Daily Kos

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

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Visual source: Newseum

Alexandra Petri:

Mitt Romney’s normalcy in artificial environments like GOP debates is only exceeded by his artificiality in normal environments — like, say, Michigan. Some attribute this to the Uncanny Valley — that space that dolls and CGI creations occupy wherein they are just real enough to be unnerving.

William Galston on community:

It is societies such as ours, badly divided and obsessed with the present, that most need communal ties. But they are the least likely to produce them. Obama’s speeches have gestured at this problem but haven’t solved it. Indeed, in these circumstances, only a steady appeal to common sense and common decency has any hope of sustainably convincing American citizens to act in what Tocqueville called their self-interest, rightly understood. But it’s still an open question whether our leaders have the fortitude to make, and our citizens the disposition to hear, such an appeal.

Lisa Miller on "us vs them" Christianity:

Last week, the Christianity police, in the persons of Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham, came forward to discredit the president’s religious beliefs. First, Santorum called President Obama’s theology “phony”; then, on “Morning Joe,” Graham refused to accept Obama into his Christian band of brothers: “He has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.”

With rhetoric like this, these Christian conservatives are playing an ancient game. They are using religion to separate the world into “us” and “them.” They are saying, “The president is not like us.”

WaPo:

But the forceful budget action taken last year by Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, including severe spending cuts and moves to curtail the collective bargaining rights of public employees, have left them deeply unpopular as the economy has improved.

This may make it more difficult for the GOP to win these states than it appeared just a few months ago, as polls find growing numbers of Americans who believe the economy has begun to recover.

Aw. Poor babies. I feel for them. I really do. Just like Romney feels for you.

Roberton Williams:

Economists generally favor the principles behind Romney’s plan: Lowering rates and broadening the base is good policy. But a plan that cuts rates and only promises unidentified future base-broadening? Not so much.

WaPo:

Romney uses a grandiose campaign to deliver relatively modest ideas.

He rolls into town like a state fair. Then he comes out to talk about tax policy and “America the Beautiful.” That has attracted a crowd of people with sensible minivans and serious economic worries. But it doesn’t win over Republicans who want the president to be a moral spokesman instead of just a national CEO.

This instinct toward grand stagecraft backfired on Romney on Friday, when he gave an economic speech at Detroit’s cavernous Ford Field. That venue outstripped even Romney’s impressive campaign machine: It wasn’t enough to camouflage an empty stadium.

Santorum, by contrast, uses a modest campaign to espouse deeply grandiose ideas.

His premise is that only he — a man who lacks the logistical wherewithal to rustle up snacks — can manage to rebuild the nuclear family and save freedom itself. That has made him a surprise front-runner. But it has done little to reassure the practical-minded part of the GOP base.

Added: the weekend must read from John Heilemann:

The Lost Party

The strangest primary season in memory reveals a GOP that’s tearing itself apart.

Wednesday night, the final four candidates faced off in the season finale of Republican primary debates.

Mitt Romney's performance won him the qualified endorsements of the largest newspapers in Arizona and Michigan, and enabled him to reclaim his frontrunner status—and for the next day or so, he was riding high.

But by Friday afternoon, cockiness was a luxury he could not afford.

When the Romney family motorcade arrived at Detroit's Ford Field, it was greeted by the sound of crickets chirping, rather than the cheers of hopeful supporters.

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

The quotation in the title is attributed to the legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel, and it must underscore the level of exasperation sensible members of the Republican Party must be feeling right now.

I will admit to times over the last two weeks when I have become convinced ... convinced ... that the remaining presidential hopefuls in the GOP were blowing it on purpose.

Whether it was the Romney debacle at Ford Field, or Rick Santorum's abysmal debate performance, or Newt Gingrich ... being Newt Gingrich, Republicans have to be apoplectic as they watch a president with approval ratings in the mid-40s and economic approval ratings even lower skate to fairly decent leads and an electoral college edge over all Republican comers.

