Hullabaloo

noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:50:33 PDT

Rerun

by dday

Big ups to Tom Brokaw for structuring the debate in the same order, with practically the exact same questions, as the first debate a week and a half ago. Thanks for spending 90 minutes providing the same information that Jim Lehrer did. Great work, Tom.

The only things that stood out to me, that weren't practically the same canned responses as last time, were these:

• Obama called health care a right and not a commodity, and brought a moral dimension to the issue that calms my nerves about him on the topic.

• Darfur got mentioned, which was one of the few new ones.

• McCain basically called for a version of a new HOLC, with the government stepping in to buy up failing mortgages and work them out with struggling homeowners. This is completely at odds with his record, and I'd like to see him explain it to fiscal conservatives. Also, why now and not during the bailout negotiations?... late update: the bailout bill already has this option, though it's completely at the discretion of the Treasury Department.

• Fountains of conventional wisdom like Brokaw still think there's a problem with entitlements completely out of proportion to the actual problem. Social Security is not in crisis and Medicare's crisis has directly to do with skyrocketing health care costs and should not be viewed in a vacuum.

• Obama's line on why insurance markets should be deregulated because the credit card industry moved all their businesses to low-regulation states like Delaware was... you know, interesting, considering his Vice Presidential nominee.

• Both candidates remain out to lunch on Afghanistan and were totally non-responsive on the plain fact that our presence there has become toxic. McCain thinks we can do a "surge" there, which turns "surge" into less a tactic than a pretty word, and Obama is slightly better but still needs to recognize that Afghanistan in 2008 is not Afghanistan in 2002.

No changes in the polls from this, as very little new things were revealed.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:30:01 PDT

No Interest

by digby

I am, sadly, in an airport with no TV tuned to the debate in the whole damned concourse, so I'm missing this one too. Please feel free to chatter in the comments.

Tonight's drinking game word is "crisis." I hope you have a 12 pack.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:30:00 PDT

Broken Faith

by digby

Finally, the Uighur prisoners in Guantanamo have been allowed to awaken from their kafkaeque nightmares:

Today, for the first time, a federal court ordered the release into the United States of 17 innocent Uighur men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for nearly seven years. The men are refugees who would face persecution and imprisonment, if not death, if returned to their native China.

“In the history of our Republic, the military never imprisoned any man so harshly, and for so long, let alone men who are not the enemy. We have broken faith with the rule of law, and been untrue to the generosity of spirit that is our national character,” said Sabin Willett, Partner at Bingham McCutchen who argued the case for the detainees today.

“This is a historic day for the U.S. Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them,” said CCR Attorney Emi MacLean. “For years, the United States has begged other countries to clean up the mess we made in Guantanamo, but the hypocrisy of this appeal was evident abroad. Perhaps now other countries will be less reluctant to come to our aid.” MacLean continued, “Allowing these wrongfully detained men a fresh start would also provide the U.S. a fresh start – an opportunity to turn a page and finally take a position of leadership in closing Guantanamo.”

Religious and community leaders from both Tallahassee, Florida and the Washington D.C. area offered to the court detailed plans for the support of the men, from housing and counseling to employment and car insurance. In this stunning show of goodwill and solidarity, 20 leaders from faith-based communities in Tallahassee, Florida, and a network of refugee resettlement agencies and other religious groups, have pledged to help settle the men in local communities. Many members of the Uighur community came to court today to lend support.

Said Mr. Willett, “The volunteers who come to court today from church and community, from synagogue and mosque to offer sanctuary to these men bear true faith to that character, and give us hope that the better angel of our nature can yet return.”

On the day of the hearing, Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) also reiterated their June call for the U.S. to grant protection to the imprisoned Uighurs.

The 17 men currently imprisoned at Guantanamo left China amid increasing political oppression and found their way to Afghanistan, where they lived in small Uighur communities. In late 2001, they were forced to flee the aerial bombardment of the surrounding areas. Eventually, they made their way to Pakistan in the belief that they would be safer there. After crossing into Pakistan, the Uighurs were welcomed and fed by Pakistani villagers who then turned them over for generous bounties offered by the United States.

Last week, after years of litigation, the U.S. government finally conceded that none of these men would be treated as “enemy combatants.” All were cleared for release long ago. However, because of the stigma of their detention at Guantánamo and for fear of offending China, no other country had agreed to offer these men safe haven. Despite this failure to find a third country to take them, the government argued that the court could not release them into the U.S. and, therefore, that the men would have to stay at Guantanamo indefinitely.

I suppose we'll probably have some sort of witch hunts in the neighborhoods where these men will live --- it's just too tempting for the xenophobe know-nothings. (Tune into talk radio...) But anything's better than Gitmo. And good for the religious and community leaders who stepped up. The government actually owes them reparations, but in the meantime at least they will be out of that hellhole.

This is yet another in a long line of moral stains on this nation perpetrated in our names these past few years. It makes me feel ashamed and embarrassed.

