Texas chops $34 million from Forest Service during wildfire problem

Much like the fake outrage about the Obama Administration's stimulus plan that was used to fun most of the Texas budget last year, the outrage over the Obama administration's assistance to Texas has also been fake. The administration has sent a considerable amount of assistance to Texas on numerous occasions. Now we find that Texas is chopping the budget for the team most in need during the wildfire outbreak. It is a state where the GOP owns all branches of the government so there are no excuses. ThinkProgress has more on the exaggerations and lies deep in the heart of Texas by the governor. Read the rest of this post...

Cornel West on Obama — "Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic"

This is a kind of Weekend Thoughts post on Obama and the sense of betrayal. Not my sense, but that of others, like Professor Cornel West, a prominent black professor at Princeton and a huge Obama supporter in 2008.

Chris Hedges at Truthdig did an interview with Prof. West — "The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic" — that has lit a firestorm in the black community. I'll present it in a second, and in a second post, an interview with another prominent black scholar, Dr. Eddie Glaude, in response. But first, consider this.

A number of communities have felt betrayed lately by Obama and the Democrats in general — it's foolish not to admit that. Gays, Latinos, immigrants, progressives, advocates for the poor, and blacks; all have a sense of checks cashed and promises unkept.

Of these, only one is in a kind of criticism-trap: blacks. Obama is not gay and he's not an immigrant. Immigrants and gays can pressure him from the outside, and he can respond accordingly. They can say, "You betrayed your promises" and he can say, "No I didn't." A simple conversation.

But Obama is black, both in reality and in white perception. When blacks say to him, "You betrayed your promises," he or his supporters can say, "And you are betraying a brother by saying this." Not a simple conversation. In addition, blacks are the only group being accused by whites of playing "identity politics" in criticizing Obama. It's a powerful killer of opposition from that quarter.

Criticizing Obama from the black square is an interesting chess problem, different from criticizing him from the Latino square. Something for you fans of eight-dimensional politics to consider.

So here's Professor West, speaking to and through Chris Hedges (who is himself not nobody). Note in it both senses of West's betrayal — the personal, characterized by that horrible, perhaps telling story of the inauguration tickets (read the interview for that); and also the political, that a major (perhaps one-and-only) opportunity was thrown carelessly away by the last person in position to stop America's self-manacled frog-march into the pit.

The interview starts:

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan.

Strong stuff, and well penned. Here is West's conclusion as quoted by Hedges (my emphasis):

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

The news isn't that the above may be true. The news is that this discussion is starting among the black community, much of which has an understandable interest in protecting a brother, the first in fact to make the really big leap.

In a later post, I'll offer another perspective on this issue, again from the black community. But I want to close with this from Prof. West; it's a note that makes me optimistic:

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities.

It's about time that people like this, with both prominence and purpose, have talked about uniting in action. A real coalition of real progressives, uncompromised and with names (West, Smiley, Feingold, Grayson; maybe Warren if Conservatives succeed against her) could be powerful if they were willing to be effective.

In my most humble opinion, of course. Weekend thoughts on what do to next.

GP Read the rest of this post...

How Harry Reid got "the biggest, best online campaign in the history of Nevada"

Really interesting article in Campaigns and Elections titled, Persuasion Points Online: Helping Harry Reid, One Click at a Time. It was co-authored by Jon-David Schlough, Josh Koster, Andy Barr, and Tyler Davis. They're the guys who ran Harry Reid's online operation during the 2010 cycle:

In early 2009, having just been hired to oversee the online component of Harry Reid’s re-election campaign, JD Schlough went to meet the Senate majority leader for the first time.

Reid knew how important the Internet had been to the Obama campaign in 2008. And, as a veteran of close races, he knew that he would need to maximize every strategic advantage to win what his team anticipated could be the toughest of them all.

“I want the biggest, best online campaign in the history of Nevada,” Reid told JD in that first meeting.

This is the story of how our firms built and deployed it.

Now, it might surprise some people that Harry Reid, who is not viewed as one of their more cutting-edge modern politicians, was so into the online world. But, he was one of the first members of Congress to engage the netroots. Back in early 2005, Reid was holding conference calls with progressive bloggers. That was way before most people on the Hill even acknowledged we existed.

Anyway, the articles is worth a read for any political types who want to know how to run an effective online operation. I'll skip over the meaty parts, but anyone who works on campaigns should read the whole piece.

Here are some of the conclusions:

Not every campaign will enjoy the Reid campaign’s advantages: a huge budget, a top-notch team of staff and consultants, and a dream opponent. But every campaign manager and every digital strategist can benefit from what we learned. The most important lesson was that digital strategy can be used for voter persuasion. But we also learned that we have to stop thinking small, in terms of clicks and impressions, and start thinking like media consultants—in terms of points. Real, needle-moving buys are measured in points, and as Americans’ content consumption habits change, online is going to look, feel, and act a lot more like television. On the Reid campaign, digital was treated like all the other elements of the media tool belt. Just like television, mail, phones, and the rest, our good ideas were funded, and the ones we couldn’t prove effective weren’t.

And just as we couldn’t have done what we did if we hadn’t had a seat at the table, we couldn’t have done it in isolation, either. Without the press team generating clips, we wouldn’t have had good content to showcase. Without the field team building a great early voter plan, our GOTV efforts would have had nothing to plug into. Our efforts paid off only because the entire Reid campaign saw them as part of an integrated strategy.

Most campaigns still don't get how to use online consultants. That's because most traditional political consultants don't grasp the online world. Harry Reid needed every tool in his arsenal. Read the rest of this post...

