOP enthusiasm to the same level as Democratic enthusiasm. But then that's probably the governing dynamic of this coming race, isn't it?


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digby 1/10/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
Money: That's what they want

by digby

If you missed this NY Times Magazine article over the week-end take a little time to read it when you have the chance.



I think this says it all:

In October, Colbert offered the Republican Party in South Carolina $400,000 to defray the cost of the presidential primary there in January in return for naming rights — he wanted the ballots, the lanyards, the press credentials to say “The Stephen Colbert Super PAC South Carolina Primary” — and for a nonbinding referendum question that asked the voters to decide whether “corporations are people” or “only people are people.” This issue has been Colbert’s hobbyhorse since August, when Mitt Romney told a heckler that “corporations are people, my friend,” and needless to say, Colbert too is on the side of corporate personhood. “Just because someone was born in a lawyer’s office and is incorporeal doesn’t mean he should have no rights,” he likes to say.

“I figured that if they’d sell me the naming rights, they’d probably be willing to sell me a referendum,” Colbert told me. “I always assume that anything that could be for sale probably is.”

Amazingly, the South Carolina Republicans were on the point of agreeing to Colbert’s proposal, and ballots were printed that included the referendum question, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the counties, not the party, had to pay for the primary and that the ballot could not include referendum questions. When the Republicans declined to pursue the matter, Colbert made the same offer to the state’s Democrats, who filed an appeal. Even Colbert seemed a little surprised, pointing out that he had repeatedly warned both the Republicans and the Democrats that his aims were satirical and that their very willingness to negotiate with him could become a joke on the show. “It turns out that both sides are happy to take my money,” he said.

It's hard to use anything but the word whore in this circumstance, but I think whores have much more pride than the political parties do. They are literally willing to do anything for money.


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digby 1/10/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
Why Romney's "Firing" Gaffe Resonates

by David Atkins

Much has been made of Mitt Romney's "I like being able to fire people" gaffe:

"I like being able to fire people who provide services to me," Romney said at a Monday breakfast in New Hampshire, when talking about health care. "You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say, 'I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.'"

If you haven't seen it yet, video is here:



Romney was making a fairly mundane point about being able to change from one health insurance company to another and used a particularly unfortunate choice of words, particularly given his reputation as a heartless, robotic job-killing vulture capital CEO. But watching the video clip is profoundly disturbing in a way that goes beyond just a thoughtless gaffe. James Fallows postulates that it's because he used the word "enjoy" in the context of the act of firing someone--an act that should in no way be enjoyable for the person on either end of the pink slip, if they have any empathy.

But not even that gets at the heart of what is so wrong with Romney's statement. It goes much deeper, to Romney's sense of privilege, and a relationship to the world around him that is alien to most Americans and reinforces everything that is wrong with the 1% in America.

The key part of what's off-putting about the gaffe isn't the first part about liking to fire people, so much as the second part about "who provide services to me." Liking to fire people is bad enough, but this is the real kicker.

When it comes to basic services like healthcare, almost no one in America sees the relationship that way. Most of us wouldn't speak of "firing" our health insurance company. No matter how much we might detest our insurance company, we probably wouldn't describe the experience of removing ourselves from their rolls an enjoyable one.

But most of all, we don't see the health insurance company as providing us a service. We see ourselves, rather, as indentured supplicants forced to pay exorbitant monthly rates for a basic need that responsible people with means can't get out of paying for if we can help it. We don't see ourselves as in control of the relationship with them. They are in control of us--and no more so than when we get sick and need the insurance most. If the company decides to restrict our coverage or tell us we have a pre-existing condition after all, we're in the position of begging a capricious and heartless corporation to cover costs we assumed we were entitled to based on a contractual obligation. It's precisely when we need insurance most that we're least able to "fire" the insurance company.

The same goes for the rent/mortgage, for the utilities, for the car, for the cell phone bill, for nearly everything. Most of these things are necessary commodities for most Americans. Many are socially expected, even if not technically necessary. They all have (usually far overpriced) unavoidable monthly charges and premiums that fall on overworked and underpaid Americans every month like a load of bricks. We see many of them increase by at least 5-20% year over year even as our wages stay flat. All we can do is struggle to keep up, trying to find the least bad service for the lowest price we can afford, but knowing we're getting gouged every step of the way.

Romney talks about paying for health insurance as if it were the same as getting a pedicure, hiring an escort or getting the fancy wax at a car wash. It's a luxury service being provided to him, and he doesn't like it, he can take his business elsewhere. Romney's is the language of a man who has never wanted for anything, never worried about where his next paycheck would come from, never worried about going bankrupt if he got sick.

It is the language of an entitled empowerment utterly alien to the experience of most Americans, who feel victimized and bled dry without recourse by these rentier corporations. Romney sees himself as in charge of the relationship between himself and these entities. Most Americans don't. That's why the statement rankles and feels so off-putting to us. The mention of enjoying the act of "firing" them is just icing on the cake.

When it comes to health insurance companies and their ilk, most Americans think of the relationship more like this:



It's an experience Mitt Romney wouldn't even begin to understand.


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thereisnospoon 1/10/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Monday, January 09, 2012

 
They just can't let it go

by digby

Wow:




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digby 1/09/2012 06:26:00 PM |

 
A General in his own mind

by digby

Newtie's failed dream:

Ultimately, though, it wasn't an issue of eligibility—Gingrich could have tried to enlist, draft or no—but of will. "Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over," Gingrich told Jane Mayer in 1985. "Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made," adding that "there was a bigger battle in Congress than Vietnam." As Gingrich put it, "no one felt this was the battle-line on which freedom would live or die."

Avoiding the draft, Gingrich told Mayer, was "one of those things that will hang over me for the rest of my life." A few months later, he told the Washington Post, "Frankly I would not have made any difference in Vietnam but much more is what difference it would have made in me." Besides, he showed his mettle in other ways:

"Temporarily in the short run," Gingrich admits that Vietnam combat veterans in Congress have "the credential of personal courage." But he counters "What do you think it took to stand up on the House floor as a freshman to take on (the expulsion of) Rep. Charles Diggs?"

In the debate over the week-end he seemed to be claiming that because he grew up in a military family, he got to claim his father's service as his own. I think he truly does wish more than anything that he had gone to war. Now. After it was over.