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noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:20:08 PDT

Delegitimization Project

by dday

The polls are surging, the fundamentals of the election are in the favor of the Democrats, and time is running out. That's why today, the Republicans kicked their ground game into high gear.

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

ACORN, which is going to supplant the ACLU as the organization conservatives blame for all the world's ills, routinely flags suspicious voter registration applications for election officials generated by their registration drives. This does not sound like the work of an organization dedicated to stealing elections - the whole "we turn ourselves in" part works against that. This is from ACORN's statement today:

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.

On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19^th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."

So you have 46 bad applications out of 80,000 new voters registered in Clark County. And of course the thing about bad voter registrations is that they are easily flagged and almost by definition cannot result in a fraudulent vote. If someone submits a registration form with the names of the Dallas Cowboys on them, that won't result in the Dallas Cowboys voting in Nevada. The same with duplicate voter registrations. It would be the most time-consuming and least likely to be successful vote stealing effort in history.

But that's hardly the point. The Bush Administration sought to make this a priority months ago by creating joint task forces to investigate voter fraud. The Attorney General of Wisconsin, in a bid to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell, openly boasted about taking action - with the Justice Department - over this non-existent problem at the RNC (how nonpartisan of him):

"We are out there front and center everyday and you'll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don't have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal," he continued.

This isn't about stopping the scourge of voter fraud. It's about using that as a crutch to stop people from voting, to put up obstructions and increase the burden among Democratic communities. They put fliers in black neighborhoods warning of prosecution if black people vote, and they distribute false information designed to get students to be afraid to vote at their colleges. Voter fraud is the hook on which they hang this cloak of suppression.

Here's Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A recently unearthed e-mail from a Republican strategist in New Mexico shows the unbridled cynicism that underlies claims about fraudulent voting. Patrick Rogers, former lawyer for the New Mexico Republican Party, was among the party hacks pushing for criminal investigations into alleged voter fraud. He clearly was hoping that the threat of legal sanctions would intimidate Democrats and aid Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), who was in a tight race for re-election. According to a new report from the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general, Rogers wrote in September 2004:

“I believe the [voter] ID issue should be used at all levels — federal, state legislative races and Heather’s race. … You are not going to find a better wedge issue. … This is the single best wedge issue, ever in [New Mexico].”

The McCain campaign is doing the same thing with this perverse charge that Barack Obama's contributions are "shadowy" and "suspect." Because donors under $200 don't have to be itemized on FEC reports, they are essentially attacking the strength of Obama's small-donor base in much the same way that these bogus fraud allegations attack the strength of Democratic voter turnout.

This may not be enough to turn the tide of the election, but will certainly be enough of a seed of doubt for the right wing noise machine to cultivate for years, delegitimizing an Obama victory and setting the stage for another wave of backlash politics. If you thought the right had a persecution complex while in the majority, wait until you see it in the minority.

...it's been brought to my attention that the Secretary of State and the Attorney General of Nevada are Democrats. The investigation is part of a joint task force with the US Attorney of Nevada and the FBI, in addition to state officials. I seem to remember the US Attorney scandal being about firing prosecutors who wouldn't vigorously pursue voter fraud allegations. I'll leave it to you to decide who's running the show here, the state or the feds.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:30:00 PDT

Joe Six-Pack

by digby

...hasn't had much of a raise in years.

Bob Herbert makes a point today that I expect we'll be hearing again over the next few months:

We’ve been living for years in a fool’s paradise atop a mountain of debt. The masters of the universe on Wall Street lost all sense of reason, no doubt. But most of us have been living above our means through the magic of easy credit, ever lower taxes, ever rising property values, stock market bubbles and the gift of denial, which we used to assure ourselves that the bills would never come due. We’ve even put our wars on a credit card.

The burden of debt for a typical middle-income family, earning about $45,000 a year, grew by a third in just the few years from 2001 to 2004, according to the Center for American Progress. The reason for this unsustainable added weight was the rising cost of such items as housing, higher education, health care and transportation at a time when wages grew only slightly or not at all.

In other words, work was not enough.

As for the debt burden of the federal government, don’t ask. (But you might want to ask your grandchildren how they plan to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With reality now caving in on us — banks and brokerage houses falling like tenpins, a trillion dollars or so in bailout money being added to the nation’s debt burden, families by the hundreds of thousands being driven from their homes by foreclosures — it might make sense to get back to basics. And in the United States, the basic economic component of a sustainable family life is a good job.

What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.

With the latest financial meltdown, there has been widespread outrage over the excessive compensation of top corporate executives. Where has everybody been? The rich have been running the table for the better part of the past 30 or 40 years.

