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AlterNet Blogs: Speakeasy Democracy Now! MoJo Articles | Mother Jones It's a classic move by an industry player feeling the squeeze of pending regulation: Hire a lobbying firm to create the appearance of widespread opposition via a carefully stage-managed astroturf campaign. One of the latest outfits to give this strategy a try: Education Management Corporation (EDMC), a multibillion-dollar heavyweight in the for-profit higher education industry that's the subject of multiple lawsuits and ample criticism from investors, lawmakers, and government officials who accuse the company of a range of deceptive business practices. The company, whose majority stockholder is Goldman Sachs, recently hired a GOP-linked lobbying shop known for its astroturfing prowess to fight a proposed federal rule that has the entire industry fretting about its future. Education Management Corporation operates Argosy University, Brown Mackie College, South University, and various Art Institutes. On August 24, EDMC CEO Todd Nelson blasted out an internal email, first reported on by the New America Foundation's Higher Ed Watch blog, saying that the company had hired DCI Group, a Washington-based lobbying and public relations firm with a controversial history, to coordinate a campaign against the Education Department's proposed "gainful employment" rule. The rule would establish metrics for assessing graduates' ability to repay their student loans as a way of judging whether an academic program is truly fulfilling its mandate: preparing graduates for "gainful employment." For-profit colleges have made no secret of their opposition to this rule; Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association, the industry's top trade group, described it as "unwise, unnecessary, unproven." And for-profit colleges have let the Education Department know their displeasure in a major way. Little wonder why: Education Department officials say the new rule would disqualify 5 percent of programs from receiving federal student aid money, and 55 percent would face limits on growth and mandates to warn students about the risks of excessive borrowing. Continue Reading » Kettleman City's Toxic Web by Titania Kumeh 2 Sep 2010 at 6:00am In the small Latino farmworker community of Kettleman City, California, at least 11 babies in the past three years have been born with serious birth defects, and several infants have died. Residents blame the recent spate of tragedy on the vast hazardous-waste dump three miles from town. But Kettleman City has numerous environmental villains, including contaminated tap water, heavy air pollution, and daily toxic pesticide exposure. In fact, residents' health is compromised in so many ways that Rachel Morello-Frosch, an environmental health researcher at UC-Berkeley, calls Kettleman City "a poster child for cumulative impacts." You can read the full story here, or view a photo essay exploring the tragic impact of cumulative pollutants on Kettleman City families. Interstate 5 and State Route 41 Each day up to 400 semitrucks pass within 4 miles of residential homes in Kettleman City. Nearly 100 trucks, some of them bearing toxic waste, roll directly through town on State Route 41. Farms The state of California is investigating possible links between pesticide exposure and Kettleman City's birth defects. Waste Management landfill The largest hazardous-waste dump west of the Mississippi stores asbestos, pesticides, and petroleum products, as well as PCB-contaminated wastes, which the EPA suspects may be linked to birth defects. A recent EPA investigation found PCBs in the soil (PDF) outside a storage building and concluded that Waste Management had improperly disposed (PDF) of waste. Gas fumes The California EPA says pollution from gas stations—there are 5 in the town of 1,500—could be linked to the birth defects. Petroleum deposits Potential contamination from oil and gas drilling in the Kettleman Hills includes toluene, which has been linked to birth defects. Food desert Cleft palates and neural tube defects are associated with deficiency in the vitamin folic acid, which is found in leafy green vegetables as well as fortified baked goods and cereals. Some researchers suspect diet might be a factor in the Kettleman City mystery. Contaminated tap water Kettleman City's two municipal wells contain what the California EPA calls "elevated levels" of arsenic and benzene, both carcinogens that are also suspected of causing birth defects. California Aqueduct The state Department of Toxic Substances Control is testing the aqueduct for toxic chemicals; some Kettleman residents eat fish (PDF) from the waterway. No Comments | Post CommentWhat's Killing the Babies of Kettleman City? by Jacques Leslie 2 Sep 2010 at 6:00am [Editor's Note: See a related photo essay here.] THE FIRST BABY'S NAME was America. She was born in September 2007, with Down syndrome, two heart murmurs, and part of her upper lip missing. She couldn't suck from a nipple, so her mother, Magdalena Romero, would stay up through the night to feed her with a special tube. America showed pleasure in music and delighted in being held by her four siblings. Magdalena thinks they felt a special tenderness for her because of her vulnerability. Hospital officials told Magdalena that the baby wouldn't live a year, but she didn't want to believe it. Then, one morning when America was nearly five months old, her lips turned purple. Concluding that paramedics would consider a rescue futile, Magdalena drove the baby to the hospital herself and insisted that all efforts be made to save her. For a few days, America survived, tethered to machines. Then she died in her mother's arms. Continue Reading » No Comments | Post CommentGlenn Beck's George Washington Whopper by Stephanie Mencimer 1 Sep 2010 at 6:00am During his much-ballyhooed "Restoring