Many wondering if bankers scammed LinkedIn on recent IPO

Whether or not you buy into the high values of social media, you probably noticed the stunning LinkedIn IPO last week. It opened at an expensive value and doubled. Now, many are asking questions about whether this was Wall Street's latest ripoff. Atlantic Wire:

When social network LinkedIn's stock skyrocketed after its IPO debut, the financial community reeled at the fact that LinkedIn's underwriters, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, had set the price so low. As Henry Blodget at Business Insider indicated, they set the price at $45 a share when they could have asked for $90, and thus effectively cheated LinkedIn out of over $130 million.

Joe Nocera furthers this claim against LinkedIn's underwriters at The New York Times, noting that while there is "nothing wrong with a small 'pop' in the aftermath of an IPO," such a tremendous rise in stock price indicates that "in reality, LinkedIn was scammed by its bankers."

The fact that the stock more than doubled on its first day of trading — something the investment bankers, with their fingers on the pulse of the market, absolutely must have known would happen — means that hundreds of millions of additional dollars that should have gone to LinkedIn wound up in the hands of investors that Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch wanted to do favors for. Most of those investors, I guarantee, sold the stock during the morning run-up. It’s the easiest money you can make on Wall Street.

If true, this would be yet another reason why the bankers are not to be trusted. And again, when the tables are turned they rarely fail to stick it to everyone else. What a missed opportunity TARP and so-called financial reform was to put them back in line. Read the rest of this post...

More reactions from France on DSK

Despite many calls of "guilty" in the DSK scandal, we really don't know the full details yet. That's why we have trials. After hearing the French complain about the photos of DSK in handcuffs, I have to agree that it does make one look guilty. As an American, it's like watching a court case in a foreign land where defendants have to sit behind bars. Of course they look guilty, so how fair is that?

The political class in France has hardly risen to the occasion, as they have often supported DSK without knowing many of the actual facts. It's as silly as those insisting on his guilt. We don't know today. What we do know is that many in the political class have made some comments that help clarify woman are so poorly represented in politics and senior management in France.

Last Sunday France awoke to the news that Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and leading light of the Socialist party, had been arrested on board a plane and charged with sexually assaulting and attempting to rape a chambermaid in his room at a Sofitel in New York. He denied the allegations "with the greatest of firmness". For the world, it was shocking enough; for much of Paris, it was insupportable – especially after pictures emerged of Strauss-Kahn, unshaven and forlorn, handcuffed in court.

In the hours and days that followed the arrest, a string of friends and Socialist allies stepped forward to defend a man they insisted could not have done such a thing. Jean-François Kahn, a well-known journalist, said he was "practically certain" that what had taken place had not been an attempted rape, but "an imprudence… the skirt-lifting of a domestic". Jack Lang, a former Socialist culture minister, wondered why, when "no man had died", Strauss-Kahn had not been released on bail immediately. Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, meanwhile, raged against a legal system that had treated DSK like "any other person". "Everybody," declared the philosopher, "is not everybody!"

The general population has also supported DSK with many claiming that "it was just a blowjob." On the other side though, there are quite a few people - women especially - who are not surprised by the reaction of the political class. It's an issue that has not made much progress in decades and many are fed up with it.

Also interesting has been the response by many that they are glad the DSK event took place in the US rather than in France, where it surely would have been swept under the rug. Even with as many problems as the US justice system has, people do have hope that the truth stands a better chance of emerging in the US than in France where political connections run deep. Read the rest of this post...

More cracks in UK coalition

This time it's about shutting down the money grab option that the Tories are trying to introduce to the National Health Service reform, but really, this could pop up anywhere. It is doubtful that this partnership can continue without a lot more infighting like this. The Guardian:

The dispute within the coalition government over NHS reforms has intensified after Nick Clegg demanded the removal of another main part of the proposals designed to encourage competition and private sector involvement.

The deputy prime minister has put himself on a collision course with the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, by proposing that a clause in the bill encouraging "any qualified provider" to take over services from the NHS should be radically rethought or dropped.

Clegg told senior Liberal Democrats that he would scupper Lansley's bill unless the Tories agreed to the new demand. He has already insisted on scrapping the requirement that Monitor, the NHS regulator, compels hospitals to compete with each other. He wants it to be replaced with a duty to promote collaboration.

Read the rest of this post...

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes

How surprised was everyone when they made it through the day yesterday? I could not believe it, but the people here pretended as though nothing at all was going to happen because the streets were still packed at midnight when the end was supposed to occur. A lucky break, I suppose.

I had a ride yesterday with my cycling partner who just arrived back from the US (he was gone since early December) and today it's a ride out west with another cycling partner who is down from Holland. I will sleep well tonight. Read the rest of this post...

Spanish protesters tired of politics as usual

While 60,000 people gathering is still relatively small, it's still large enough. What is even more interesting is that the protesters are fed up with the same old political parties and the same old politicians. That is something everyone can relate to including in the US. How many people really are that excited about either the Democrats or the Republicans? On the right we saw the Teabaggers rise (and now fall) and on the left, there's a lot of discontent with the Democrats on a number of issues including the failed management of the financial industry, human rights, and the wars. The Guardian:

Cynical and ingenuous by turns, the Madrid protesters and those who refused to budge from the city squares have torn up the rule book of Spanish public politics. The heavyweights of old – political parties, trade unions and media commentators – are not wanted here.

"I was sacked when the Madrid regional government closed down a women's centre last year when it imposed cuts," explained Beatriz García as she bashed a small frying pan with a wooden spoon. "The unions didn't even bother to turn up."

The political parties were worse still, she said. "There is no renovation. There is nothing new or different, just two parties who take it in turn to govern because our electoral laws favour them."

Read the rest of this post...