"Income inequality" is one of those phrases we've heard a lot about, but haven't really seen why it matters. Well, this is it. Much of the American middle class, stuck with stagnant wages, inundated with consumer goods and easy credit, is in debt, big time. Popular culture has been celebrating the vast wealth of Britney or Trump, making it look easy and desirable. New goodies with deals at 0% interest, new consumer electronics that you can put on that credit card they just sent you in the mail without even asking. And all at a time when the rich were getting much richer and the average worker's salary was standing still or going lower.

Nobody cared about income inequality when credit cards and home equity were covering up for the fact that there were no raises. Now, the party's over and that reality is becoming much more clear. The raises (or property values) that were supposedly coming to cover all that interest aren't coming after all.

My question is how the "conservatives" are going to convince everyone one more time that the government needs to cut their taxes so they'll go out and spend money to stimulate the economy. I somehow doubt they will. Maybe this will all blow over and the party will get a second win, but I doubt it. This time people going to pay down debt. And that means the government is going to have to spend directly rather than encouraging citizens to spend mindlessly on new consumer goods if they want to stimulate the economy. That should make for quite the interesting political battle. It challenges every economic trope the conservatives have been spewing all these years.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:30:00 PDT

Into The Belly Of The Beast

by digby

Naomi Klein goes to the University of Chicago:

NAOMI KLEIN: When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld. I have it on my website. My favorite quote in that speech from Rumsfeld is this: he said, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”

So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.

More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.

But he also was clearly a tremendously inspiring teacher, and he had a gift, like all great teachers do, to help his students fall in love with the material. But he also had a gift that many ideologues have, many staunch ideologues have—and I would even use the word “fundamentalists” have—which is the ability to help people fall in love with a perfect imagined system, a system that seems perfect, utopian, in the classroom, in the basement workshop, when all the numbers work out. And he was, of course, a brilliant mathematician, which made that all the more seductive, which made those models all the more seductive, this perfect, elegant, all-encompassing system, the dream of the perfect utopian market.

Now, one of the things that comes up again and again in the writings of University of Chicago economists of the Friedman tradition, people like Arnold Harberger, is this appeal to nature, to a state of nature, this idea that economics is not a political science or not a social science, but a hard science on par with physics and chemistry. So, as we look at the University of Chicago tradition, it isn’t just about a set of political and economic goals, like privatization, deregulation, free trade, cuts to government spending; it’s a transformation of the field of economics from being a hybrid science that was in dialogue with politics, with psychology, and turning it into a hard science that you could not argue with, which is why you would never talk to a journalist, right? Because that’s, you know, the messy, imperfect real world. It is beneath those who are appealing to the laws of nature.

Now, these ideas in the 1950s and ’60s at this school were largely in the realm of theory. They were academic ideas, and it was easy to fall in love with them, because they hadn’t actually been tested in the real world, where mixed economies were the rule.

Now, I admit to being a journalist. I admit to being an investigative journalist, a researcher, and I’m not here to argue theory. I’m here to discuss what happens in the messy real world when Milton Friedman’s ideas are put into practice, what happens to freedom, what happens to democracy, what happens to the size of government, what happens to the social structure, what happens to the relationship between politicians and big corporate players, because I think we do see patterns.

Now, the Friedmanites in this room will object to my methodology, I assure you, and I look forward to that. They will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedman’s theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. We’ll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.

But here’s the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman’s other life—he wasn’t just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world—China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a “who’s who.” So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedman’s great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.”

Read on...

noreply@blogger.com (tristero) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:30:00 PDT

McCain/Keating = McCain/Palin

by tristero

I agree with my blogging colleagues that this film about the McCain and Keating is a must see.

The story is very simple: Keating was a common thief who stole hundreds of millions of dollars directly from his own company. McCain and 4 other senators were paid by Keating to block inquiries into that theft. They were all caught, Keating was sent to the slammer while McCain and his colleagues were sternly reprimanded and publicly humiliated.

The lesson of the story is also simple. McCain doesn't possess the moral and intellectual judgment to be president of the United States.

Nor has McCain learned better judgment over the years. Exhibit A: Sarah Palin, his first presidential-level decision and as spectacularly bad a failure of judgment as his befriending and support of Charles Keating. In a very real sense, McCain's support of Keating and McCain's choice of Palin are all of a piece: John McCain cannot make intelligent decisions.

Bottom line: John McCain does not have what it takes to be president.

noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:06:24 PDT

Frustration, Anger, Incitement, Violence

by dday

Yesterday, at two major rallies for the Republican candidates, audience members yelled out that Obama is a terrorist and that he should be killed (or maybe that Bill Ayers should be killed, hard to know from the context, but when you're talking about someone approving of murder in the presence of a Republican candidate, it's a distinction without a difference). Today, an audience member screamed "Treason!"

The right has made a cottage industry of whipping up their side into a frenzy, demonizing liberals, blaming them for every ill of society and ramping up that rhetoric louder and louder until it essentially has no distinction from eliminationism. And as much as the conservative noise machine gets all wounded and indignant when you say this, such rhetoric does play itself out into acts of violence.

