You know the knee-jerk claim from conservatives when Fox News comes under attack: Partisan, Dem-cheering MSNBC is just like Fox News, except from the left, so leave Rupert's team alooooone.
Except that, of course, it's not.
Meaning, MSNBC for most of the broadcast day actually produces a straight news product, which Fox News does not. And MSNBC for the most of the day welcomes conservatives on the air to discuss the day's issues (paging Pat Buchanan!), which is a courtesy Fox News simply does not extend to liberals.
But more importantly, MSNBC tees off on Democrats, even during the channel's supposedly liberal, opinionated shows, in the way Fox News absolutely refused to do when Republicans under Bush ran Washington, D.C. (And still refuses to do today.)
In the last four weeks, MSNBC has probably aired more substantive criticism of the current administration than Fox News aired of the Bush administration during that president's entire second term.
Period.
That's why MSNBC is not the liberal counter to Fox News. Because MSNBC does not operate as an appendage to the DNC and MSNBC does not consider itself to be a purely partisan political entity, the way Fox News now so clearly is.
Being willing to hold our own accountable is what separates us from the lower animals.
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I'd like to start by saying that I don't get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place—a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles—and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn't need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I'm deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.
Now let me explain why your son was wrong.
When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, "Have a ball, peas [sic]?" And I'm sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.
To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, "No! Looter!" right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.
The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly....
I just have to disagree with Matt Yglesias on this one, as I did with Ezra Klein when he first posted an academician's study showing that legislation has a better chance of passing if the President doesn't lead.
I don't buy it.
1. Why have a President at all? It sounds like this study would have him be nothing more than a figurehead. And even if the study were right, and I seriously doubt it, that's not the way our government is set up. I think the American people would have a problem with a President who doesn't feel the need to engage. In fact, I think the American people do have a problem with a President who doesn't like to engage.
2. I inherently have a problem with any leader who would choose how to conduct his job based on some academic's study of how to do his job. It's just a gut sense. The notion is somewhat odd and disturbing.
3. The notion that when the President leads, Congress gets all partisan, but when he doesn't lead, Congress doesn't get partisan, seems difficult to believe in principle, and in practice it's just not true.
In principle, are the Republicans going to be any nice to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, just because Barack Obama goes on an extended 2.5 year vacation until 2012? Seriously? They're going to come around on immigration reform, and climate change, and abortion once Obama gets out of the picture? That's just not true. And I apologize for not presenting any counter-polls to prove this - my polling is 20+ years of working in politics in Washington, DC. This town is partisan. Politics is partisan. There is no "cure," as the post-partisan President, with an approval rating now lower than his age, has been finding out for 18 months now.
And that last sentence is where the "in practice" comes in. Barack Obama was practically nowhere to be seen on health care reform. He didn't put forward his own proposals, didn't fight for them at all, and what happened? The GOP went immediately partisan and spent a year trying to kill reform. And they did a pretty good job. Almost killed the entire thing. And certainly gutted the proposal so that it's now a shadow of what we (Democrats) wanted, and a shadow of what we could have had.
Why did the President's absence from the health care debate not solve the partisanship problem? He hasn't been much of a leader on immigration either. So what happened there? And on climate change. And on gay rights. He didn't lead very well at the beginning during the BP oil spill. How did that go?
They say the best way to avoid a fight is to not get into one in the first place. So maybe the best way to avoid partisanship is for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to also take this academic's advice, and they can stop leading as well. The only way we're going to get the Republicans to play nice is by ceding everything to them. Then they can pick the Supreme Court justices they want, lower taxes for the rich as much as they want, bash gays and women and blacks and Latinos as much as they want, and we'll all be living in post-partisan bliss.
Now, is it possible that presidential leadership fuels "more" partisanship than simply have congressional leadership alone? Okay, sure. But George Bush was a rather strong leader - he was a moron, but he asserted himself strongly (except for those few hours he went and hid while our country was under attack, but let's put that aside for a moment). And Bush got a lot done. Oh sure, he polarized things to death. And it didn't matter. He still got a lot of what he wanted. So did Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a "sit back and let someone else take the lead" kind of guy.