This was one of the president's better polling weeks, to be sure. But that wasn't all we saw this week. We also saw a raft of new Senate data, some key House polling with actual primary elections right on the doorstep (!). Add to that the most diverse (and, in some ways, comical) Air Ball candidates since ever, and it is a full week to catch up in the "people start voting again soon" edition of the Daily Kos Elections Weekend Digest.

As one of its many objectives, the Koch Bros.-founded and -financed Americans for Prosperity has been out to defund the seven-year-old Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. It seems to have succeeded in New Jersey. Republican Gov. Chris Christie has just scooped up the $473,000 left in the RGGI coffers and plunked them into the general fund along with $210 million from the state's clean energy fund.

Myopia? Buffoonery? Hardly. It's a calculated effort to block clean and green energy programs as well as anything smacking of "climate change" mitigation. While Christie himself is not personally a climate-change denialist, the tea party and oil-soaked AFP most definitely fit in that category. Thus does Christie align himself with the most retrograde of his party's movers and shakers.

This is not the first time the governor has raided each fund:

Although repeating a budget-balancing move he has used in the past -- Christie diverted more than $400 million in clean energy funds to balance his first state budget — the proposal irked clean energy advocates. In his first three budgets, the Governor has diverted approximately $620 million in clean energy money into the general fund.

"They're cutting the program to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. "When people go to buy an energy-efficient appliance, they won't be getting any rebates."

Ten Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states established RGGI as a cap-and-trade program in 2005. It limits CO₂ emissions from power plants and charges them for every ton of CO₂ by which they exceed the limit. Plants that can't get below the limit are required to buy pollution allowances in state auctions. At least a quarter of the auction proceeds must be spent to benefit utility customers. Typically, the money is used to fund energy-efficiency and conservation programs for businesses and home-owners.

Christie conceded last May that climate change is real, but he claimed RGGI is ineffective and vowed to take the state out of the program by the end of 2012. Maria Gallucci of InsideClimate News reports:

In its three years in RGGI, New Jersey has generated more than $113 million in revenues from 14 auctions, even with Christie's diversion of millions of dollars. The proceeds helped homeowners and businesses purchase energy-efficient appliances, weatherize homes and install rooftop solar panels, resulting in $150 million in economic activity and the creation of nearly 1,800 jobs, according to a November report by Analysis Group, a Boston-based consulting firm.

A report this month by Environment New Jersey claims that scrapping RGGI would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenues. The state, at minimum, could generate more than $170 million in auction proceeds between 2012 and 2018, the report found. RGGI authorities are now reviewing the program and could move to tighten emissions requirements. If that happens, the state could bring in between $340 million and $680 million during that six-year time period, it said.

In a statement about the program, Matt Elliott, Environment New Jersey's Clean Energy Advocate, said:“It’s creating jobs, putting money back in our pockets, and cutting harmful air pollution. With data like this, the right choice is crystal clear: New Jersey should remain in RGGI and continue to reap the economic and environmental benefits for decades to come."

That is what majority Democrats in the New Jersey Assembly and Senate hope to do with legislation reinstating RGGI. But they tried the same thing last year and Christie vetoed it. In New Hampshire, it's the opposite. The Republican-controlled legislature is trying to bail out of RGGI. A year ago, Democratic Gov. John Lynch vetoed a similar effort.

It's tempting to chalk this up to just one more backward-looking move by just one more dunderhead. But Christie is no fool. And even though he didn't take up the Koch Bros. offer to help fund a presidential run in 2012, he knows where he can get suitcases of cash four years from now if the White House looks more tempting then. And he obviously knows how to make the owners of that cash happy in the meantime.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Two important pieces highlight how American labor law is stacked heavily against workers—and how things could be different. Josh Eidelson argues that one of the lessons of the Komen Foundation controversy is that secondary boycotts work—but while that's a strategy that anti-choice groups and anti-gay groups and just about everyone else can use, it's illegal for unions to do so:

So if anti-gay activists were to picket JC Penny for featuring Ellen DeGeneres in its TV ads, it would be protected speech. But if union members were to picket JC Penny for selling boycotted products, it could be illegal.