Indeed, John McCain has actively shielded domestic terrorists from prosecution through his votes in the 1990s. These are the characters, the Randall Terrys, the Chad Castagnas, that are never subjects of ads or whisper campaigns.

Pfotenhauer’s invocation of abortion clinic bombers in defense of McCain is ironic given that McCain has repeatedly voted against protecting Americans from domestic terrorists in the anti-choice movement. On multiple occasions throughout his career, McCain sought to limit the government’s ability to punish violent anti-choice fanatics by:

– Voting against making anti-choice violence a federal crime. As the Jed Report notes, McCain voted in 1993 and 1994 against making “bombings, arson and blockades at abortion clinics, and shootings and threats of violence against doctors and nurses who perform abortions” federal crimes.

– Opposing Colorado’s “Bubble Law.” McCain said he opposed Colorado’s “Bubble Law,” which prohibited abortion protesters from getting within 8 feet of women entering clinics [Denver Post, 2/27/00]. The law was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

– Voting to allow those fined for violence at clinics to avoid penalties by declaring bankruptcy. NARAL Pro-Chioce America notes that McCain “voted to allow perpetrators of violence or harassment at reproductive-health clinics to avoid paying the fines assessed against them for their illegal acts by declaring bankruptcy.”

(This is to say nothing of Sarah Palin's very direct ties to Jew-hating Christian Zionists or the extremist Birchers in the Alaska Independence Party, which until recently included her husband.)

It should be unsurprising that the McCain campaign is stopping reporters from mingling in their crowds - maybe it's for their own protection. But riling up your base and demonizing your opponent to this degree - calling him un-American, for example - is bound to have consequences. Especially when we're about to head into a protracted economic downturn and it will be blamed on liberals, gays, Hispanics, Arabs and black people, not necessarily in that order.

...more:

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

They fail to understand the consequences of their actions. *

* - meaning this.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:00:00 PDT

Sounds From Mars

by digby

I can't tell you how much Sarah W. Palin's accent is bugging me. Alaskans do not have this accent. They don't sound like North Dakotans and they don't sound like Canadians and they certainly don't have the weird, folksy drawl of Sarah W. Palin. Unless they are transplants, which Palin is not, Alaskans sound like other inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest, which is to say they sound like newscasters.

Julia has put together some clips which show that Sarah W's accent isn't only odd for someone who spent her life in Alaska --- it comes and goes:

Of course, there's nothing that the conservative base likes more than someone who sports a rural or southern accent. And in fact, they prefer it to be fake --- it means the person who uses it understands how important they are and has even changed the way they sound in order to appeal to them. They squealed with delight at the Connecticut Yankee George W. Bush's carefully cultivated Texas drawl.

There's nothing wrong with Palin's accent. In fact, it might even be charming if it were real. But I'm just not charmed by phonies and that exactly what she is.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:30:00 PDT

All Gone

by digby

In case you find yourself listening to the financial gasbags blather on hysterically about complex nothingness like they know what they're talking about and it's leaving you confused, may I present Atrios:

They Lost A Lot Of Money

Spending the day watching CNBC, it's really quite stunning that they're unable to grapple with the real problem underlying all of this instead of the consequences of that problem. There's been a tremendous evaporation of housing wealth as a consequence of the bursting of the housing bubble. Lots of banks made bad loans and that money isn't coming back. Dealing with home foreclosures is time consuming and expensive and a lot of houses are underwater. Other people lost money insuring mortgages. Still more people lost money buying up those mortgages. Still more people lost money lending to people to buy up more mortgages. Even more people lost money insuring those loans. Etc.

All of this babble about liquidity and short selling and blah blah blah just obfuscates all of this. A big reason that there is a liquidity problem is that... people lost a lot of money. All gone!

And he has the right alaphbet soup after his name and everything.

Honestly, watching CNBC makes me appreciate the staid, contemplative, thoughtful style of Chris Matthews.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:00:00 PDT

Wind-Up Doll

by digby

If anyone knows John Roberts on CNN, could you please tell him to cut the sanctimonious crap and stop interrupting and lecturing guests about "name calling" when they are arguing about important political differences? The two presidential candidates' economic advisors Holz Eakin and Goolsbee had to endure being scolded by Roberts over and over again --- and he was just wrong. They weren't name calling, they were disagreeing over some pretty important things. They are both respected economists, not "political strategist" hacks and we are in the middle of a hotly contested, extremely important election. Roberts apparently can't tell the difference between real political argument and swiftboating nonsense.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if Roberts weren't the ditziest mannequin on cable TV (and that's saying something.) But it's extremely irritating to have to watch this empty suit treat his guests like children and then pat himself on the back as if he's accomplished something. Ken dolls should be seen and not heard.