And finally, if the President isn't going to get involved in legislation, or is inherently ineffective at getting involved in legislation, then don't promise it in exchange for our votes. I don't buy the argument for a minute. I think strong presidents get the job done by bulldozing, elbow-twisting, and smartly making deals. But if we're going to let the guy off the hook, and tell him he doesn't have to lead the country the next two and a half years, then he'd better find another reason for us to vote him back into office.
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It's a mess. And one of their own making. The GOP, and their propaganda organ, FOX, fed this beast. And now it's taking over their primaries. We can laugh, but as I wrote a good year ago, if the Dems screw up enough to convince the voters that they need another "change," we could very well get these nutjobs in office.
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Judge Walker just lifted the stay on his Prop. 8 decision. Marriages are now legal in California again -- and will start soon. Couples have been lining up in San Francisco and West Hollywood.
UPDATE: Looks like marriages won't begin now:
That judgment shall be STAYED until August 18, 2010 at 5 PM PDT at which time defendants and all persons under their control or supervision shall cease to apply or enforce Proposition 8.
The delay provides an opportunity for the Prop. 8 supporters to seek a stay from the Ninth Circuit. Unclear if that will happen. Absent a stay from that body, marriages can begin on August 18, 2010 at 5:00 PM PDT.
You have to know that a post titled, "Women for Blunt rally for guy who dumped his wife for something more glamorous," is probably going to be a good read. Yeah, it's good:
Roy Blunt stopped in Columbia on Monday to visit with women who support his candidacy in spite of the fact he tossed aside the mother of his children for a Washington glamor lady.
"Women for Blunt" gathered at Moresource, a woman-owned business, to meet with the U.S. Senate hopeful, who left his wife of 35 years to be with a tobacco lobbyist. Blunt and Wife No. 2, the former Abigail Perlman, are regulars on the D.C. party scene.
The relationship between Blunt and Perlman got off to an appalling start. In 2003, The Washington Post reported that Blunt tried to package a gift for Philip Morris inside the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security. Perlman worked for Altria, P.M.'s parent company.
At the time, the two lovebirds were not public about their relationship, which The Post delicately described as a "close personal" one. Blunt married Perlman later that year, a mere six months after his divorce became final.
The post includes a photo of the Blunts with the White House party crashers.
With a firm renunciation of reason sitting in your corner, it makes perfect sense to argue, as Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli does, that his state’s anti-Obamacare lawsuit is “more about liberty than it is about health care.”
It is the quintessence of callousness for Cuccinelli and others like him to pit an academic definition of freedom against the well-being of the 1 million (or 15.1 percent) non-elderly Virginians who don’t have health insurance. Read in The Post about reporter Mary Otto’s visit to a free clinic run by Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, a Knoxville-based organization that provides free medical, dental, and veterinary care to rural and impoverished areas, which vividly illustrates the plight of the state’s uninsured.
Rachel Maddow closed her show last night with a rather strong broadside against Robert Gibbs and President Obama, over DADT, but more generally, over everything. Rachel says this White House refuses to spend political capital, refuses to show guts. She says the White House won't stop the DADT discharges now because "it would be hard." She concludes:
"If DADT is going to end, the President could stop enforcement of that policy, pending that change. Why isn't he?"
Why isn't he? Because either the policy isn't ending, or the President is afraid of something. Afraid of standing up to the Pentagon (remember, THEY work for HIM), afraid of spending political capital, afraid of making Republicans angry, afraid of doing anything that in any way might seem "controversial."
It's interesting that Rachel did this, since the White House made quite a big deal recently over her recent broadcast in which she praised Obama and his accomplishments. I'm guessing the White House won't be sharing this video with anyone. It's spot on.
