Romney foreign policy concerned about country that doesn't even exist

Romney's foreign policy expert on a call today expressed concerned about President Obama's policies concerning Czechoslovakia.  And he should be concerned, as Czechoslovakia ceased existing nearly 20 years ago. Read the rest of this post...

Obama to make climate change a campaign issue

Hmm. I think some would have liked the President to make climate change an issue before the campaign.

President Barack Obama says the amount of money poured into fighting the scientific consensus on climate change will push the issue into the presidential campaign.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published Wednesday, Obama also says he's worried about the lack of international progress to address global warming and believes that is tied to frustration with the Keystone XL pipeline.

Romney ran to the right in the Republican primary on global warming, saying in October that the causes of climate change are unknown.

"My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet," Romney said at a fundraiser last fall. "And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us."

This is all well and good. But I do think the President treated climate change like he treats, or treated, any controversial issue. He didn't push very hard, and then walked away and blamed failure on how strong the opposition was, without ever really trying to beat the opposition. Read the rest of this post...

Murdoch blames everyone else for hacking problem

Now here's some classic leadership skills for you by Rupert Murdoch. Either he's a completely clueless executive and should be sacked immediately for having no idea what has been happening within his organization for years or he's a liar. You choose.

It's gutless to blame everyone else and fail to accept responsibility as the CEO but this is Murdoch that we're talking about. How could it be possible to have so many hacking scandals within the News Corp organizations - allegedly across borders as well - yet he knew nothing about it? How weak to suddenly be the tough guy.

With wife Wendi and son Lachlan watching he said that he, his son James and other senior News Corp executives were “misinformed and shielded” about the extent of phone hacking at the tabloid. He also blamed “a clever lawyer” at News International for stopping people coming forward and admitted that the culture had left too much in the hands of the editor and lawyer. “I should have gone there and thrown all the lawyers out of the place and seen Mr Goodman (the reporter jailed over phone hacking) one-on-one - he had been an employee for a long time - and cross-examined him myself and made up my mind, maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, was he telling the truth,” Murdoch told the court. "And if I had come to the conclusion that he was telling the truth, I would have torn the place apart and we wouldn't be here today.

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Obamacare making insurers pay $1.3 billion in rebates to customers

Sounds like socialism.

Where do I get some? Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post's Kaplan for-profit college division was an ALEC member

Well, this is starting to get interesting. All the spotlight on ALEC is really paying off. This is not only a Washington Post story, it's a for-profit college industry story. (Our ALEC backgrounder is here.)

David Halperin at the amazing Republic Report (my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

Republic Report has learned that the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC.

Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force. This morning, in an email message to Republic Report, Mark Harrad, Vice President of Communications at Kaplan, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company that includes Kaplan Higher Education, wrote, “A unit of Kaplan was a member of ALEC for a one year period, which ended in August 2011.”

Remember that ALEC's role in "education" is what drew the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to ALEC as well. Stripping down public education and feeding on the bones must be a major ALEC attraction. Here's Halperin on this:

For-profit colleges are the ultimate special interest. Many receive around 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid, more than $30 billion a year, and many charge students sky-high prices.

In recent years, it has been fully documented that a large number of these schools have high dropouts rates and dismal job placement, and many have been caught engaging in highly coercive and deceptive recruiting practices.

Yet when the bad actions of these predatory schools got publicly exposed, the schools simply used the enormous resources they’ve amassed to hire expensive lobbyists and consultants, and to make campaign contributions to politicians, in order to avoid accountability and keep taxpayer dollars pouring into their coffers.

We reported over a year ago on for-profit colleges — "For-profit colleges fight back against gov’t attempt to make them deliver education". A great many are simply vultures. Doubt me? Click and read.

Because ALEC specializes in enacting law at the state level, it makes a perfect place to end-around state investigation into their predatory business model:

Much of the action on for-profit colleges takes place at the federal level, where the money comes from, but states are increasingly taking an interest in protecting their residents from predatory practices – through accreditation of schools, investigations of fraud, and other oversight. So for-profit colleges have come to ALEC to seek influence at the state level.

The Republic Report article has more, including a list of major for-profit education players with ALEC ties.

ALEC is deeply involved in the "Stand and Fire" laws associated with the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the Washington Post Company's secret membership in ALEC raises many questions:

ALEC, which advanced model laws on Stand Your Ground, the provision that could influence the outcome of George Zimmerman’s criminal case for the killing of Trayvon Martin, and on Voter ID, which makes it harder for low-income people, people of color, young people, the elderly, and the disabled to vote.

Why did the Washington Post Company, whose CEO proclaimed that Kaplan was committed to aiding the disadvantaged, support through Kaplan an organization that was doing these things?

And why hasn’t the Post disclosed in its coverage of ALEC that its Kaplan division was recently an ALEC member?

Halperin has more; please do read the rest.

The public ALEC lists are fascinating (feel free to click). The non-public list, even more so. Excellent work.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Austerity promises fail as UK hits double dip recession

Despite all of the big talk about how austerity creates an economic miracle, as usual, miracle talk was nothing more than a lie by snake oil salesmen. The Tories, much like the US Republicans, are happy playing economic games with everyone else and the results are clear. Austerity during these conditions doesn't work, it only makes the recession more severe. If only the Democrats weren't so afraid of making this point early and often. Running a country is not the same as running a household, but this is somehow news for the GOP. During times like this, stimulus spending is a must to keep the economy going until the private sector can rebound. The Guardian:

"We consistently warned that their austerity plan was self-defeating and that cutting spending and raising taxes too far and too fast would badly backfire. David Cameron and George Osborne arrogantly and complacently dismissed people who warned of the risk of a double-dip recession and the country is now paying a very heavy price. Their economic credibility is now in tatters." Responding to news that a big fall in construction output and a smaller decline in manufacturing production had caused the economy to shrink for the fourth quarter in the last six, the prime minister told MPs: "These are very, very disappointing figures. I don't seek to excuse them, I don't seek to try and explain them away."