In fairness to Newt, in terms of qualifications to be Commander in Chief by dint of interest and proximity to the warmaking decisions of the past decade, he's a top contender:

As a close advisor to the administration over the past six years, as an intimate of both Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Gingrich was a powerful advocate both for the idea of invading Iraq and for the botched way in which it was done.

Gingrich wasn’t merely a booster of the war and the manner in which it was conducted, said Kenneth Adelman, who like Gingrich was a member of the influential Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, which advises the Secretary of Defense. He was involved in the hands-on planning.

“Rumsfeld thought very highly of [Gingrich],” Adelman said. “There were times quite apart from the Defense Policy Board that he was called in to meet with Rumsfeld.” Adelman added that the Defense Secretary told him that Gingrich had gone down to the Central Command in Tampa, Fla., where the U.S. military directs its operations in the Middle East and “worked on war plans and proved very valuable.” (Asked for confirmation of the visit, Gingrich spokesman Rick Tyler said, “All I can say is that he’s made many trips to CentCom … My guess is that’s right.”)

Gingrich used to like to talk about his influence at the Bush White House. In the beginning of the current administration, and especially after 9/11, when the president’s popularity was at a peak, Gingrich felt no compunction in freely discussing his new role back in the seat of power three years after leaving Congress. In November 2001, the New Yorker reported that Gingrich had been scheduled to meet with Cheney on Sept. 11 to discuss what Gingrich perceived as the president’s failure to properly communicate his message. Gingrich told the New Yorker at the time that he had “pretty remarkable access to all the senior leadership,” including Karen Hughes, Karl Rove and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former colleague whom Gingrich says he spoke with “routinely” in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Most important, Gingrich met regularly with one old friend, Cheney, and advised another, Rumsfeld. But his influence was also felt in the former employees who had taken jobs throughout the administration. Notably, Bill Luti and William Bruner, who had served Gingrich as military affairs advisors during his days as speaker, were central figures in the Bush team’s politicization of intelligence. They worked for the infamous Office of Special Plans, the Department of Defense’s “stovepiping” operation that was responsible for much of the questionable intelligence on Iraq. Bruner himself was the handler for Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi who provided much of the OSP’s most dubious data. Bruner and Luti worked with Elliott Abrams, the disgraced Iran-Contra figure whose redemption Gingrich had kick-started.

As war approached, Gingrich wasn’t just helping the Pentagon to plan the conflict. He often acted as a proxy for Iraq hawks. Media reports place Gingrich at the CIA, where, England’s Guardian newspaper reported, he was engaged in pressuring analysts on Iraq intelligence. Gingrich, who says he did go to Langley to discuss other intelligence matters at the request of then-CIA director George Tenet, denies the allegation.

“I never went down to Langley, before the war, on Iraq intelligence. I went down on other topics,” he said. “I thought, frankly, the argument for replacing Saddam was so overwhelming that it was silly to base it on weapons of mass destruction. And it never occurred to me that [intelligence on weapons of mass destruction] would be such a total mess.”

But as the administration geared up for war, Gingrich was striking a different note. In a paper written late in 2001 for the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow, he asserted, “We are a serious nation, and the message should be simple if this is to be a serious war: Saddam will stop his efforts and close down all programs to create weapons of mass destruction.” On Oct. 31, 2002, he wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Times opposing proposed U.N. inspections of Iraq’s supposed WMD facilities; in it, he said, “President Bush and his administration have been abundantly clear why they believe Saddam must be replaced. They have convincingly argued that time is on the side of the Iraqi dictator, and that every day spent waiting is another day for him to expand his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction program.” In a piece for USA Today on Oct. 16, 2002, he wrote, “The question is not, ‘Should we replace Saddam?’ The question is, ‘Should we wait until Saddam gives biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to terrorists?’ We should not wait until Saddam has the full capacity to create terror around the planet and is able to blackmail with nuclear weapons. Waiting is not an option.”

In fact, Gingrich’s seat on the Defense Policy Board put him at the heart of the administration faction that was pushing to wage war on Iraq. During two meetings little more than a week after 9/11, according to the New York Times, board members became convinced that Iraq should be the next target after the invasion of Afghanistan. Gingrich was quoted in that Times report, on Oct. 12, 2001, as saying, “If we don’t use this as the moment to replace Saddam after we replace the Taliban, we are setting the stage for disaster.”

When he was speaker he had a contingent of military aides, openly flouting the rules against military influence in politics. He is, in fact, a military fetishist.

The problem for Newtie isn't that he dodged the draft --- they all did. The real problem for Newt is that he was allegedly against the war, a very big no-no, especially for him. This is what I don't think he can live with:

Despite his repeated written and spoken endorsements of the Vietnam war, several people who knew him at the time say he actually opposed it. Frank Gregorski, a Gingrich confidante since their days at West Georgia College, told PBS Gingrich "didn't want to be one of the sacrifices, one of the enlisted men that were sent to die for a stupid military leadership or a political leadership." Gingrich's adviser at Tulane, Pierre-Henri Laurent, told the New Yorker that the student he knew in New Orleans was "modestly anti-war." In a 1976 fundraising speech, Gingrich struck a tone that would feel at home in a Ron Paul stump speech: "The US cannot be the policeman of the world. When we tried that in Vietnam, they beat us up."

Newt really wanted to be a General in a glorious war. It fits perfectly with his personality. But he has always taken this defiant position that what he's doing is just as courageous as being on a battlefield and I expect that his sub-conscious knowledge that it's just not so is what has fueled him all these years. Poor Newt. A warrior hero forced to substitute words for bullets. He's certainly wounded more than a few of his enemies with them along the way, but I have a suspicion that isn't really enough for him.


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digby 1/09/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Matt Stoller takes aim, misses wildly

by David Atkins

Matt Stoller decided to take take on his critics today, singling out my post in particular for lengthy comment. He prefaces the quotation by calling me a "Democratic Party activist" with veiled contempt, I suppose in contrast to real bloggers. It's worth noting that I started writing at DailyKos in 2005 under the pseudonym thereisnospoon and have been very active in online progressive circles for the better part of that time--a fact well-known to Stoller, who has clashed with me in those circles before. I have only been involved in official Democratic Party activism for less than three years as a result of seeing the limits of online activism, and out of a desire to bring the culture of online progressivism into the Party. So Stoller's chosen label for me is a subtle but pointed attempt to characterize a "good progressive activist" versus "bad Dem Party operative" dynamic that doesn't really exist here.