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noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:30:01 PDT

You Don't Get Your Oversight

by dday

Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten won't be testifying to Congress anytime soon. Not until their Dear Leader is on an island somewhere:

Time will run out on this year's congressional session before the battle between two branches of government can be resolved, according to the ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The ruling essentially pushes any resolution on the politically charged case until next year.

"The present dispute is of potentially great significance for the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches," wrote the panel of judges, two of whom were appointed by Republicans.

Still, the judges wrote, "Even if expedited, this controversy will not be fully and finally resolved by the judicial branch ... before the 110th Congress ends on January 3, 2009. At that time, the 110th House of Representatives will cease to exist as a legal entity, and the subpoenas it has issued will expire."

There you have it, folks. The White House has basically altered the relationship between the executive and legislative branch permanently. Future Presidents now know that if they push aggressively enough, if they evade oversight and subpoenas and dare the Congress to stop them, nothing will come of their actions, no matter how illegal they are.

It's worth going back and understanding what the White House actually did in this case, a series of events now illuminated by the recent OIG report on Justice Department politicization, the facts of which did nothing to persuade the circuit court that decisive action needed to be taken. We now know that the executive branch, led by Karl Rove, absolutely played a role in the firing of US Attorneys in 2006. There are emails between Rove and officials in New Mexico proving his role in the firing of David Iglesias, for example, because of Iglesias' refusal to swiftly prosecute Democrats and bogus voter fraud cases. They made room for a political friend of Rove's, Tim Griffin, at the US Attorney's office in Arkansas by firing Bud Cummins. And they conspired with Senator Kit Bond to remove the federal prosecutor in Missouri:

In Missouri, evidently, Republican politics are exceptionally bloody, with clans fighting like rival mobs whose carnage spreads to other locales and sweeps in innocent civilians.

This is what former U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves discovered when he was ousted in January 2006 by the Justice Department. He got his first inkling of trouble in 2004 not from the department, but from an aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), whose office was then embroiled in a bitter dispute with Graves's brother, a U.S. congressman.

In a telephone call, the aide angrily warned Graves that if he did not intervene on Bond's behalf -- against his brother's chief of staff -- the senator "could no longer protect [his] job." Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced from his Kansas City office after Bond's staff made repeated complaints to the White House counsel's office.

More on the Graves firing here.

This is all out in the open despite pervasive, continuous stonewalling on the part of White House officials, refusing to comply with any and all investigations into their conduct, including the OIG report put together by their own Justice Department. But the evidence is nonetheless clear and thorough.

The White House's active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys -- traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration -- deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.

You can see the wealth of evidence at the handy link from TPM Muckraker. It need not be repeated here.

What must be repeated is how easily the White House has evaded any accountability for these clear crimes of politicization of the Justice Department. They took advantage of the lack of teeth in such federal statutes like the Hatch Act, which offers remedies only to the firing of those responsible, by having the perpetrators resign. They allowed an investigation to be released but only one coming from an internal monitor, not an independent investigation from Congress or a special counsel. The report was so damning that the Attorney General was forced to name a prosecutor to investigate the crimes further, but he refused to make her independent from the DoJ, and he gave her a 60 day mandate so that the investigation could not spread beyond the current Presidential term in office, after the election and before the new President begins his term. And now, as that investigation will be wrapped up before Miers, Bolten or anyone else would ever have to testify, their testimony will not factor into this accelerated timeline.

Indeed, in order to get Miers and Bolten on the record, the House Judiciary Committee would have to file subpoenas all over again, as they will have expired, and go through the exact same stonewalling. Thus far absolutely nobody has paid even the smallest price for the US Attorney purges, other than moving from their cushy jobs to some other cushy wingnut welfare sinecure.

This is the crisis of accountability we are facing due to the expansiveness of executive power over decades and consistent enabling from the Congress as they fail time and again to enact basic oversight in real time. This scandal represents the failure of our system, a loophole in the Constitution that extremists have successfully exploited.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:30:00 PDT

Oh Canada

by digby

Conservative violence seems to be on the rise everywhere:

Toronto police patrolled a midtown area overnight, after vandals cut brake lines on at least 10 cars parked at homes with Liberal election signs on their lawns.
"We're investigating. Officers are paying special attention to the designated area and we take this very seriously," Staff-Sgt. Shawn Meloche, from 53 Division, said last night. "This is a danger to life as well as to property. Regardless of the motivation – and there appears to be a connection (to the signs) – this is a public safety issue."
Affected residents live in the riding of St. Paul's, in a swath of the city around Eglinton Ave. between Bathurst St. and Mount Pleasant Rd., and had Carolyn Bennett signs on their property. Although Meloche confirmed 10 cases of vandalism last night, Liberal riding headquarters said the number was going up, reporting 14 by 9 p.m.
The cars were also damaged in other ways; some were scratched and keyed with L signs. Phone and cable lines of some homes were cut.
"There are two child seats in the back of my car," said Andrew Lane, chief financial officer for Bennett's campaign. "To cut the brake line on a car like that is just evil. Awful."
Added Lane, whose children are 6 months and 22 months: "You have to crawl under someone's car and cut the brake line, knowing that it could kill someone, or their whole family."
Lane discovered his brakes didn't work on his silver Saturn View as he tried to pull up at a stop sign near his home yesterday. He kept slamming the brakes and, in a "moment of terror," narrowly avoided slamming into a bus.
Later, the garage called to tell him it had been no accident. When Lane expressed disbelief, the mechanic told him: "Look, this is a big, heavy rubber hose and it's been cut through with a very sharp knife. You should phone the police."