Honor" rally on Saturday, Glenn Beck told a whopper involving the founding father who was supposedly unable to tell a lie: George Washington. Speechifying at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, the controversial Fox News host highlighted the legacy of the nation's first president to drive home his claim that encouraging honesty and integrity was a main aim of the event. Beck even told attendees that "the next George Washington" was "in this crowd. He may be 8 years old, but this is the moment. This is the moment that he dedicates his life, that he sees giants around him. And 25 years from now, he will come not to this stair, but to those stairs. And he can proclaim, 'I have a new dream.'" Beck also invoked Washington while describing the inspiring experience of visiting famous tourist destinations around the nation's capital. "I have been going to Mt. Vernon," he explained. Holding out his hands for emphasis, he declared with emotion, "I went to the National Archives, and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington." Continue Reading » Are Swing District Dems Toast? by David Corn 1 Sep 2010 at 6:00am As he walks the quiet Main Street of Farmville, Virginia, Rep. Tom Perriello has his work cut out for him. Wearing khakis, brown boots, and an open-collar shirt in the 100-degree heat, the freshman Democrat pops into stores and offices—he's not always recognized—and asks how business is going and what he can do to help. He tells his constituents that America needs to "make things," and "the elites" in Washington don't get this. At Key Office Supply, owner Jim Ailsworth thanks Perriello for his health care reform vote, noting that he plans to use the law's small-business tax credit for his staff. At Davenport & Company, an independent stock brokerage, manager Brad Watson says he's worried that the stimulus (which Perriello also supported) won't yield long-lasting public works. Perriello points out that he argued "for a stimulus that is focused on 10 years—not 18 months." After Perriello leaves, Watson points to campaign literature on his desk for state Sen. Robert Hurt, who vanquished several tea party candidates to become Perriello's Republican challenger. "Hurt's a nice, moderate Republican," Watson says; he intends to vote for him. Some 175 miles away in Washington, Republican strategists would be heartened to hear Watson talk. Defeating Perriello is one of the GOP's top priorities as the party fights to gain the 39 seats it needs to seize control of the House and create an anti-Obama fire wall. These few sleepy blocks in central Virginia constitute one of the front lines in this fight. (Before the campaign even began, Perriello was already the target of $1 million in attack ads.) Given that political handicappers estimate the GOP is likely to bag at least 30 House seats, the Dems' fate could depend on whether Perriello manages to hold on. Continue Reading » No Comments | Post CommentWe Are Not Invisible by Matteen Mokalla 31 Aug 2010 at 6:00am As Fox News, the New York Post, and other right-wing media outlets are stirring up emotions over the so-called "terror mosque" planned near the site of the World Trade Center, I can't help but think back to the few days I spent in southern Ohio as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in November 2008. It was there, in Fairfield County, that I committed one of the greatest acts of cowardice in my life. I allowed myself to stand by and say nothing while an entire creed was deemed violent, hateful, and un-American. At the time, the Obama team was already concerned about the false rumor that their candidate, a self-identified Christian, was a closet Muslim. (According to a recent survey, nearly one-fifth of Americans continue to believe this). When approaching potential voters who believed the rumor, volunteers were instructed not to get in an argument over Muslims, their rights, much less what Islam really stands for. Instead, we were given pamphlets about Obama's faith in Christ and were told to talk about the then-senator's churchgoing habits. On one campaign stop I knocked on the door of a middle-aged woman who was shocked to see her son's name on my list of potential Obama voters. "He had better not vote for Obama," she declared to me on her doorstep. When I asked her why, she leaned towards me and whispered in my ear, "Well, for one, he's a Muslim and I have the proof." Continue Reading » Jules Feiffer, Sketchy Character by Clara Jeffery 30 Aug 2010 at 1:25pm In his new memoir, Backing Into Forward, Jules Feiffer describes channeling dyslexia, anxiety, and a troubled childhood into a prolific career. "There's some brain damage," he jokes, "but I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways." Fortunately, the Oscar-, Pulitzer-, Obie-, and Polk-winning author and illustrator's quirks remain in full bloom. The 81-year-old is still cranking out political cartoons and working on kids' books with his daughter and—after a 50-year hiatus—The Phantom Tollbooth author Norton Juster. Not that he's gone soft; his satire remains as sharp as ever: "The grown-ups, or the ones I choose to go after, deserve everything they get." Mother Jones: I should start by confessing that I named my son after Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth and, like a lot of people, became familiar with you through your children's books. How does it feel to have that be the way into people's hearts—the softer side of Jules? Jules Feiffer: [Laughs.] As long as they pay attention, why should I care? I love doing the children's books as much as anything else I've done. As a matter of fact, just coming back from the audiologist because the hearing aids I've just spent $7,000 on weren't worth a goddam thing, I wrote new picture book on the bus just to cheer myself up. MJ: Do the kids' books feel like they're on a continuum to the very dark social