But it's Stoller's mischaracterization of my argument that is most remarkable. He says this:

For Atkins, liberalism is dominance, with liberals holding the dominant position. Mankind’s nature is brutal and exploitative, liberalism restrains it using equally harsh methods. Atkins furthermore equates support for Democrats with policies that benefit the middle class, in a nod to Cold War era liberal anti-communism. This kind of alpha-beta mindset implies that criticism and rejection of Barack Obama, the chief alpha of the Democrats, is a threat to Atkins’ version of liberalism itself.

There is so much wrong with this paragraph that it's hard to know whether Stoller really doesn't understand liberalism, or is being disingenuous. His argument is reminiscent of those made by creationists who claim that science is its own religion, and that there is a battle afoot between the followers of Darwin and the followers of Christ.

Like the scientific method, Liberalism is not a creed seeking dominance but a system of thought that attempts to alleviate oppression and exploitation wherever possible, providing equality of opportunity and a minimum standard of living to everyone, thus ensuring basic human dignity and the ability to better one's station in life. If providing those things were possible without the use of force or even laws, that would be fine. In cases where human behavior is self-guided and does not create oppression over others (e.g., mutually consenting sexual activity, the right to choose, marijuana usage, etc.) liberalism stands aside, shattering the use of force or law that curtails human freedom.

Where human behavior does inevitably create oppression (and it most certainly does), liberalism seeks first and foremost to implement laws, legitimized by the consent of the governed, to regulate against that oppression. The use of force is a last resort, and is only necessary to enforce the law, or to act in the most egregious circumstances of oppression where domestic law will not reach.

Dominance is not part of the liberal program. Far from it. Remember the basic dictum: power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Dominance corrupts, even liberal dominance. That's part of what went wrong with totalitarian communism: too much dominance by ostensibly leftist ideologues who were allowed to maximize their own power at the expense of others. The program of liberalism is not about putting dominant people in charge, so much as about creating self-regulating systems of government that function for the benefit of people regardless of the who is temporarily in charge.

So liberalism does not seek to correct human exploitative behavior with "equally harsh methods." It seeks to do so with systems of legal and social intervention. The use of force is only a last, if sometimes necessary, resort. Liberals need not hold a position of dominance, if the proper systems are in place to check the power of those who would seek to exploit others. That, in fact, is what the perfection of civilization is supposed to be all about.

Only libertarians on the right and the left have such a positive view of human nature that they believe the use of force should never be necessary at any time.

Moving on, Stoller makes a weird claim that defending the middle class is somehow a nod to anti-Communism. I have no idea what he means by that, unless he somehow conflates the middle class with Marx's bourgeoisie, implying that by defending the middle class, liberals ignore the plight of the poor and, I suppose, the implicit need for some sort of collectivist action. Collectivist action that Stoller thinks could presumably happen without dominance and the use of force? It's hard to know how even to defend oneself from this charge. Bringing all individuals down to the same standard of living is a bad idea, and has been a bad idea everywhere it has been tried. Social democracies everywhere in the world have creation and expansion of the middle-class as their goal, while maximizing the safety net and the opportunity for advancement of anyone who is left behind. That program has a long track record of success, in contrast with programs of forced equality. So I guess in that sense, Stoller's attack is accurate, but irrelevant. He might as well have accused me of thinking the sky is blue. So what?

But it's the last charge that is most preposterous.

There is no sense in which attacks on President Obama are a threat to liberalism. I have been a very frequent of the Obama Administration myself, and (commenters here notwithstanding) in most left-leaning circles have been characterized a frequent critic of the Administration, not a defender. A google search of references to my posts here turn up more critics of my work from Administration defenders lumping me in with Greenwald and Hamsher, than the other way around.

The problem with the Obama Administration has always been that it is not doing enough to implement a social contract that will prevent economic exploitation, bound by rule of law and the implied threat of force to enforce it. Rather than embodying liberalism in his persona, it is the Obama Administration's failure in many cases to implement a liberal agenda that is the problem.

Where the President himself has aided and abetted breaking the rule of law and creating a more unaccountable Executive Branch with increased power, that's a bad thing and those critiques are also accurate. One can argue the particulars of the NDAA and question whether a Presidential veto would actually have resulted in less damaging legislation or not (I think Congress would have overridden his veto in both chambers.) One can argue whether the President should have responded to Congress's refusal to try to Gitmo detainees on U.S. soil by simply releasing every prisoner (probably a bad idea.) One can argue whether the President should have risked sending a SEAL team into Yemen to capture Al-Awlaki as opposed to others like him, simply because he happened to have been born in the U.S. (Constitutionally required, but showing the fraying limits of the nation-state model.) One can argue whether the situation in Libya rose the moral level of potential genocide required to justify military intervention. But the collective weight of the President's actions on these matters have left him open to very valid criticism from civil libertarians. These critiques are also not a threat to liberalism, which seeks to constrain the limits of absolute power. They are a benefit to liberalism.

There is no sense in which liberalism demands an unquestioned dictator in pursuit of dominance, as Stoller implies. Far from it. Liberalism demands social systems that restrict and limit the influence of any individual leader, be they liberal or conservative, from causing too much damage to the social services and systems of governance that allow for shared opportunity and human dignity.

No, the danger to liberalism comes when individuals become so single-mindedly upset with the current state of affairs that they begin to make irrational arguments about the warlike nature of the Federal Reserve, or to put libertarian whackadoos on a pedestal.

Humans have been warlike for a very long time. America itself has a very bellicose history that predates the Civil War, as anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of what might euphemistically be called the "opening" of the West knows full well. Andrew Jackson was perhaps America's most brutal and warlike President, and it seems doubtful that he was acting at the behest of the nonexistent Federal Reserve or any other central banking hierarchy, or that he was testing out new weapons systems against Native Americans on behalf of the flintlock-industrial complex.