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When did Blue Dogs become "moderate"?

The head of the Blue Dog Democrats in the House, Mike Ross, is that Democrats are facing "a terrifying reign of their own as liberal activists and unions keep hounding moderate members out of office." (emphasis added)

Well, let's get a few things straight. Most importantly, Blue Dog does not equal moderate. In Democratic circles we have three major types. Conservatives (Blue Dogs), liberals (Kennedy was a good example), and everyone else in between who could potentially be called "moderates." But nowhere does being a Blue Dog (i.e., a right-wing Democrat) make you a moderate, any more than being a conservative (i.e., right-wing) Republican - the GOP version of the Blue Dog - make you a moderate.

It's a cute lie that people like Ross would like you to believe, and it's a cheap lie too. It's the same thing as Republicans always fighting to see who's the "real" Republican, meaning of course, the furthest to the right. And Blue Dogs play the same games. No one is "moderate" except them, they'd like you to believe. Really?

If Blue Dog Democrats in the House are "moderate" Democrats, then I'd like Ross to explain to us who the "conservative" Democrats are to the right of the Blue Dogs?  Because there are none. Read the rest of this post...

Perlstein: Is Obama's "religion of Secular Humanism" this election's viral RW meme?

Yes, you read that right. Seems really stupid doesn't it, that something so ... stupid ... could suck all the air out of an election campaign. Yet that's exactly what happened in 2004, with the swiftboatage of John Kerry. Stupid; and so very effective.

For Perlstein, the Kerry part of the story — the analogy that sets up the Romney prediction — started with a stupid little self-published booklet he discovered in 2004 floating around the fringes of a right-wing event.

Here's his intro (my emphasis and paragraphing):

Once upon a time, in early 2004, I attended one of hundreds of "Parties for the President" organized nationwide for grassroots volunteers who wanted to help reelected George W. Bush, at a modest middle class home in Portland, Oregon.

At one point, a nice old lady politely pressed into my hand a grubby little self-published pamphlet she had come upon, purporting to prove that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had faked the heroics that had won him three purple hearts in Vietnam. I added it to my mental store of the night's absurdities that I expected to hear rattling across the wingnutosphere the entire fall: "I still believe there are weapons of mass destruction"; "There is an agenda—to get rid of God in this country"; "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language!"

What I didn't expect was to see Kerry's war-hero cred earnestly debated night after night on CNN. Then came August and "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" — and that little old lady's fever dream began dominating the media discussion of the campaign, and the rest, as they say, is history.

That's the way, in my experience, the ecology of right-wing smears works: Insane horror stories – Clinton is running cocaine out of an Arkansas airport! Barack Obama had gay sex in the back of a limo! – bubble up from the collective conservative Id at the outset of an election year; professional conservatives in Washington identify the ones that seem most promising and launder them through the suckers in the "balance"-hungry mainstream media; and presto, before you know it, it's death-panel-palooza, 24/7.

Presto; yet this is not magic, but art. These are professionals. Watch and learn — here's how the process breaks down. They:

• Figure out how the rubes want to be lied to
• Figure out which lies have "legs"
• Figure out which lies also advance the Movement Conservative Project
• Focus-test all of the swamp-meat prose they come up with
• Deliver the stinkiest rot to the eager flies using the fly-seeking "professional" press
• Count the money (note to students: the MoveCon Project pays extremely well)

This is how it's done when the pros do it. There is nothing uncalculated about advertising. (Hint: Ask yourself why there are so many black men in the "can't get hard" ads. Go ahead, ask. There's an answer, and it's perfectly thought through.)

Perlstein has much more. He traces the history of this particular fantasia — from a 1961 Supreme Court decision footnote; to a 1974 near-miss court challenge to the "religion of Secular Humanism"; to its demonization in a 1984 right-wing classic; to ... well, read on. It's Perlstein doing what Perlstein does quite well — tell a great story.

I can't close without giving you this, the current season's seed, from the Rolling Stone article I've been quoting and Crooks and Liars. (If by chance you listen to this vid twice, ask yourself if the questioner isn't a shill, a ringer.To my ear she sounds way too focused on asking the question from a very precise angle.)

Romney in Wisconsin (that's Paul Ryan on stage with him):



In defense of Perlstein's prediction, the Catholic Bishops PAC is all over this one. I agree with Perlstein — it's not going away on its own.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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House Tea-partyers want to let student loan payments double

Greg Sargent at the Post:

Is the battle over student loans shaping up as a rerun of the payroll tax cut fight, which by all accounts badly damaged the GOP? Consider the parallels. Just as in the payroll tax cut battle, there’s a looming deadline: On July 1st, interest rates on federally funded student loans is set to double. Barack Obama and Democrats, confident that the politics are on their side, are signaling that they intend to remain on offense on the issue.

Meanwhile, House conservatives — just as during the payroll battle — are beginning to signal that they oppose the extension, period, full stop. Check out this quote from GOP Rep. Todd Akin, who is running in a GOP primary for the right to take on Dem Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Akin said the government should be out of the student loan market altogether. “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in,” he said.

You know who else wanted kids to go to college? Hitler.

Kidding. But only just.

This is sadly typical of the radical fringe running today's Republican party.  Every thing they don't like is socialism (which, to their simple minds means, of course, Soviet communism).  And everything they do like is Reaganism (even if Reagan, but today's GOP standards, would be a socialist). Read the rest of this post...