satire that you've done? JF: No, no. It's a different part of me. Until kids' books, I was never able to show the more playful side, the sillier side, and just be out-and-out goofy. MJ: In your book, you say that the best cartoons or comics are when one person does all the writing and the drawing. I found it interesting in context of The Phantom Tollbooth, because I can't imagine a better pairing of text and image. JF: Well Norton [Juster] and I have for the first time in 50 years just done another book, which is coming out in the fall. It's a picture book for younger kids, called The Odious Ogre, which will be in color. What I've tried to do is kind of get inside the author's head and do a presentation that he or she might want to do if they could draw. It's all about telling the story, and telling the story from the inside. What I've always done with the cartoons, in terms of my art, is try to get inside the characters I'm talking about. You know, the character who is speaking, is showing us through body language and through facial expression what he or she is thinking, what the struggle is that's going on, and visualize it as much as verbalize it, and that's what I try to do in the kids' books. MJ: Your kids' books do such a wonderful job of capturing loneliness and other emotional states that we think of, falsely, as adult concepts. JF: I couldn't actually write kids books and go on the attack the way I do with grownups. The grownups, or the ones I choose to go after, deserve everything they get. But kids are in ongoing need of support, and they get various versions of it from grownups which aren't legitimate—a grownup's version of what we think you should have. We tell you what creativity is, and we even tell you what you're thinking. What I try to get at in my books is akin to that sense that Holden Caulfield felt when he reads a writer and wants to call him up in the middle of the night—to be a friend to the reader. Continue Reading » No Comments | Post CommentThe Hardest Job in Washington by David Corn 30 Aug 2010 at 6:00am The office might be that of a regional sales director for a midsize company—a modest space, adorned by little more than family photos, a "Fightin' Phillies" banner, and a shelf of binders bearing labels like "Northeast" and "Midwest." Four blocks from the Capitol, it has a view not of Washington's grand buildings, but of an elevated highway. Yet this room is the command center for a titanic fight that could determine the future of the nation. It's the office of Jon Vogel, the man tasked with one of the toughest jobs in politics: stopping what appears to be a tidal wave heading toward Congress. Vogel, 35, is the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a.k.a. "D-Trip" (even "D-Triple C" is now passé), the party unit in charge of raising money and providing other support for House races. It's a tall order: Since Abraham Lincoln, the party of a first-term president has always lost House seats in the midterm election, with two exceptions—the year after FDR was inaugurated during the Great Depression, and the year after 9/11. If the pattern holds true this year, Republicans might ride popular discontent, Tea Party anger, and sky-high unemployment to regain control of the House. Vogel's job is to stop that from happening. Continue Reading » No Comments | Post Comment
In These Times Daily Kos It was the first debate of the Arizona governor's race, and likely the last, as there's no way incumbent Republican Gov. Jan Brewer chances another disaster like this one. It started out embarrassing enough: Brewer, who has gained national notoriety for signing into law the country's toughest provisions for illegal immigrants, awkwardly paused twice during the opening statement of the Clean Elections Debate broadcast on the state's PBS affiliate. "I have ... done so much and I just cannot believe that we have changed everything since I've become your governor in the last 600 days. Arizona has been brought back from its abyss," Brewer said, after appearing to lose her train of thought. Then, after saying, "We have cut the budget, we have balanced the budget and we are moving forward. We have done everything that we could possibly do," the governor paused for a 10 seconds — an eternity in a live televised debate — before looking down at her notes. Video of that giggly 10-second pause: Ouch. But even worse was the substance, as the local media gangs up on her for her refusal to admit that her alarmist story about beheadings in the Arizona desert is bullshit: The transcript is below the fold, but needless to say, it's brutal. Her refusal to own up to her misstatement is inexplicable, generating hostility from the local press and stepping all over her message. But maybe that's good for Brewer, as it's one less question about her blatant conflict of interest in signing SB 1070: Gov. Jan Brewer took center stage last Tuesday night after she officially clenched the Republican nomination. Standing just behind her was a man most Arizonans would not recognize. He’s Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, policy adviser and a lobbyist for the largest private prison company in the country. And he’s one of two people in the Brewer administration with ties to Corrections Corporation of America. The other administration member is communications director Paul Senseman, a former CCA lobbyist. His wife still lobbies for the company [...] Isaacs said private prison companies have been buying influence in Arizona politics for years. The number of private prisons and jails operating across the state shows the result of that influence, he said. Currently, there are at least 12 for-profit prison, jail and detention facilities in Arizona. Isaacs said the state has something else that attracts these companies. "The other Holy Grail, if you will, of private prison construction is immigrant detention," Isaac said.