Digby, whom Stoller insults as child in an ice cream store too confused to understand his brilliance, was too kind to say it outright. But conspiracy theories involving the Federal Reserve have a long and ugly history of anti-Semitism, and it's a little disturbing to see supposed progressives latch onto such theories in order to explain militaristic tendencies that long predate the creation of strong central banking authorities.

It's especially disturbing when Federal Reserve conspiracies are tied to the ravings of racist and anti-Semitic loon Ron Paul. Ron Paul has attracted a number of young followers of various ideological orientations. Some are drawn to him by his anti-drug-war policies, some to his anti-war stance, and many others to his libertarian Objectivist economics.

But unlike a Kucinich or Gravel in 2008 who made anti-war and anti-drug-war arguments from the left, Paul's presence in the race only serves to attract the unwary into his Objectivist libertarian ideology. It's particularly problematic because Ron Paul comes to his stances not for the right reasons, as Stoller claims, but for the wrong ones. Paul doesn't believe in intervening on anyone's behalf to help anyone else, or in preventing self-destructive behavior of any kind. Ron Paul (and apparently Matt Stoller) would simply allow Iran to mine the Strait of Hormuz without taking any action beyond, I guess, the sanctions and diplomacy that have worked so well in past. On drugs, Ron Paul would legalize heroin, and then eliminate funding for rehab centers and just let things sort themselves out from there. The presence of that sort of ideology being taken seriously is not a positive thing for liberalism. It's an unqualified negative.

Stoller closes by talking about the need for explanatory political systems:

But political ideologies are systems. They have to be financed, there has to be an energy model so you can fuel things, they have to display internally consistency so they don’t break down, people have to run the machinery, the programs have to work, the people that manage and implement have to have ethical, social, and financial norms, there must be safeguards,etc. You can’t just randomly choose a bunch of stuff you want and call it an ideology.

But it's impossible to tell from his writing what sort of universal systemic thinking about human nature and the proper form of government guides his own ideology. That might be more helpful than grossly mischaracterizing the views and motivations of others.



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thereisnospoon 1/09/2012 03:04:00 PM |

 
Oh!

by digby

Ok, this made me sick:



Well I guess it was slightly better than saying "suck my dick" and gesturing toward his crotch like Andrew Dice Clay, but not much.

Mitt had a good chuckle. I guess he turns his sexist humor chip on when Christie flies in.


Update: The reason it sounds like what it sounds like is because of the tone --- and the fact that appended "sweetheart" on the end of it. It sure sounded like a "I gotcher job for ya right heah!" retort. But whatever --- he's an ass no matter what he meant.


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digby 1/09/2012 01:40:00 PM |

 
Kafka moment 'o the day

by digby

From Chris Bertram:

The position of the last British detainee at Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer, is in the UK news today. He’s never been charged with anything and was “cleared for release” under the Bush administration. He is in failing health. For protesting about his own treatment and that of others, he is confined to the punishment block. It seems the reason the Aamer can’t be released today is that the US Congress has imposed absurd certification requirements on the US Secretary of Defense, such that Panetta would be personally reponsible for any future criminal actions by the released inmate. One of the reasons why the US Congress has put these obstacles up is because of claims made by the US military about “recidivism”, claims that also get some scrutiny in the report. It would seem that subsequent protests about conditions in the camp, writing a book about it or making a film, are counted as instances of “recidivism”. Astonishing. You can listen to a BBC radio report here (start at 7’ 40”)

This is yet another one of those Catch-22s like the indefinite detention procedures in the recently passed NDAA, in which everyone claims that just because these laws exist it doesn't mean the executive will have to abide by them. The problem is that the political implications of them not doing so (and in this case legal liability) ensure that virtually any president will abide by it anyway.

This man is innocent.The government has already admitted it. But he's been tortured and wrongfully imprisoned for years. One can hardly blame him if he harbors some hostility now, even if he didn't before. It is The Count of Monte Cristo effect: when you do this to someone, there is a possibility they will seek revenge. After all, their lives have been ruined. Therefore, they must never be released lest they go on to commit the crime they were wrongfully accused of committing in the first place.

Now, the tales of "recidivism" are hugely overstated. Thew worst thing most released prisoners have done is express some unhappiness with their incarceration and torture. As Bertram said, that's considered "recidivism" as well.But the possibility that one released prisoner might actually seek revenge for their mistreatment is always going to be too much for Secretary of Defense or the executive branch to risk personally signing off on going forward. I can't imagine it happening, frankly. They know what's been done to these people.

This is the true, practical problem with the president signing the NDAA. (The legal and moral problem has been well established.) Even if one were to assume that all of our leaders going forward will be moral people who would never in a million years abuse their authority or wrongfully imprison someone, you cannot escape the fact that the politics will always mitigate against setting someone free once they've been put through this extra-judicial wringer.

Unless the entire "terrorist" legal edifice that was born out of the overreaction to 9/11 is torn down and a humane and transparent system is put in its place, there will remain a very good chance that we will continue to turn otherwise innocent people into enemies by our treatment of them or keep innocent people imprisoned forever. Kafka couldn't have designed a more byzantine hell.


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digby 1/09/2012 12:15:00 PM |

 
Third Party's the charm?

by digby

Ron Paul said this yesterday in the New Hampshire debate:

[M]y trillion dollar proposal to cut spending, doesn’t immediately deal with Social Security, it’s to try to work our way out of Social Security.I’m cutting a trillion dollars by attacking overseas spending and going back to ‘06 budget. And I do not believe that you have to have -- people who have gotten special privileges and bailouts from the government, they may get the pain, but the American people, they get their freedom back and get no income back, they don’t suffer any pain.

He also said this to a reporter talking about South Carolina, the most conservative state in the country:

Venturing well beyond what any other GOP candidate would dare, the Texas congressman said he thinks his support can encompass followers in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He told a supporter in Meredith that his appeal extends to "independent people who are sick and tired of the two-party system. The people who are going out on Occupy Wall Street. They are sick and tired of it."

Sounds good.Between that and his national security platform you have to wonder why he's a Republican.

Until you look at the details. Here's Paul's economic plan. Let's just say he's not being entirely forthcoming:

DELIVERS A TRUE BALANCED BUDGET IN YEAR THREE OF DR. PAUL’S PRESIDENCY:

Ron Paul is the ONLY candidate who doesn’t just talk about balancing the budget, but who has a full plan to get it done.