That's pretty awful. You'd think it might just be depraved, generic vandals, but this does seem to be connected to the yard signs.

I hate to jump to conclusions, but there's just too much evidence of the right wing fringe coming unglued right now. I would expect that if they lose, we're going to see more of it here in the US. Times are likely to get tough and these people have been indoctrinated in propaganda for the past three decades that says liberals are the cause of all their problems.

H/T to RK
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noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:30:00 PDT

Dishonorable Revisionism

by dday

So I watched the Obama campaign's Keating documentary, and it's a fairly good recitation of the scandal, and the connection to the financial crisis of the present.

What's more, the research section of the "Keating Economics" site includes a wealth of information and documents, including personal letters from McCain to White House colleagues and federal regulators asking for them to back off Charles Keating. This letter to then-WH Chief of Staff James Baker in 1985 is particularly striking, if only for the line "I believe it to be unwise, and I think it flys (sic) in the face of our recent efforts to remove the hand of government from the affairs of private enterprise." That sentence alone explains much of the current crisis.

Now, what's been very interesting is the McCain campaign's reaction to this. Rewriting 20 years of history, they have trotted out surrogates, including McCain's lawyer in the case John Dowd, to claim that the entire affair was a classic political smear job on the Arizona Senator. This makes no sense, considering that McCain's very cultivated media image was entirely launched on his admission of guilt in the Keating case. As usual, Billmon puts it best.

But I was around, and following congressional politics rather closely (by which I mean professionally) when McCain first popped up on the political radar screen in 1986 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. In exchange for various regulatory favors, Keating, a wealthy and politically, um, generous, S&L executive, turned himself into the special friend of a bipartisan group of sleazebag Senators, with five in particular, including McCain, reaping most of the benefits. By modern standards (i.e. Jack Abramoff’s and Ted Steven’s standards) it was actually pretty tame stuff, but it was considered a big deal at the time.)

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain "brand," because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media ("Senator admits guilt" outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.)

Now, if you go back and look, you’ll see that if Keating didn’t comp McCain as generously and vigorously as he did the other four, it was probably because McCain was a very junior senator at the time, with relatively little influence to peddle. But it wasn’t because Honest John was shy about accepting the favors that were offered him. If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won’t find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain’s fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he’d already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain’s media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them – after the world had already found out he took them. But that’s precisely what McCain did. He’s never looked back since.

Until today, when he flip-flopped on his own contrition, and basically used the time-honored political trick in describing an investigation against him as a "witch hunt."

This is the usual move for McCain. He admits his own failures only when it's politically convenient. In the moment he's as dishonest and dishonorable as the rest, probably more. But at the proper moment, he returns to the lecturn and somberly recounts his moral failings, weeping at the altar of honor for all to see, and the media responds in Pavlovian fashion with a handkerchief for their fallen warrior and a flurry of encomiums to his great character. Whether that will happen this time around is unclear. But McCain reverting back to the "I did nothing wrong" side of the Keating Five scandal should make it pretty obvious that to him, "honor" is a coat that is worn only in winter, only when necessary.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:30:00 PDT

Punishment For Being Human

by digby

It is very dispiriting that California's Prop 4 requiring parental notification for abortions seems to be in danger of passage considering how how high the stakes are for some of the most vulnerable people in our population. It seems that the anti-choice forces are on the verge of another successful chipping away of a woman's right to own her own body and choose her own reproductive future.

The ad to the left tells the whole sad story and I encourage you to click through and read it. But let me just say that it is a tragedy for any teenager to be forced to bear a child against her will. And that is a very likely outcome for some girls if this proposition passes.

Everyone would prefer that a young woman or girl would have a relationship with her parents that would allow her to seek their help and support if she became pregnant. Many girls probably have that. But an awful lot of them don't. They have abusive parents or those whose values would require them to make an irrevocable decision to bear a child against her will. Girls are, by definition, immature and don't always understand how time works --- they live in denial past the moment when they can explore all their options. Being kids, they don't fully understand the consequences of failing to face reality, and if they have to confide in their parents they may wait longer than they otherwise would, out of embarrassment or fear. And, of course, there is the problem of incest and abuse, which makes it nearly impossible for some girls to tell their parents.