I've been waiting for an electronic version of Matt Taibbi's latest in-depth analysis — this time, of the Obama administration's Financial Reform bill. Well, here you go; it's a doozy. Matt digs out all the admin-Congressional maneuvering, unpackaging the deals and naming the ugly names — insider reporting at its best.
For me, this bottom-lines the bill. First, a taste from the introduction, and then I'll gloss the piece with a "good guys–bad guys" list — all you need to know about your Congressional Betters, in one chocolate-covered post.
But Dodd-Frank [the Financial Reform bill] was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America's financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn't have the stones to wipe out our country's one dependably thriving profit center: theft.
It's not that there's nothing good in the bill. In fact, there are many good things in it, even some historic things. [List of good things in the bill; check the article for details.]
All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.
The article is Taibbi at his researching best, and the writing is wonderfully clear.
Now for my good guys–bad guys lists. But first some context — the two big issues in the bill, two things real reform needed, were these:
The Levin–Merkley amendment, which implemented the "Volker rule" forbidding FDIC-insured banks from laying bets with their own money (in effect restoring Glass–Steagall), and
The Blanche Lincoln amendment, which would have forced commercial banks to spin off their derivatives business.
Needless to say, both failed. From the article, Volker-rule good guys are:
Carl Levin (D-MI) & Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who fought for it hard and got knee-capped for their trouble by both parties.
Paul Kanjorski (D-PA), a strong supporter of the Volker rule in the House.
Barney Frank (D-MA), who agreed to re-introduce the amendment in conference talks, after Brownback and Reid stripped it out (see below).
Volker-rule bad guys:
Sam Brownback (R-KS) & Harry Reid (D-NV), who worked together to kill a Brownback amendment to which Levin–Merkley was attached, then bring back the Brownback amendment clean.
Scott Brown (R-MA), who demanded many changes to the amendment in exchange for his vote, after Barney Frank got the amendment resurrected.
Chris Dodd (D-CN), powerful chair of the Senate Banking Committee, who used Brown's intervention as ground cover for even more evisceration, on behalf of this guy —
Tim Geithner, whom Taibbi says "acted almost like a liaison to the financial industry, pushing for Wall Street–friendly changes on everything," and who was clearly fronting for unnamed others in the administration (go ahead, guess).
Chuck Shumer (D-NY), Lloyd Blankfein's BFF (you have to read the Shumer section; it's priceless), who like a blade-wielding pro sliced the last vestiges of meaningful restriction from the amendment.
Barney Frank (D-MA), who upheld these last-minute Senate changes by refusing Kanjorski's request to block them in the House version.
Yep, Barney Frank is on both lists. Good guys on Blanche Lincoln's derivatives rule:
Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and a small group of Dem stalwarts who stayed on the Senate floor, ready to object if Chris Dodd tried to swiss-cheese it in the middle of the night (yes, Maria Cantwell, whom I wrote about here expressing doubts).
And that's about it. Guess whose name is missing? Bad guys on Lincoln's derivatives rule:
Chris Dodd (D-CN), who tried to substitute his own swiss cheese version for Lincoln's, only to be blocked by Cantwell & crew. (Wonder where Dodd's next office will be? Wall Street? K Street? Thank-you Street?)
Barney Frank (D-MA), the House New Democrats Coalition (click to read the list), the Treasury dept, influential FDIC chief Sheila Bair, and NY mayor Michael Bloomberg, all of whom were strongly opposed.
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) herself, who gutted the amendment for good, once she got past Bill Halter in the Arkansas Dem primary.
Little-known Blue DogCollin Peterson (D-MN), who went even farther than Lincoln did in eviscerating its restrictions (apparently Peterson wants to make soup from the left-over entrails).
And there you have it. Our fine friends in Washington. The name of the bill? Dodd–Frank, of course. The name of the article? "Wall Street's Big Win". As I say, money enables Republicans and neuters Dems.
I'd hang onto these lists. Keep your enemies in front of you if you don't want their arrows in your back.
BP has managed to link the fate of its $20 billion oil spill victims compensation fund with its continued ability to pump oil from the Gulf of Mexico.