SPENDING:

Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels.

ENTITLEMENTS:

Honors our promise to our seniors and veterans, while allowing young workers to opt out. Block grants Medicaid and other welfare programs to allow States the flexibility and ingenuity they need to solve their own unique problems without harming those currently relying on the programs.

CUTTING GOVERNMENT WASTE:
Makes a 10% reduction in the federal workforce, slashes Congressional pay and perks, and curbs excessive federal travel. To stand with the American People, President Paul will take a salary of $39,336, approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.

TAXES:

Lowers the corporate tax rate to 15%, making America competitive in the global market. Allows American companies to repatriate capital without additional taxation, spurring trillions in new investment. Extends all Bush tax cuts. Abolishes the Death Tax. Ends taxes on personal savings, allowing families to build a nest egg.

REGULATION:

Repeals ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley. Mandates REINS-style requirements for thorough congressional review and authorization before implementing any new regulations issued by bureaucrats. President Paul will also cancel all onerous regulations previously issued by Executive Order.

MONETARY POLICY:

Conducts a full audit of the Federal Reserve and implements competing currency legislation to strengthen the dollar and stabilize inflation.

CONCLUSION:

Dr. Paul is the only candidate with a plan to cut spending and truly balance the budget. This is the only plan that will deliver what America needs in these difficult times: Major regulatory relief, large spending cuts, sound monetary policy, and a balanced budget.

I urge you to click over to the site and see the details. It's quite illuminating.

Paul's plan calls for greatly reduced military spending. How that breaks down is unknown, but I assume that I would agree with most of it. But take a look at the specifics of the tax policy:

I didn't know that Occupy was for lowering taxes for the 1% and corporations and eliminating financial regulations and I would imagine that would come as something of a surprise to most people who identify with that movement as well. But hey, maybe they've evolved.

Despite what he said in that interview. His long held position is that he would allow all the old folks to continue to collect SS (he says they've been "conditioned" to need it) but will end it for younger people. Not "opt out." End it.

Why does he want to end it?

WALLACE: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.

PAUL: Technically, they are. … There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause. … That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that’s what we have to reverse—that very notion that you’re presenting.

WALLACE: Congressman, it’s not just a liberal view. It was the decision of the Supreme Court in 1937 when they said that Social Security was constitutional under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

PAUL: And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal to, and we had to reverse that.

That's interesting because Paul's philosophy really says that the constitution doesn't have the authority to declare slavery illegal but perhaps that big old war made the difference on that one. And it should be said that he thinks states have a right to have their own social security plans so that's good.

I suppose he's actually being practical in saying that the elderly who haven't been "conditioned" to spend their last years in penury because they can't work will be allowed to collect. But you younguns should be ok because you are going to spend your lives in a dog eat dog, every-man-for-himself world and you're all going to be tough old birds who can scrap out a meager living ragpicking at the (gigantic, toxic) landfill --- or you'll be rich, I tell you, rich! No matter what, at least you'll have your pride.

The fact is that he's being very cagey about the details of his economic plan, which seems a little bit odd considering that he's the man of principle who sticks to his guns and tells it like it is. So, I have to wonder if he isn't truly planning a third party run. His extreme economic views are certainly his big selling point to the Republican base so why would he soft peddle them and evoke the much loathed Occupy movement.

Adele Stan is following the Paul campaign on the ground and she wrote this a couple of weeks ago:

At last week's Iowa debate, when asked if he would endorse the GOP nominee, Ron Paul dodged the question. I expect he will again endorse the Constitution Party's nominee [as he did in 2008] -- especially if it's him.

While a third-party run by any of its early primary winners could cause problems for the Republican Party, if Paul is the third-party standard bearer, it's a circumstance that could prove vexing as well to the Obama campaign, siphoning off the most enthusiastic sort of young voters that Barack Obama relied on for his 2008 triumph. And in 2012, Obama will need every vote he can muster.

If he's talking about attracting Occupy protesters in the context of the South Carolina primary, it's hard to figure any other way.

The Constitution Party is on the ballot in 38 states, by the way.


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digby 1/09/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
Where have all the assets gone?

by David Atkins

I've written at length before about ideological battle between those who want to increase asset values, and those who want to see wage growth. To make a long story short, a variety of forces, the strongest of which are globalization and increased access to an endless supply of cheap labor, have conspired to depress wages. Rather than do the hard work of fixing the system to help a globally connected world synchronize in harmony with broad-based wage growth, policy makers chose to disguise the lack of wage growth by maximizing asset growth, and attempted to push as many people as possible away from wage orientation and into asset orientation, specifically stock investments and housing.

Some of the decision to do this was simply a question of taking the lazy way out of the problem. Some of it was a craven desire to help plutocratic campaign donors steal away more wealth. And some of it was ideological fervor, as with Ronald Reagan, who said in 1975:

"Roughly 94 percent of the people in capitalist America make their living from wage or salary. Only 6 percent are true capitalists in the sense of deriving income from ownership of the means of production...We can win the argument once and for all by simply making more of our people Capitalists."

All of American policy was designed to cheapen the price of goods, to extend credit, and to maximize the prices of assets in attempt to create more Capitalists and hide the fact that wages were declining against inflation, and that non-bubble-related jobs were disappearing.

The problem, of course, is that asset prices are volatile and prone to speculative bubbles. When the bubbles inevitably burst, it wasn't just speculators who got hurt this time: it was everybody who had been suckered into the asset-based con. When the recoveries from the speculative bubbles did belatedly show up, they tended to be increasingly jobless recoveries--just as one might have expected from a society where both boom and bust depend on quick-buck speculation rather than productive long-term investment.

But the problem doesn't end there. There's also the fact that regular Americans don't have remotely enough wealth to buy into the asset-based ponzi scheme in the first place:



The attempt to disguise wage stagnation and decline with asset growth has been a marked failure on many levels, not least of which is the obvious fact that not enough Americans have access to enough wealth to make the model work. Cheap, easy access to homeownership was supposed to be the main fix for that. But that blew up just a few years ago, taking the entire economy with it. 401Ks were supposed to be another fix, but people have lost confidence in those too, as those who own substantial enough 401Ks to retire never know just how big their nest egg will be from year to year, while those without significant 401Ks or union pensions don't have much retirement at all beyond Social Security.