Why, Eidelson asks, should unions not have the same right to free speech as Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church?

Dorian Warren, meanwhile, argues that America's last hope is a strong labor movement, and sketching out a number of ways the labor movement can focus "not just on workers’ rights, but can also act as a democratizing force advancing social justice and expanding worker, citizen and resident power in the workplace and in their communities." For instance:

While labor law constricts the scope of issues that unions can negotiate at the workplace, it doesn’t prevent worker organizations from bargaining in the political arena for affordable housing, equitable development, local, regional and national economic policy, criminal justice, or the wide range of issues that affect poor and working class people. Stephen Lerner, among others, has outlined what a wider scope of collective bargaining might look like. Imagine, for instance, that the United Auto Workers could negotiate over the environmental standards of the cars they produce instead of just wages and benefits. Such a vision requires a far-reaching campaign to redefine the scope of collective bargaining and workers’ voices at work.

Last summer, our own Jake McIntyre similarly took a look at the constrictions of labor law and how unions and their allies can find a way forward.

And more:

• There's been another indictment in the 2010 Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 miners:
  

  Last year charges were brought against two others — the mine’s security chief and a foreman who had not been at the mine on the day of the explosion.

  But Mr. May, one of the mine’s two superintendents, is the most senior, and industry observers say the charges against him are an indication that prosecutors are getting closer to the executives who ran the company, Massey Energy, which has since been bought by Alpha Natural Resources.

• Hotel workers are asking Iron Chef Morimoto not to open a new restaurant at the Hyatt Andaz, because of Hyatt's horrible record on workers rights.
  
  Related, faculty and students from more than 150 colleges and universities are calling on Hyatt to rehire the sisters fired from the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara after objecting to having their heads photoshopped onto bikini-clad bodies.
• With locked-out workers from American Crystal Sugar and Cooper Tire on a 1,000-mile road trip for justice, word came that the United Steelworkers and Cooper Tire had reached a tentative settlement. Mike Hall had talked to some of the locked-out workers.
• Karoli explains how the picture of Michelle Rhee and Rick Santorum sugar-daddy Foster Friess isn't just some random picture of people with nothing in common taken at any old party.

  Related, while Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy's education reform program targets teachers in counterproductive ways, even he thinks Rhee is too divisive, and backed out of attending a parent group's rally when he learned Rhee would be there.

• Awesome. Tennessee's teacher evaluation process has led to physical education teachers "scrambling to incorporate math and writing into activities, since 50 percent of their evaluations will be based on standardized tests, not basketball victories."

As previously noted in Keystone XL pipeline attracts fresh foes, opposition has been growing in Texas against the building of a conduit for oil from Alberta's tar-sand deposits to Gulf Coast refineries at Port Arthur. The project has run into serious opposition across Canada and the United States from an ad hoc coalition whose members include indigenous tribes, Nebraska corn farmers and environmental advocacy groups.

Now, while congressional Republicans seek ways to get around President Barack Obama's decision to reject the 1661-mile pipeline along its current route, and builder TransCanada keeps condemning property along that same route, an assortment of East Texas landowners are fighting to keep the 376 miles of pipeline slated to run through 18 counties of their state from ever being built.

A focus for the opposition now is Julia Trigg Crawford, a 53-year-old farm manager and former basketball star at Texas A&M University. She began her fight against TransCanada in 2008. Last summer, she was among 1000 pipeline protesters arrested during demonstrations at the White House.

Crawford has sued to keep the company from running its pipeline across 30 acres of hay meadow on her 600-acre farm. The full trial begins April 30.

But, on Friday, Crawford and other family members, who have owned the farm since 1948, lost their effort to block further work by TransCanada until after the outcome of the trial. A judge lifted a temporary restraining order that had been granted earlier this month on the grounds that the pipeline might disturb archeological artifacts of the area's Caddo Indians, most of whom were forced off their land and evacuated to what is now Oklahoma in the 19th Century.