Earl update by DarkSyde 2 Sep 2010 at 1:16pm At 11 AM EDT Hurricane Earl's track is mostly unchanged from yesterday evening. The storm has intensified slightly and is now a strong cat 4 with winds in excess of 140 mph and higher gusts. Conditions along the US east coast will deteriorate as Earl now moves near or over the outer banks later tonight, bringing hurricane and tropical force winds and 3 to 5 foot storm surge to a wide region: Earl's size and track will produce tropical-storm force winds somewhere along the East Coast this weekend, and there is a 28% chance of hurricane-force winds along the Outer Banks. NHC puts out a very useful wind probability forecast. The highlights are that Cape Hatteras, NC has a 28% chance of hurricane-force winds and a 91% chance of tropical-storm (TS) force winds. A wide swath of 30+% probabilities covers the East Coast from Virginia to New England. Cities with a greater than 40% chance of TS winds include Norfolk, Ocean City, Providence, Boston, and Nantucket. Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada has a 62% chance of TS force winds. A hurricane and tropical storm warning has been issued by the NHC. A Special Alert has been posted at North Carolina DOT. More info on evacuation and storm preparation can be found at FEMA and GetReady.gov. See also discussion in MillWX's diary.
"Guiding assumptions" of American governance by Hunter 2 Sep 2010 at 12:30pm I'm not trying to be naturally contrarian, here -- really. But in a back-and-forth argument with Digby over a review of Markos' new book, the American Prospect reviewer dropped this nugget of wisdom: Granted, hyperbole and distortion has helped the right win elections for almost 30 years, and during that time, they have successfully changed the terms of American politics. But for all its electoral success, the conservative movement hasn't really changed the guiding assumptions of American governance or stopped the expansion of the welfare state. Liberals might be arguing in the house that Ronald Reagan built, but conservatives are still trying to breach FDR's fortress. Mind you, TAPPED is a liberal website. But statements like these drive me nuts, because they are manifestly not true. And recognizing that they are not true is fundamentally required if "liberals" are going to even compete electorally, much less actually practice competent governance. Saying "the conservative movement hasn't really changed the guiding assumptions of American governance or stopped the expansion of the welfare state" isn't just not true, it's a ridiculous statement. It's a bit past ridiculous, in fact. The conservative movement hasn't changed guiding assumptions of American governance? Really? What channels has this person been watching? As has been pointed out countless times in countless outlets, the policies of Ronald Reagan himself are now considered too liberal for him to survive in modern GOP politics. Ditto Buckley. Ditto David Frum. Ditto Bob Bennett. John McCain, the ex-presidential candidate of the Republican Party, had to launch himself into loony-land to survive a primary attempt mounted against him. It used to be an assumption of American governance that governance would, at the very least, include actually governing. Now we've got an entire, large segment of the political population dedicated to the premise of not governing, at all. Of just shutting everything down, from the economy to the judiciary to the EPA to education to "volcano monitoring" to corporate regulation to civil rights protections to everyfuckingthingelse. The legislators themselves are getting in trouble with their voters if they don't block all legislation. And all government appointees. And whatever else comes along. Even previously completely innocent and popular stuff like S-CHIP, a health insurance program for children, is now a hot-button issue and a sign of an offensively charitable government. We had an independent pro-affordable-housing group, ACORN, get completely shut down because they got on conservative radar for... well, for advocating for poor people. They never had problems before, but in the world of Beck, Breitbart and Fox, they're suddenly an intolerable, anti-American, near-communist presence. And the reviewer says nothing has changed? Hell, we're not sure we have the "federal authority" anymore to regulate whether B-effing-P is allowed to dump a metric megaload of oil up and down the entire Gulf Coast, or if trying to prevent that is an unbearable overreach of a government that needs to be blocked and apologized for. Economically, we're on the cusp of a Japan-style lost decade, with the odds looking more likely every day -- even though every damn economist in America knew what Japan did wrong when they did it and vowed we in America would never, ever be so stupid. But we are exactly that stupid now, and proudly so, because conservatives have succeeded in freaking themselves and others out about "deficits" after ten years of running