But no one in a major role on a public policy level is even talking about the problem or looking toward new solutions. As I said before:

Whether they can articulate it or not, what has most progressives most incensed about the Obama Administration's domestic policy is that it has ultimately hewed to the same asset-based economic model. When the Administration could be progressive on cutting costs or ensuring equality without negatively impacting assets, it did so. That's what the ACA, the Ledbetter Act, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and numerous other left-leaning Administration moves were designed to do. But the Administration has been very reticent to take any actions that would negatively impact the value of assets.

That's not meant to be a knock on the Obama Administration alone. Almost no one in government is really talking much about this problem, which lies at the root of so many others. Certainly not Republicans who are just fine with the system and would like to slash the safety net while expanding asset inflating policies, and scarcely any Democrats, either. Certainly not the pundits who, when they can be bothered to talk about it at all, either celebrate the trend (Thomas Friedman) or figure that a simple combination of infrastructure spending and redistributive taxation can solve it (Paul Krugman.) Not even much of the progressive movement, which is stuck either in issue silos or railing against "corruption" and the influence of the one percent, as if all the country's greedy villains had somehow gotten the people's votes and assembled into Washington D.C. solely for the purpose of self-enrichment while pretending to fight one another.

The problem is systemic and broad-based. The entire country--and, indeed much of the rest of the industrialized world--looked at the threat posed by global labor competition and decided to jump into a razor blade-filled pool of asset speculation. The Right celebrated its victory, and the Left went neoliberal and decided to roll with it while the bubbles inflated, creating a fleeting mirage of universal prosperity. When the bubbles popped, the Right went off an ideological cliff to defend its position, and the Left was sent scrambling to find its soul again. Neither side has quite regained control of its senses or its moral center.

That's not surprising: after all, it's hard to find a solution to a problem that one cannot even identify. It's no wonder that the majority of the country that has born the brunt of asset-bubble recessions without much partaking in the froth of the bubbly frenzy sees villains lurking in every shadow, regardless of political ideology. They don't know who the criminals are. Heck, they don't even know what the crime is, really. But they do know that somebody is going to pay for the loss of their standard of living.

But whoever the scapegoat is, they won't get their assets back to bubble highs unless they're part of the elite rich. And given legislators' priorities of the last 30 years and more, they're certainly not going to get their wages back, either.


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thereisnospoon 1/09/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Sunday, January 08, 2012

 
State sanctioned kidnapping

by digby

The other day, I wrote about the 14 year old African American girl who was wrongly deported to Colombia (even though she doesn't even speak Spanish.) Well, she's back home now. And her case illuminates a big problem with our Immigration Bureaucracy:

The girl was reunited Friday with her family for the first time since running away from her Dallas home in the fall of 2010. “She's happy to be home,” the family's attorney told reporters as Jakadrien left Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport at about 10 p.m., flanked by her family and police.

But the known facts of her case, namely that an American kid who didn't speak Spanish ended up on a plane to Colombia within six weeks of being arrested in Houston for shoplifting, are reviving questions about the frequency of mistaken or accidental deportations of US citizens.Some suggest that mistakes are on the uptick as US authorities have notched record deportation levels in recent years.

“Clearly, U.S.-born citizens can't be detained by immigration officials, much less deported by the Department of Homeland Security,” writes the Los Angeles Times in an editorial about Jakadrien's journey. “But it seems to be happening with greater frequency.”

People who are indigent, mentally disturbed, ex-convicts, or those who were born in the US but can't easily prove it are usually the most susceptible to mistaken deportations, which in the most egregious cases critics liken to state-sanctioned kidnapping. One study published last year looking at cases in which deported Americans have later been able to prove they're US citizens contends that about 1 percent of those detained and deported in any given year are, in fact, Americans. That's about 20,000 people since 2003, it concludes.

20,000 people are a lot of people. And that doesn't even count the people who have lived here nearly their whole lives and are as "American" in identity as I am.

Any country that routinely incarcerates and deports it's most vulnerable and poor, purely because they can't prove their citizenship, is a sick country. You almost have to wonder if some of them aren't doing it on purpose.

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digby 1/08/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Bungee madness

by digby

I don't get it:

A 22-year-old Australian thrill-seeker miraculously survived after her bungee cord snapped during a death-defying dive over crocodile infested waters in Africa on New Year's Eve, according to local reports.

Erin Laung Worth told Australia's Channel 9 that her feet were still bound together after she plummeted into the rapids below the 360-foot Victoria Falls bridge on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

"It went black straight away and I felt like I'd been slapped all over," Worth told the station.

"It was quite scary because a couple of times the rope actually got caught on some rocks or debris," the Aussie adrenalin junkie added.

"I actually had to swim down and yank the bungee cord out of whatever it was caught on to make it to the surface."

This whole thing just escapes me. I guess it feels good when it's over.

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digby 1/08/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Newt's Free Market Heresy

by David Atkins

Newt Gingrich speaks heresy:

“Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation,” Mr. Gingrich said, “we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.”

At a campaign stop at the Don Quijote restaurant on the edge of downtown Manchester, Mr. Gingrich seized on one of Mr. Romney’s lines from the debate, when he said, in an effort to asert that he was not a lifelong politician, that he did not get into politics until he no longer had to pay a mortgage. Mr. Gingrich suggested his rival was out of touch with ordinary Americans.

“We want everyday normal people to run for office,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Not just millionaires.”

That's not going to work out so well for Newt. Those are pretty words, but any capitalist knows that the whole goal of investment is to make lots of money off the surplus value of labor while cutting costs in order to provide greater value to shareholders. Entrepreneurship is beside the point, and job creation? Well, if an investor could produce greater profits by firing every employee and having gnomes do the work instead, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

Newt knows this, of course. He and all the other candidates have spent their lives in the service of destroying the middle class in pursuit of investor profits. Romney's Bain Capital job cremation isn't some sort of perversion of the free market. It's the whole point of the free market.

But at least Newt understands that the real free market doesn't exactly play well with actual voters. They know that their ideology is unAmerican even to their own primary voters, and they're willing to actually admit it when it's an intramural contest. Still, come June, they'll all be singing the praises of Bain Capital and the "free market."