The anti-abortion crusaders are now flogging what they call "The Juno Option" (thanks Hollywood!) but I think it's fair to say that there are few teen age girls as self possessed and mature as that movie character. Most women, of any age, are emotionally torn to some degree or another, at the prospect carrying a child to term and giving it up for adoption. Even if they feel that it is the right thing to do and are happy that someone will have the great happiness of raising a child through their generosity, it isn't easy. Most likely, their future children will have a sibling they do not grow up with, and even in the case of open adoption the relationship is fraught with complexity. Certainly, as much as the anti-abortion zealots claim that having an abortion "damages" a woman (and some do have regrets) adoption is no less difficult. Indeed, for a great many women, it is far more difficult.
Most people agree that the best solution for everyone is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. (Unfortunately, the anti-abortion zealots are working to deny women and girls access to birth control and the morning after pill as well.) But even under the status quo, teenagers are the least liable to be cognizant of their options and the most likely to take chances because they just don't fully understand the ramifications of unprotected sex. Being compulsive and irresponsible is nearly the definition of adolescence. Sexual activity is almost a given. It will never change.

What has changed is the hopes and aspirations of women. We don't see very many young women like Bristol Palin getting married these days, because somewhere along the line we recognized that forcing marriage on two young people was a disastrous waste of two young lives when we knew the marriage was very unlikely to be successful. So now, most teenage girls who decide to keep their baby do so on their own as single parents. That is certainly their right and nobody would ever say they shouldn't. But that decision is hugely life altering. Certainly, a teenager keeping and raising a child against her will is a tragedy for her and the child.

Polling says that the vast majority of people are in favor of abortion rights in the case of rape or incest. So, clearly the anti-abortion cause has little to do with "murder" of a fetus. There can be no moral difference between a child conceived in rape and one who is not. What most "pro-life" people don't favor is abortion because of unwanted pregnancy. It's as if the act of sex must be "punished" with childbirth and delivery if the woman did it willingly. But pregnancy shouldn't be punishment, certainly not for a teenager who did something that is so natural and so common, it's akin to taking pleasure in the warm the of the sun or the taste of chocolate. To punish a teenage girl for life by forcing her to carry to term, give birth and either become a parent far too young or give up her child and live with the consequences is extreme.

The bottom line is that if this passes, a lot of girls lives are going to be ruined because they couldn't tell their parents, or thought they couldn't tell their parents, and they waited until it was too late. It's just how teenagers are. It could result in a new form of back alley abortion, with girls going to dicey, unregulated practitioners so they don't have to face their folks. It will cause tragedies in any numbers of ways.

Vote No On Prop 4. There are young women out there whose futures depend on it.

And if you some how think that the pro Prop 4 people are sincere upstanding folks, take a look at this dishonest, manipulative piece of garbage:

noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:41:56 PDT

Flying Through Hysteria

by digby

I'm traveling today and got off a plane to see that the Dow had plunged 800 points. It looks like the hysteria continues apace. It sure would be useful if the richest, most powerful nation in the world had a president that had some credibility and an administration that knew what it was doing. But no such luck...

Maybe these guys will be listened to instead? From Floyd Norris, live blogging amid panic:

“The Market Has Flopped”: The Group of 30, a group of former regulators and government officials, and current and former corporate chieftains, is out with a long report on financial regulation today. It offers no conclusions, but is interesting in describing the weaknesses of all the systems used around the world.
At a news conference today, the people in charge of writing the report, Paul Volcker, a former Fed chairman, and Roger Ferguson, a former Fed vice chairman who now runs TIAA-CREF, a money management firm, along with the chairman of the Group, Jacob Frenkel, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now, unfortunately, vice chairman of A.I.G., had some interesting things to say.

Mr. Frenkel noted that “things are highly contagious today,” and that the old distinction regulators used, between solvency and liquidity, was badly blurred. Mr. Ferguson observed that none of the financial regulatory systems had worked especially well, and that they would need to be restructured almost everywhere. But he added that even the best regulation would not stop financial institutions from making mistakes.

The best lines, as usual, came from Mr. Volcker, the only living ex-Fed chairman who still has a good reputation for financial wisdom.

“The Treasury has become the lender of last resort in the United States, which I think is appropriate,” he said.

He noted that in Britain, with the most consolidated regulatory scheme, the Financial Services Authority still seemed to have trouble communicating with the Treasury and the Bank of England and that regulatory communication may have been better in the United States, despite its fragmented nature.

Mr. Volcker’s skepticism of the new financial system has been well known for years, and was ignored by its biggest fan, Alan Greenspan, who succeeded Mr. Volcker at the Fed.

Mr. Volcker recalled the “intense lobbying process” that had largely allowed markets to supplant banks as providers of funding with minimal regulation.

“In the U.S., the market took over,” he said. “The market has flopped.” When things got tough, he added, “everybody is running back to Mother, the commercial banking system.”

update: It looks like we had a bit of a rally. I can't say I'm surprised. Greed eventually supercedes panic and there must have been some serious bargains out there this afternoon.

noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:30:00 PDT

Torture Training

by digby

POLICE zapped a runaway sheep that was blocking traffic with a Taser stun gun, a weapon issued for use in violent situations.