up the biggest freakin' deficits the free world has ever seen. We chose to undertake an inadaquately sized stimulus, even while most serious, non-already-discredited policymakers recognized that an FDR-style stimulus was exactly what we needed, simply because politics prevented us from taking the action the government itself knew it needed to take. We're talking about stealing yet more from Social Security, not because it's in trouble but simply because we want to. We're talking about nipping off a little here, a little there from educational programs, and health programs, and food stamps during the worst recession since The Big One, because the scary welfare state is one of the few things that both parties are willing to gut. Before this economic disaster, the previous President of the United States made the "privatization" of Social Security -- that is, gutting it or ending it, and leaving it to individual investors to try their hand at the market casino (with appropriate fees, of course) -- a major domestic focus. That exceedingly stupid idea was shelved during the market collapse, since it was manifestly obvious that had it been undertaken, millions of senior citizens would have been reduced to eating driveway gravel after their "private accounts" simply disappeared into the void -- but guess what? Yep, the idea is already back again. We're still in the middle of the crisis, and the notion of gutting Social Security is already back, and being called "sensible", even "necessary" by the same group of clowns that drove the truck into the ditch a few scant years ago.
FDR's fortress hasn't been breached. But it has been hollowed out from the inside, repeatedly, over the last decades, as deregulation turned banks into increasingly irresponsible organizations, corporations into increasingly more powerful counters to public authority, and as the promise of a basic, though meager, quality of life provided by Social Security and Medicare keeps getting whittled away, bit by bit, as something "private investments" or "private companies" are in a better position to provide. Regardless of what you may think about our new healthcare legislation, you have to at least acknowledge that it was based in large part on the premise that private, for-profit industry, not the government "welfare state", should be the primary guardian of the health and welfare of our own citizens. Some used to call a very similar notion Romneycare, back when Republicans were willing to offer similar policy prescriptions. Now the other side calls it Obamacare, considers it the work of out-of-control socialism, and threatens to run any politician who acquiesces to it out of town on a rail. Most importantly, Democrats -- and liberals -- continue to play a game of defense against further erosion of government, rather than truly restoring its competence. We're not talking about actions to help guide us out of recession, anymore -- those have been declared off the table. We're simply trying to prevent conservative economic nuttery from nosediving our country into a worse recession. And the conservatives have been failing? What on earth would success look like?
NH-Sen: Report: Ayotte shares blame in Ponzi oversight failure by Laura Clawson 2 Sep 2010 at 11:48am The FRM Ponzi scheme may have been the first significant sign of trouble for former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte in the New Hampshire Senate race. Which means that two weeks before the primary, with the state's biggest paper endorsing another candidate, she can't be happy about this: Former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte failed to have internal procedures to alert her to “a series of criminal and civil complaints” about a Lakes Region Ponzi scheme, a draft legislative report concluded Tuesday. Ayotte, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, denied any knowledge of this scandal involving Financial Resources Mortgage Inc. before FRM filed for bankruptcy protection in November. “The attorney general must implement internal practices to ensure that he or she is briefed when a series of criminal and consumer complaints come to the office against a particular bad actor,” concludes the draft done for the House and Senate commerce committees investigating the FRM matter. The report draft is making headlines across the state and has already been jumped on by one of Ayotte's primary opponents: In a statement, Republican candidate Bill Binnie said, "Once again Kelly Ayotte has been criticized for her handling of this Ponzi scheme, the largest fraud in New Hampshire history. And once again the victims, many of whom lost their life savings, and the taxpayers of New Hampshire await a credible explanation of her failure to act." Just a couple months ago, Ayotte looked like a clear and easy winner in the primary. She still has to be considered the favorite, but it's shaping up to be a lot tougher than expected -- and that's a bright spot for Democrats.