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thereisnospoon 1/08/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Tenther Pole Dancing

by digby

Rick Perry really is just letting it all hang out:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doubled down on his claim that President Barack Obama is a socialist during Sunday morning's GOP debate in New Hampshire.

"I make a very proud statement and a fact that we have a president that's a socialist," he said, in response to a question about whether he agrees with a 2011 editorial by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that said Obama should not be attacked as having un-American values.

The moderator asked if Perry agrees with that statement.

"I don't think that our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country," Perry continued. "So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another President Obama reflects our founding fathers. He doesn't. He talks about having a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government."

Perry said as governor he pushed for a stronger embrace of 10th Amendment, which says some powers should be left to the states rather than the federal government. "The states will considerably do a better job than Washington D.C. as led by this president," he said.

He's a Tenther all the way. And an idiot. You'd think he'd hit at least 15%.

But he does serve a purpose. By blithely calling Obama a socialist in presidential debates, he keeps the Democrats trying to prove they aren't. And you know what that means. It's a very effective ploy.

BTW: Apparently "tentherism" isn't commonly understood in liberal circles. Here's a good primer, more at the link:

When the right’s view of the Constitution was ascendant 75 years ago, basic protections such as a restriction on child labor were declared unconstitutional; laws banning discrimination were unthinkable; and Social Security was widely viewed as next in line for the Supreme Court’s chopping block.

America’s right now wants nothing more than to revive this discredited theory of the Constitution. These conservatives are over-reading the Tenth Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that provides Congress’s power is not unlimited. So-called “tenther” conservatives are determined to use their twisted reinterpretation to shrink national leaders’ power to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. They must not be allowed to succeed for three reasons:

Tentherism is dangerous. Monopolists seized control of entire industries during tentherism’s last period of ascendance. Workers were denied the most basic protections, while management happily invoked the long arm of the law when a labor dispute arose. Worst of all, Congress was powerless against this effort. And the Court swiftly declared congressional action unconstitutional when elected officials took even the most modest steps to protect workers or limit corporate power.

Tentherism has no basis in constitutional text or history. Nothing in the Constitution supports tenther arguments. And tenther claims are nothing new. Each of them was raised as early as the Washington administration, and each was rejected by George Washington himself.

Tentherism is authoritarian. Health reform, Social Security, and the Civil Rights Act all exist because the people’s representatives said they should exist. The tenthers express goal is to make the Supreme Court strip these elected representatives of power and impose a conservative agenda upon the nation.

The tenther agenda

In its strongest form, tentherism would eliminate most of the progress of the last century. It asserts that the federal minimum wage is a crime against state sovereignty, child labor laws exceed Congress’s limited powers, and the federal ban on workplace discrimination and whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local businesses. Many tenthers even oppose cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Tenthers divine all this from the brief language of the 10th Amendment, which provides that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In layman's terms, this simply means that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers—such as the power to regulate interstate commerce or establish post offices or make war on foreign nations—and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress’s authority.

The tenther constitution reads each of these powers very narrowly—too narrowly, it turns out, to permit much of the progress of the last century. As the nation emerges from the worst economic downturn in three generations, the tenthers would strip away the very reforms and economic regulations that beat back the Great Depression, and they would hamstring any attempt to enact new progressive legislation.

Maybe that whole agenda is too extreme to win a national election. But as long as it's considered respectable for presidential candidates to believe it --- and dismiss those who disagree as "socialists" --- the rightward pole of our politics will continue to pull us way off center. This is a radical, right wing theory, as radical as it gets. And from Perry to Paul to Santorum to Gingrich to Romney, every last one of these would-be GOP presidents have adopted it at least to some extent. The two Texans, Perry and Paul, are true believers. They really do want to turn back the clock a hundred years.


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digby 1/08/2012 02:00:00 PM |

 
Getting the word out one traffic jam at a time

by digby

The freeway blogger hit LA on January 4th. Check it out:

Do you know how many people see that? They're just sitting their cars, mostly alone, travelling slowly on an LA freeway at rush hour. It may be the only time they've ever had to really contemplate what that means. And even if they don't give it second thought, these slogans will inevitably start to feel familiar the more they see them.

And that's half the battle in making people change the way they think about things.

If you're interested in this kind of activism, be sure to click the link. He tells you all about how he does it.

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digby 1/08/2012 01:00:00 PM |

 
The out-of-touch candidate

by digby

I think this says it all:

Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house.

Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”

“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”

A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy.

“I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.

Really darling, if you have to worry about paying bills you have no business running for office. Needing money for your expenses distracts from your real job --- delivering for your fellow millionaires.

I watched him last night and he really is bad. (I haven't been able to bring myself to watch this morning's yet.) Yes, he's marginally better than the rest of them, but that's a comment on them, not him. He doesn't really say anything, his "passion" is stilted and phony and he's stiff as a board.

Plus, he really proved last night that he isn't in touch with the religious right base with his answer on birth control. He acted like it was insane to assume that anyone anywhere would like to ban it and didn't seem to understand the connection between Griswold and Roe. And that's just wrong. There's a whole bunch of social conservatives for whom this is a priority of the first order and his dismissive attitude has to grate. Many of them believe that the pill is an "abortifacient" and believe it should be banned. Still other believe, as Rick Santorum does, that sex must be procreative regardless.

Now, it's true that the vast majority of Americans don't agree with this and use birth control without any thoughts to these issues, but Mitt's still trying to get the votes of the GOP base and I would think that was seen as a slap in the face --- a disregard of their very serious beliefs on this issue.

Maybe it won't matter, but church goers are the foot soldiers in any Republican election. He may have to distance himself from them to appeal to the middle, but it's odd for him to blatantly insult them in a GOP debate. Frankly, from what I saw, it was a genuine lack of understanding about this, not a political calculation. He's just not tuned into his base. Which explains why they can't stand him.