The voluntary trust agreement negotiated with the Department of Justice is not with the British-based multinational, or even with BP America, but with a fairly remote subsidiary, BP Exploration & Production Inc. (BPEC) -- a Delaware corporation that operates BP's Gulf oil leases.
So if BP's drilling revenues from the Gulf suddenly vanished, so, presumably, would the compensation fund, said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy Program.
"This is a very advantageous agreement from BP's point of view," Slocum told the Huffington Post. "Because their big concern is that the Deepwater Horizon incident would result in sanctions that would significantly reduce BP's involvement in lucrative Gulf operations."
"But if you tie the compensation fund to Gulf of Mexico production, you are helping to guarantee BP's continued involvement in that market," he said.
Remember how Republicans wouldn't support extending unemployment benefits for those Americans who were bearing the brunt of the economic crisis created by GOP policies? Remember how worried they were about the deficits? Well, the GOP's plan to extend all of the Bush tax cuts would add billions to the deficit -- and only benefit the very rich. I doubt we'll hear many concerns about budget busting from the GOPers on this one. No surprise, but, they're hypocrites:
A Republican plan to extend tax cuts for the rich would add more than $36 billion to the federal deficit next year -- and transfer the bulk of that cash into the pockets of the nation's millionaires, according to a congressional analysis released Wednesday.
New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.
The analysis, requested by Democrats on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, comes as debate heats up over tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration, most of which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. Republicans want to extend all the cuts, which would cost the Treasury Department $238 billion in 2011, according to the taxation committee. President Obama and congressional Democrats have vowed to extend the cuts only for families making less than $250,000 a year and individuals making less than $200,000 -- 98 percent of American taxpayers -- in a plan that would add about $202 billion to next year's deficit.
Given the soaring national debt, many economists deem both proposals unaffordable. Even some Republicans, including Reagan administration budget chief David Stockman and former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, have urged lawmakers to let them expire and allow income tax rates to pop back up to their levels during the Clinton administration.
Why do I have a sinking feeling that somehow, at the end of the Congressional session, the GOPers are going to win this debate. They just have to sit back and wait for the White House and the likes of Max Baucus to cave. They usually do.
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The Senate is convening to pass a bill that provides funding for border security. Apparently, Senators Schumer and McCaskill, who sponsored the measure, are letting Gov. Jan Brewer determine U.S. policy these days. They bought into the border security BS.
There will be big news from Judge Walker today. He's going to issue decision on whether to end the stay of his Prop. 8 decision between 9 a.m. and 12 noon Pacific time (noon and 3 PM on the East Coast). If the stay is ended, marriages can begin in CA again -- at least until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issues its own stay, which could happen pending an appeal.
We're getting a really intense early morning thunderstorm here in DC. So, no dog walking for awhile. It actually looks dangerous out there.
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Wow. This really is really disturbing. It's further proof that the Pope really doesn't get the magnitude of the child rape scandal that has engulfed the Catholic Church:
In a move that has stunned critics Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the resignations of two Dublin auxiliary bishops.
Bishop Raymond Field and Bishop Eamonn Walsh had both tendered their resignations in 2009 in the wake of the Murphy report into clerical child abuse.
Both men had come under intense pressure because they had served as bishops during the period investigated by the Murphy Commission into clerical child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.
The Murphy Commission in Ireland found that sexual abuse was 'endemic' in boys' institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their original victims had been sworn to secrecy.
Church leaders have enabled and protected child rapists for decades. Decades. Pope Benedict is the leading enabler. Still.
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I just find all this "woe is us" talk -- about how we don't have 60 votes in the Senate, and that being the reason that Obama fails to fight for so much of what he promised -- to be incredibly naive. To wit, today's article by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post:
Indeed, for all the derision from the left about the Bush administration not being "reality-based," many lefty bloggers and talking heads have failed to be reality-based in assessing the Obama administration.