The deficit commission's conservative bias by Joan McCarter 2 Sep 2010 at 11:00am TPM's Brian Beutler profiles each of the 18 members of the deficit commission, and finds it a bit stacked to the right. Comprised of nine tax-averse Republicans and nine Democrats, many of whom have expressed support for Social Security changes in the past, the commission will almost certainly be biased toward benefit cuts, and away from raising taxes, when it presents its report on December 1. Ezra actually does some quantifying of the political leanings of this group. Here are the legislators serving on the president's deficit commission: For the Democrats, Kent Conrad, Max Baucus, and Dick Durbin are representing the Senate, and Xavier Becerra, Jan Schakowsky, and John Spratt are representing the House. For the Republicans, Mitch McConnell sent over Judd Gregg, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo, while John Boehner deputized Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, and Dave Camp.... Something you may notice: The Republicans are much more conservative than the Democrats are liberal.... The Senate Democrats on the commission equal out to position 35 -- that is to say, there are more than 30 Democrats who are more liberal than the deficit commission team, which means the deficit commission team is a bit more conservative than the average Senate Democrat. Not so for the Republicans. They average out to position 94. That is to say, there are only a handful of Republicans more conservative than this group. So on the Senate side, the Democrats are a bit less liberal than the average Democrat and the Republicans are a lot more conservative than the average Republican. The story on the House side is a bit more muted: The Democrats end up in position 84. The Republicans end up in position 384. That means there are more than 80 Democrats who are more liberal than the Democrats' deficit commission group, and about 50 Republicans more conservative than the Republican contingent. As Democrats control more seats than Republicans do, this means the House Republicans are only slightly more conservative than the House Democrats are liberal. The presence of so many hard-right lawmakers--not to mention the co-chairmanship of Alan Simpson, who's long-standing opposition to Social Security is no secret--certainly doesn't help the credibility of the commission.
Life support by Laurence Lewis 2 Sep 2010 at 10:16am It was just about a year ago that we were hearing stories about President Obama's intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Again. The president's most ardent defenders insisted that we shouldn't listen to unnamed and anonymous sources, and should instead wait and see what happened. And then when he escalated, pretty much as had been reported, we were told that it was the right move, and we should support it. The same dynamic played out with the public option. For months, while it became increasingly apparent that the president wouldn't fight for a public option, we were told that he kept saying he supported one, and we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. When the public option was punted, we were told that it never had been all that important, anyway, and the health insurance bill that was passed was all kinds of wonderful, so we should just be appreciative and grateful. The same dynamic is playing out with the Catfood Commission. We are being told not to worry, and that Social Security won't be gutted, and it's just an advisory committee, and on and on. And it seems likely that there is an element of truth in the defense, but only an element. It doesn't seem likely that Social Security will be gutted, but don't be surprised if it is incrementally stripped down. An older retirement age. Less benefits. Things that can be defended by those reflexively inclined to defend. We'll hear that it wasn't as bad as we'd feared, so we should accept it and support it. But as with the incremental rollback of reproductive rights that was folded into the health insurance bill, it's the momentum that will matter most. Democrats buying into Republican framings. Democrats leading a movement backwards. Democrats refusing to stand on principle, on issues that should be core Democratic principles. As she so often does, digby gets to the heart of the problem, starting with the refusal to fire Alan Simpson. It's fairly clear they will keep Simpson on the panel. The question is why. I think it's a pretty good guess that he's a guy they can "do business" with. And if you pay attention to what he's saying that's fairly alarming. Of course, he's only a professional conservative, and not a professional liberal, so it's all cool. And more to the point, she has advice for younger people: I just want to say to all the young people who read this blog that I'm really sorry about all this. I'm old and I'll probably get most of my social security. You, on the other hand, are going to face a vastly more insecure old age if this happens. Right now you don't think much about it. You figure you'll make a lot of money someday or you'll at least be well compensated enough to be self-sufficient. And it all seems so far away that you can't even relate it to yourself at all. But she remembers when she herself was young, how the future seemed so far away, and it was easy to believe something good would happen in the interim, so she wouldn't have to worry about Social Security. But now, she does. Social Security is one of those things you don't think about until you get to be about my age and you're staring into the abyss, a decade or two away and you suddenly wake up knowing that you aren't likely to be wealthy in your old age no matter how hard you work between now and then. The bottom line? If the Democrats fail this time to protect the safety net and the Teabaggers take over the government you're going to need them. They're just getting started. And I'm sorry about that. You can't expect young people to understand how