At issue in the lawsuit is whether the company can use "eminent domain" to condemn her land and that of others because pipelines are "common carriers." A Texas Supreme Court decision last year suggested that such condemnations may be unconstitutional. Some say this could be a landmark case. One opponent of the pipeline says she has found 89 legal actions taken by TransCanada against Texas landowners to enforce eminent domain.

While the constitutionality of taking private property for use by a private company is on some minds, Crawford's family has more mundane concerns. Among the specifics in the lawsuit is the potential for the pipeline to taint Bois d'Arc Creek, which flows through the property. In drought-ridden Texas, contaminated water is no small matter:

In Reklaw, population 266, Mayor Harlan Crawford [no relation to Julia] says fighting the pipeline has become his principal mission in a job otherwise filled with the predictable litany of small-town complaints, such as stray dogs and water problems. [...]

After learning that the pipeline would run near the town, residents joined forces with Gallatin, another small farming community, to form the equivalent of a regional compact that would give them more power to challenge the pipeline. One big concern for the alliance is the potential contamination of the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which lies underneath 60 counties.

"This is some nasty stuff, and we look to get it stopped," Crawford said.

TransCanada makes grandiose claims. A Waco-based consultant for the company said that the pipeline would eventually provide 50,000 direct and indirect jobs in Texas, something opponents say is ludicrously inflated. But such assertions make for a big come-on.

Even in the oily politics of Texas, however, grabbing land to benefit an oil company, particularly a foreign oil company, gets people's back up. Add in the possibility of water pollution and the disaster of strip-mining tar-sand deposits and you create an unusual alliance. Libertarians and tea partiers, including a candidate who ran against Perry in the state primary, have joined the fight against the pipeline, making common cause with people like Crawford and groups like Friends of the Earth, Corporate Ethics International and the Center for International Environmental Law.

Julia Crawford doesn't see herself as being out of the ordinary. "I'm just someone who decided to stand up and push back. We are a very proud Texas family," she says. "Even though I know it is just the Crawford family farm against TransCanada, it is worth taking a stand."

That's an attitude that seems to be spreading, not just when it comes to the pipeline, but also against a predatory Wall Street, a Congress ever more beholden to big money, an entire system seemingly dedicated to giving plutocrats even more clout than they already have. A battle here, there and everywhere. Win some, lose some, but never yielding without a fight. Model behavior for the 99 percent.

•••   •••

You can sign a petition in support of Julia Trigg Crawford here.

Conservative America is hell-bent on turning the nation's clock back to the 1950s, when there were only incandescent light bulbs, "bad" girls were always punished, and "undesirables" were kept away from the ballot box. The Right is fighting modernity with everything it's got right now, and that includes an intensified battle in the courts over voting.

An intensifying conservative legal assault on the Voting Rights Act could precipitate what many civil rights advocates regard as the nuclear option: a court ruling striking down one of the core elements of the landmark 1965 law guaranteeing African Americans and other minorities access to the ballot box.

At the same time, the view that states should have free rein to change their election laws even in places with a history of Jim Crow seems to be gaining traction within the Republican Party.

“There certainly has been a major change,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California at Irvine. “Now, you have a whole bunch of credible mainstream state attorneys general and governors taking this view. … That would have been unheard of even five years ago. You would have been accused of being a racist.” [...]

The issue has surfaced in the Republican presidential contest, including at one of the televised debates, and could move to the front burner within weeks as a federal appeals court in Washington prepares to rule on the leading lawsuit against the Voting Rights Act. That case, brought by Shelby County, Ala., is backed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona and Georgia. At least three similar constitutional challenges are pending.

There's a difference between "credible" and "elected," and what we're now seeing is an extreme Republican party that is by no means mainstream any more. It's such an extreme party that it isn't afraid of pursuing policies that are and have been identified by plenty of observers as racist, all in the name of "states rights" and the "will of the people."