Health-care reform, in this glass-half-empty world, is a disappointment because it lacks a public option. The president's failure to close Guantanamo or end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is a betrayal. If only President Obama was willing to bang heads, name names, stand tough, he would have been able to get -- fill in the blank -- a bigger stimulus, tougher financial reform, new legislation to help unions organize.
Excuse me, but can these people not count to 60? Have they somehow failed to notice that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have not exactly been playing nice? That while the left laments Obama's minor deviations from party orthodoxy, the right has been portraying him, with some success, as an out-of-control socialist?
So much to respond to.
1. It's the President who said the public option was "the" best way to cut costs and ensure competition. So forgive us if we believed him.
2. The problem with the public option not being in health care reform is less about it "not being there," and more about the President not even trying to get it in there.
3. I'll let Glenn Greenwald tackle Guantanamo.
4. DADT. Seriously, you want to talk about DADT? Okay, let's. When do the discharges stop, Ruth? Under the White Houses's "compromise" being debated in Congress when will the discharges actually stop?
That would be the sound of Ruth Marcus's crickets.
5. The stimulus. Seriously, you want to talk about the stimulus? And then blame its insufficient size on the Republicans? You do realize that the powers that be in the White House didn't even tell the President that we actually needed a bigger stimulus? They just cut Christine Romer's proposal from the memo, dumbing downing down the stimulus right out the gate. We call that negotiating with yourself. It's a common theme in any analysis of the Obama policymaking. And now we have a stimulus bill that wasn't enough, leaving us with unbearably high unemployment, about to lose control of the House. You call that success?
6. And now for my favorite. 60 votes. Yes, but for 60 votes in the Senate, Obama would be king. It's all the fault of the Senate rules.
How exactly did he do that, Ruth? Not having 60 votes and all. I thought not having 60 votes was sort of a killer deal. You're exonerated from screwing up, from not fighting back, from not even trying to get your full agenda passed because you just don't have those 60 votes, and without them, you're surely doomed. Then how did George W. Bush do it?
And finally, yes, the right has been portraying President Obama as a socialist. And no, the Republicans aren't playing "nice." I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time Republicans have demonized a Democrat, nor the first time they haven't played "nice." So what's your point? Here's an idea. Maybe, rather than trying to give the Republicans a collective hug, President Obama could start fighting back? The socialist thing stuck because candidate Obama, and then President Obama, didn't want to fight back. Again, that recurring theme.
Yes, I know, being President is hard work. And the Republicans are mean. That's simply not an excuse for not even trying to fight for what you promised.
Florida Democratic Representative Alan Grayson was on MSNBC recently discussing Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' now-famous rant against the Democratic base. Here Grayson calls for Gibbs to be fired, and gets press for his "Bozo the Spokesman" remark. But that's not why I'm presenting this video.
Watch Grayson carefully. He's asked point-blank to rat out members of the administration as complicit, and dodges each time, bringing it back to Gibbs and the Republicans. That's really important.
Watch first, then my take:
You and I are Dem outsiders; it's our job to kick unresponsive Dem butt, and frankly we've been doing that.
But if, as I've asserted elsewhere, our best hope is to take the Democratic party the way the pre-raptured and post-money freaks have taken the Republican party — then we will need insiders who won't dismantle the whole thing at once, but pick it apart thread by thread.
To put it bluntly, you can't kill the horse you hope to ride.
You have to tame it, via the efforts of people exactly like Grayson. So far, at least, Grayson has not violated my sense of his integrity, so I trust his calculus. And he doesn't violate that sense here; what he does do is play his current hand carefully and well.
It's a fine line, I admit, but we need people who are walking it. And good on him for that. I'd like to vote for him for president some day, sooner rather than later.
Ratting out the unworthy, that's our job, and we're glad to do it. Being in position to replace them, that's the job of people like Alan Grayson, Howard Dean, and Elizabeth Warren.
GP
(Yes I know, net neutrality; let's see how that one plays out, vis-Ã -vis Grayson. A man can be wrong without being corrupted.)
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