important this is for all the reasons I just stated. It's our job to leave the next generation at least as well off as we were and I'm not at all confident that we're going to do it. Some may wonder why there is such a gaping enthusiasm gap, with the Republicans, in all their insanity, looking to make large gains, most likely in the House. It's not very complicated: the Democrats are abandoning core Democratic principles. Another issue on which we were told to trust that the president knew what he was doing was the economy. Krugman and Stiglitz and Roubini were saying the stimulus wasn't nearly large enough, but every slight apparent improvement in economic data was sold as evidence of the grand turnaround. Even as the same people who had predicted the economic collapse kept telling us that the recovery wasn't what it seemed. For which even many former supporters on the left criticized them. We now know they were right. But at the beginning of this year, rather than making the case that Republican economic models had proved complete failures, while a Keynesian approach was the only answer, we instead were handed the Republican rhetoric of deficit reduction, right in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. And we were handed it by Democrats. Some now say the enthusiasm gap is partially or wholly attributable to liberal criticism of the president's policies. As if people who are unemployed or under-employed or losing their mortgages wouldn't realize it if we didn't keep talking about it. In other words, it's not the policies and the lack of policies that are driving down Democratic enthusiasm, it's the discussions of the policies and the lack of policies. In another post, digby gets to the heart of the real reason: I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if you want to get people enthusiastic you might want to pick a big old fight right about now instead of trying desperately to avoid controversy (also known as "kerfuffles".) In case the Democrats don't realize it, Republicans and right leaning Independents aren't going to vote for them no matter what they do. Even if they open up those FEMA camps and start rounding up every Muslim and Mexican looking person they see, it won't work. Neither will rolling over and playing dead. We need Democrats to stand for core Democratic values, and to fight for them as if all our lives depend upon them. Because many lives do. And many Democrats' careers do. For many, it already may be too late. Because in January 2009, the Republican Party seemed on the verge of extinction. The Republicans lacked the issues and the skills to resuscitate themselves. They still lack the issues and the skills; but by ignoring their liberal base, while buying into Republican framings on key issues, the Democrats have revivified a political opposition that should have been left for dead.
Cheers and Jeers: Thursday by Bill in Portland Maine 2 Sep 2010 at 9:55am From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE... Dumb: Fred Barnes on Fox News' Special Report Monday: "If Jewish terrorists, in the name of their religion or some perverted version of it, had attacked the World Trade Center, then you couldn't build a synagogue. ... If Christians had become terrorists, a group of them, and attacked the World Trade Center in the name of Christianity or some perverted version of it, then you wouldn't want to see a church a couple blocks from it. ... [W]e have more than 1,000 mosques in America. They're all over the place!" Smart: Former Maine Assistant Attorney General and current executive director of Center for Preventing Hate Steve Wessler in yesterday's Portland Press Herald: The Ku Klux Klan has deep Christian roots. Would Americans rise up in anger if a Christian group proposed to build a church near the site of a Klan killing? In 1856, a period of intense anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, a mob of angry Protestants burned to the ground a Catholic church in Bath. Would Maine Catholics have erupted in anger and hysteria if a Protestant church had been built near the site of the burned and desecrated Catholic church? That there are hateful Christians who commit acts of violence partly in the name of their religion does not mean that Christianity as a whole is hateful and violent. That there are hateful Muslims who commit acts of violence partly in the name of their religion does not mean that Islam as a whole is violent. Pulitzer-winning: Me, this morning on my cocktail napkin: Oh noes! Mosques is all over the place, I tells ya! Over there and over there and over there!!! They're breeding like rabbits! You shoulda stopped at 800, I tells ya! Pretty soon there'll be so many mosques that they'll be crowding out our homes and businesses! There'll be mosques on the national mall and in the Grand Canyon if we're not careful! I mean, seriously, how many mosques do "you people" need? Save some room for the rest of us! After all, we only have 300,000 Christian churches here. That's hardly any at all! Hair on fire! Hair on fire! I do love being a helpful part of the debate. Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Abbreviated pundit round-up by Barbara Morrill 2 Sep 2010 at 7:12am Your one stop pundit shop. Gail Collins: Sarah Palin is going to Iowa to be the headliner at a Republican fund-raiser. In the state that will be the first to hold a contest in the 2012 presidential campaign, even if it has to do it in 2011. Her staff says this means nothing whatsoever, but let us acknowledge that Palin is on a roll. She’s got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on the president’s Iraq speech was: "may make u want to dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered." On the one hand, the sentence construction does have that Sarah ring to it. On the other, how many of you think that Palin has old Orwell books hanging around the house? May I see a show of hands? E.J. Dionne: Obama's Oval Office speech was resolutely nonpolitical in form but profoundly political in its implications. To rescue his party, Obama had to begin rebuilding his popularity, offer hope in a time of economic despair and restore confidence in the course on which he has set the nation. [...] For Van Hollen and other Democrats, the real test of whether Obama succeeded will not be the reception of this single address but whether it becomes the prelude to an invigorated presidency that uses the end of combat operations in Iraq to rekindle the aspirations for change that won him power in the first place. As a successful author, Obama knows that turning a page is not the same as writing the next chapter. Now, he must produce a narrative compelling enough to alter a story line that, on its current trajectory, does not end well for him. Matt Miller: My fellow Americans: I'm a pundit, not a president, but since it's a moment for taking stock of America's role in Iraq, I want to remind you that I blew it. I supported the war in 2003 because I thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ... For my part, I'm chastened. I'm less confident in my judgments on foreign affairs. Politicians rarely admit they're mistaken (as our surge-opposing president and vice president proved again this week). Neither do . But politicians can be held to account. Pundits prattle on regardless. Not to be holier (or wronger) than thou, but that turns people off. It ought to. I'm hoping for the best, in the spirit the president urged Tuesday night, though he can't admit he fought the surge that's created the chance for a happier ending. But in the end I'm with Cher, who's still singing her heart out in Las Vegas: "If I could turn back time . . . " Thank you, God bless you, and may God save America's unaccountable chattering class. Steven Levingston: First, let's get past the risqué cover of Meghan McCain's campaign memoir, "Dirty Sexy Politics." [...] She ended the campaign feeling alienated from her party and worried about its domination by the Christian right. Calling herself a passionate Christian, McCain fears the party will shrink and possibly become irrelevant if it narrows its agenda to "accommodate only one moral code." On the night of her father's defeat, she felt gloomy enough to imagine the worst for the party. "That night," she writes, "I was standing at its funeral and saying good-bye." Joshua Green: The White House insists that it could not have gotten a larger stimulus through Congress, a debatable claim. But by twice neglecting to try, it has staked its fortunes on a policy that has visibly fallen short on the issue of greatest concern, the economy. Because of the divide between the experts and the strategists, nothing is happening. Given the weak state of the economy, the White House cannot claim that the stimulus it settled for has sufficed. Unwilling to call for another one, it is left to look on silently and helplessly. Jarrett Barrios: as our families continue the march towards equality, the gay and lesbian community often doesn’t talk about divorce, even though some of the most important protections associated with marriage are exercised at the end of a relationship — protections that help the more economically vulnerable partner, give a formula for sharing the care of the children, and establish how two people can disentangle a life’s worth of acquisitions, compromises, and dreams. Just as gay and lesbian couples share the joys of marriage, we will share the pain of divorce, something for which we have no template. Divorce plumbs impossible depths of sadness. It involves separating the dishes and the books and all the other things you acquired back when you both still felt the lightness of love, asserting to a judge at a public trial that, yes, your marriage has broken down irretrievably, and telling your parents whose marriage of 47 years hangs heavy over your anemic explanations to them. Nearly a year ago, I separated from my partner. At the time, we had been together for 16 years and married for over five. I felt I couldn’t discuss it beyond my close circle of friends. Especially if you’re gay and arguing that marriage should be open to you, divorce seems to be the ultimate failure. Julie M. Weise: We can already see the future of our nation if it renounces birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, and it isn't pretty. Dragging economies, new forms of fraud, a disenfranchised underclass, children deported to places they have never even visited — countries that do not have birthright citizenship have experienced these problems and more, and have been forced to reconsider their practices. Germany, Israel and Japan are just three of those countries, and their experiences have much to teach us. Arturo J. González: I write on behalf of the Bar Assn. of San Francisco, a legal professional membership organization with 8,000 members that works to elevate the standards of integrity, honor and respect in the practice of law. I disagree with Times Assistant Managing Editor David Lauter's claim that the sexual orientation of Northern District of California Chief Judge Vaughn Walker is relevant to the paper's reporting on the federal Proposition 8 case Walker adjudicated. Lauter states that judges "bring the totality of their life experience to the cases on which they rule. As a result, certain aspects of their humanity are relevant to note in news stories." Yet Lauter acknowledges that if the judge deciding the case was heterosexual, The Times probably would not have reported it. [...] I object to The Times' reporting beyond the facts and legal analysis of the case to inject irrelevant and potentially inflammatory information about the personal characteristics of a judge. Doing so reflects a misguided presumption of heterosexual normativity that undermines the public's confidence in the rule of law based on biased assumptions about the impartiality of anyone without a heterosexual sexual orientation.
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