Several cases are quickly working up through the courts, challenging Section 5 of the VRA. This is the provision that requires states covered by the act to receive pre-clearance from the Justice Department or a three-judge District Court in Washington for any election law changes that affect minority voters. It's the provision that at least five states are challenging as unconstitutional.

There's a multi-pronged attack on the most basic element of citizenship, and it's not about the people's will or state's rights, the ultimate code words for racist policies. It's about Republicans fighting progress and fighting politically the only way they can. With demographics against them, they either have to change, or eliminate as much of the voting population as possible. They've chosen their path. It's a path that an increasingly conservative, activist court could clear for them.

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• Relentless anti-choice forces can only be defeated by relentless foes, by Meteor Blades
• 2008 v. 2012--Is the presidential landscape changing, by Steve Singiser
• Trouble in the Heartland, by DarkSyde
• The encroachment of religion on our secular government, by Armando
• Will 2012 be the year the Democrats say 'I do,' by Scott Wooledge
• The lie about when slavery ended, by Denise Oliver Velez
• President Obama outflanks lost Republicans on corporate taxes, by Dante Atkins
• Defeating Mitt Romney is about more than 2012, by Laurence Lewis
• The Romer Memo and Obama's first term, by brooklynbadboy

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson These days, Mitt Romney can hardly find enough hours in the day to bash unions enough. But as the video above shows, it was a different story in 2002, when he was thanking the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for making a 500-foot mountainside light sculpture of the Olympic rings possible:

We thought it was going to take three weekends with 20 people. Instead it took 20 weekends with several hundred people. And the work was done by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They worked up there, they put on the snow shoes, they treaded up there to help us.

Romney's reference to snow shoes gives a small hint of the project's challenges—the workers involved had to be trained in avalanche duty.

The IBEW's work on the rings was not the only way a union made the success of the Salt Lake City Olympics possible. Before the Olympics started, a stretch of highway in the Salt Lake Valley had to be reconstructed. That work was completed ahead of schedule under a Project Labor Agreement involving six unions as well as nonunion contractors and ensuring that most of the workers involved were hired locally. The American Society of Civil Engineers named the project the top civil engineering achievement of the year.

Project Labor Agreements, by the way, are one of the things Romney told the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors he'd "curb" as "giving union bosses an unfair advantage" if he's elected president. But if that stretch of highway hadn't been completed on time, and the Salt Lake City Olympics had been a disaster at which athletes, media, and audience spent all their time stuck in traffic, would Mitt Romney have that important entry on his resume to make him a viable candidate for Massachusetts governor then and president now?

Today is the 142nd anniversary of the swearing in to the U.S. Senate of Hiram Rhoads Revels, an AME minister and the first black person to serve in the Senate. Carl Chancellor, senior Editor at the Center for American Progress writes that this anniversary "provides the perfect opportunity to reflect on the obstacles African Americans have encountered—and continue to encounter—in exercising their right to vote and to participate in the political process."

Today, 142 years after the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment—which forbade the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude—African Americans and people of color find themselves facing a growing number of impediments to the ballot box. [...]

As was the case during Reconstruction, the less progressive members of our citizenry are scared of the collective impact of black voters. Adding to their concern going into the 2012 elections is the growing number of young and Hispanic voters who are strongly progressive. In 2008 both groups delivered two-thirds of their votes to President Barack Obama, while 95 percent of African American voters went for the president.

That is why conservatives, backed by corporate donors, are resorting to extreme measures to suppress the votes of the young and minorities. Just as poll taxes and impossibly skewed literacy tests were used to bar blacks from voting during the Jim Crow era, the raft of voter suppression laws now being advanced have a singular and equally despicable aim—the disenfranchisement of targeted groups of voters.

As we reflect on the long struggle for voting rights on this red-letter day in black history, let’s recommit ourselves to protecting the vote in America. To do less is to undermine our democracy.