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digby 1/08/2012 11:30:00 AM |

 

Misdirection for Ricky

by digby

Kathryn Lopez says that Rick Santorum is misunderstood. He's not really "coming for your birth control." He just doesn't think you have a right to use it:

What Santorum has said is that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut — which dealt with a case that was a Planned Parenthood official’s stunt — was a bad precedent and bad law. It created a constitutional right for married persons to use contraceptives. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas declared that ”specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” and that “various [of these] guarantees create zones of privacy.” That would be the basis for the Roe decision eight years later, which relied on a similar constitutional stretch.

Santorum’s is a perfectly sound opinion. Why is it such a threat that some feel the need to make his position into something much more than it is

Why is it a sound opinion? I don't know. She doesn't say.

What she does say is that Santorum has the courage of his convictions and that he is willing to talk about them.But don't worry, just because he said he was going to talk about these issues from the presidential bully pulpit and make it part of the national conversation doesn't mean that he's going to have anationwide lecture because he won't propose any legislation. So that's good. Plus he'd be a "friend to sex-ed programs that don't give out condoms." (I'm fairly sure that's right.)

She doesn't mention the other thing that Santorum said, which is that he thinks states have a right to ban birth control. So, while she may be technically correct that Santorum will not personally be rummaging around in your nightstand, he's perfectly willing for others to do it. Indeed, he explicitly said they should.

But here's what interests me the most about Lopez' piece:

There’s something else worth noting. While it wouldn’t be wise for the president of the United States to launch a lecture campaign (we get way too much of that from the current president) on so intimate an issue, Santorum’s view is not as fringy as it is often portrayed. Obviously, Santorum is informed by his Catholic faith on this issue, but, in recent years, we’ve had the testimony of women who realize the damage contraception has done in their lives and relationships. A New York magazine cover story marking the anniversary of the Pill included the following:

One anxiety — Am I pregnant? — is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect.

She's mischaracterizing the (very silly) article, which suggested that using birth control is causing infertility --- because women are waiting too long to get pregnant. It's idiotic but I'm guessing it's the next big paternalistic ploy by the forced childbirth brigades --- too many dizzy gals are damaged by waiting too long to conceive that the choice must be taken out of their flighty little hands.

She goes on to complain about having to pay for birth control --- which is going to be the hook these zealots will use to whittle away at women's access and then ends with this:

In this campaign, Rick Santorum has not been lecturing us about so-called social issues. But he gets asked about them, and he answers honestly. Can’t we be honest about what he is saying?

Here's what he's saying (go to the end):

"The state has a right to [make a law outlawing the right of married people to use birth control], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.

And he explained very thoroughly elsewhere that he believes birth control is wrong unless sex is procreative it "becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure."

I think we understand him very well.

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digby 1/08/2012 10:15:00 AM |

 
Dangerous Nutcases

by David Atkins

TPM has the New Hampshire GOP debate whittled down to 100 seconds:



I must admit that last night was only the third GOP debate I've actually sat down to watch the whole way through this cycle. Listening to a bunch of sociopaths sound more and more heartless and insane with each passing month is an enjoyable spectacle for some. For me, it's just another push on the Overton Window taking the country down yet another notch on its core morality scale.

That any of these fools has even an outside shot at the Oval Office really says something about the depths to which the country has sunk.


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thereisnospoon 1/08/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Saturday, January 07, 2012

 

Saturday Night At The Movies

Girls will be boys

By Dennis Hartley

It gets better: Tomboy

“You’re different from (the other boys),” says Lisa (Jeanne Disson), sans any trace of irony in writer-director Celine Sciamma’s coming-of-age tale, Tomboy. She is talking to her new friend Michael, who recently moved into her neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris; the boy on whom she’s developing a crush. Indeed, there is something “different” about Michael. It’s a possibility that Lisa, with the insouciance of a starry-eyed pre-pubescent in the thrall of puppy love, would likely never ponder (hence an absence of irony). “Michael” is the self-anointed nom de plume of a girl…named Laure (Zoe Heran).

Laure lives with her loving parents (Sophie Cattani and Mathieu Demy) and precocious little sister, Jeanne (Malonn Levana). Mom is very pregnant and resting up these days, so we see Laure spending a lot of time with her dad, who is patiently teaching her how to drive in the film’s opening. Although dad is retaining control of the accelerator and brake (after all, Laure is only ten), we glean that she has a fearlessness and assured sense of “self” belying a ten year-old (and in a subtle way, challenging traditional societal expectations of gender behavior). This is especially apparent in a wonderfully observed scene where Laure (in her guise as Michael, who she hides from her family) watches the neighborhood boys playing soccer, carefully studying their body language and mannerisms. She is particularly bemused by their propensity for serial spitting, and taking pee breaks en masse (you know, typical males…spraying everywhere). Soon, “Michael” is on the field; shirtless, spitting and generally displaying appropriately surly behaviors. But for how long can Laure pull this off? It’s late summer, and a new school year looms; surely her parents won’t register her as Michael (and what about roll call, or gym class?).

Although it may appear on paper that this story holds all the dramatic tension of an Afterschool Special, it is precisely the lack of drama (or, as Jon Lovitz used to exclaim on SNL…”ACT-ing!”) that makes Tomboy one of the most naturalistic, sensitive and genuinely compassionate films I’ve seen about “gender confusion”. What’s most interesting here is that it is not the protagonist who is “confused”. Laure knows exactly who (she?) is; this is not so much about the actions of the main character as it is about the reactions of those around her (and perhaps the viewer as well). There is one thing the director seems to understand quite well, and that is that you can learn a lot about a society’s mores by watching its children at play; Sciamma devotes large chunks of screen time to simply allow us to observe kids doing, well, what kids do when they get together.

Tackling the subject of childhood sexuality is always a potential minefield for a filmmaker, which is probably why so few venture to go there (the last film I saw that handled it with such deftness was Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know ). Thanks to the combination of an unobtrusive (if leisurely) approach, even-handed direction, a perceptive screenplay (by the director), and extraordinary performances by the child actors (especially from Heran, who vibes like a Mini-Me Jean Seberg with her pixie hairdo) I was transported back to that all-too-fleeting “secret world” of childhood. It’s that singular time of life when worries are few and everything feels possible (before that mental baggage carousel backs up with too many overstuffed suitcases). And it’s a lovely ode to self-acceptance…which is a good thing. Any ten-year old can tell you that.

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Dennis Hartley 1/07/2012 05:30:00 PM |