That's just a snippet, the whole history presented is well worth the read.

For more of the week's news, make the jump below the fold.

• The more things change, the more they stay the same. Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg at The Atlantic draws our attention to the fact that one of Tom Edison's first experiments in motion photography was cats boxing in 1894. Clearly Edison, a man of vision, knew the future of motion photography was destined to be LOL cats on YouTube.
• Detroit Free Press chronicles Mitt Romney's struggle to make the 65,000 seat Ford Field Stadium look full at less than two percent capacity (1,200 attendees).
• The Advocate's Julie Bolcer: "Stonewall Democratic Club of NYC, the largest LGBT political club in NYC and NY State, elects transgender leader Melissa Sklarz as president." Me: Congrats!
• Study finds legalizing marijauna correlates with lower suicide rates.
• American Medical Association releases study that suggests chest pain, the warning symptom for most heart attacks, is less present in the growing population of women who suffer from heart disease. This can impede early detection and aggressive initial treatment.
• Even from across the pond, the UK Guardian can see Ron Paul's dastardly plan to bogart more than his share of convention delegates. But do Mittens, Frothy Mix and the Dough Boy see it coming?
• Nelson Mandela in "satisfactory condition" after hernia operation. Best wishes. This should lift his spirits, hunky Idris Elba (Stringer Bell on HBO's The Wire) inks deal to play him in biopic.
• Last year, the mayor of Wappingers Falls, NY approached tea party Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth (NY-19) with an appropriation request. She told him to take a hike because the Federal government is only for roads and national defense. So, he decided to pull a "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" and declare for her seat so constituents would have a congressman who will actually try to bring home some bacon for the district. His name is Matt Alexander. Remember it, NY-19 one of the 25 seats we need, and can get.
• To protest the for-profit prison industrial complex, Anonymous hacks Geo Group's corporate site disabling it and replacing it with an image of imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal.
• In August 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union, National Council of La Raza and United Methodist Church — asked Obama to end 287(g) agreements that involve local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. This week, he did. Resources will be retasked to the Secure Communities program. Reaction is mixed whether this is an improvement or not.
• Bankrupt American Airlines getting huffy with labor unions over concession agreement it needs to emerge from Chapter 11. Says needs deal done in weeks, not months. Management dismisses proposals for a union buy out.
• Remember when Kennedys made headlines winning elections and fighting for the disenfranchised? Ah, those were the days.
  

  Douglas Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy, was charged with child endangerment and fighting with two maternity nurses after they blocked him from taking his three-day old baby boy out of a Westchester hospital.

• 

  The Problem We All Live With
• Did you know? Norman Rockwell, best known for saccharine-sweet, idealized illustrations of how white people live, did a haunting series of illustrations on American's struggle to integrate. Look magazine ran them in 1964. The painting above, "The Problem We All Live With" depicts Ruby Bridges escorted by national guardsmen deputy marshals to her first day of school in New Orleans, LA, and has hung outside President Obama's Oval Office since 2011.
• In New Jersey, Dharun Ravi's trial begins on felony charges he faces over the role he played in his gay Rutgers University roommate Tyler Clementi's suicide. Newscorp throws stones from the glass house of their relentlessly homophobic New York Post in their scathing first-day coverage. Irony.
• She gotta fast car: Sports Illustrated reports NASCAR's Danica Patrick wins pole for nationwide contest in Daytona. From what I can ascertain this is apparently one pole in Daytona, FL you can be proud of your daughters for pursuing.
• Yet another Obama failure! This time his relentless, socialist attack on capitalism. "U.S. stocks rose this week, driving the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to the highest level since 2008."
• The opportunity to enter your organization or small company in the Netroots Nation's 2nd annual "Grab a Booth" contest ends next Tuesday, February 28th. Netroots Nation is giving away six free booths in the Community and Exhibit Hall at NN12 in Providence this June. Enter today!