Motorists trapped in the traffic jam caused when the sheep got out of a field in north Wales in Britain were horrified to see the sheep stunned by police then carried to the side of the road where it continued to convulse, the Daily Mail reported.

They and animal welfare advocates say police did not have to use the weapon on a defenceless sheep.

But officers said they had to prevent the ram "causing major disruption and possible danger to motorists" on the A55, the Mail reported.

Motorist Mark Faulkes said his 13-year-old daughter Amy was distressed after seeing the sheep Tasered.

"We came across a traffic jam and we saw there was a sheep in the road. Everyone had stopped their cars and a few people had got out and were trying to herd the sheep away from the carriageway.

"The police then arrived and they went towards the sheep but it moved away from them. Then one of the officers got out his Taser gun and fired it at the sheep. Then he carried it to the side of the carriageway.

"Amy was very distressed. I don't know if the sheep was all right. When we left it was lying by the side of the road, shaking.

"I thought it was excessive to use a Taser on a defenceless sheep," he said.

A north Wales police spokeswoman said Sparky, as the sheep was nicknamed by locals afterwards, was unhurt.

I just don't now what say about this anymore. Maybe we can start using tasers in kindergarten to make the kids behave. After all, by these standards, they too will be "unhurt."

Oh wait:

Police departments use the x26 Taser to shock unruly suspects into submission, but Lorain residents are stunned that an officer used one on a school bus to subdue to 12-year-old boy, reported NewsChannel5.

According to the police report, police were called to remove the boy from the bus after he tried to steal another boy's CD case.

Police Capt. Russ Cambarare said the boy cussed at the officers and then threatened her.

"Then he made a threat that he was going to kill her, he bucked his head backwards and hit her on the chin and broke one of his arms free," said Cambarare.

That's right:

a 12-year-old girl... was skipping school was found drinking and smoking in a swimming pool, Miami-Dade police officer William Nelson stated in an incident report. He said he responded to an anonymous call about the activities.

He said he told the girl he was taking her to school. As they walked to the police car, she ran away.

"I advised her to stop several times," he said in the report. She "continued running even to the point of starting to run into lanes of traffic."

Nelson said he used the Taser for his and the girl's safety, striking her in the base of the neck and lower right back.

The girl was released into her mother's custody and taken to a doctor.

"I couldn't breathe, and I was, like, nervous, and I was scared at the same time," the girl told CNN.

About two weeks earlier, a first-grader was shot with a Taser at school when he threatened to cut his leg with a piece of broken glass, authorities said. The boy's family said he vomited after the jolt.

"If there's three officers, it's nothing to tell a 6-year-old holding a glass, if you feel threatened, 'Hey, here's a piece of candy, hey, here's a toy. Let the glass go,'" the boy's mother told CNN.

But police insisted using the gun was the only option.

It's already happening.

h/t to pastordan

noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:30:00 PDT

From Bad To Worse

by dday

John McCain's health care idea is to get employers to throw their workers off of their health plans by taxing the benefits, leaving employees to the wilds of the individual insurance market armed only with a tax credit that is too small to actually pay for health insurance. Barack Obama's campaign has been hammering this of late, so McCain's team adjusted the tax hit, applying it to income taxes and not payroll taxes. But I guess the budget numbers didn't match up, so to pay for that too-meager tax credit, it turns out that McCain wants to cut Medicare.

John McCain would pay for his health plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, a top aide said, in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs.

The Republican presidential nominee has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan "budget neutral," as he has promised. The McCain campaign hasn't given a specific figure for the cuts, but didn't dispute the analysts' estimate.

To be clear, creating efficiencies in the marketplace and applying cost controls would reduce Medicare spending in the same way it would reduce overall health care spending, but McCain isn't advocating that. He just wants to cut Medicare. To fill in his budget gap for his insufficient health care tax credit. I guess when Sarah Palin used a Reagan quote about how "if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up telling our children and our children’s children about a time when America was free," wherein Reagan was talking about what would happen if Medicare were enacted, she was being descriptive and not allusive.

Paul Krugman further explains McCain's dangerous health care plan today, and he wrote it even before this attempt to gut health care entitlements:

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

By the end, Krugman announces himself "terrified" by the McCain campaign's ideas. You should be too.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:30:01 PDT

Keating Economics

by digby

If you haven't seen this film on McCain and Keating yet, I urge you to watch it and pass it on. I've been groaning about Keating for some time and I can't tell you how happy I am that the Obama campaign is firing back with both barrels after McCain started his October smear campaign.

The thing is that McCain really does have a history of being involved in exactly the same kinds of deregulation schemes that brought us to this current financial crisis. After Keating, he created his come-to-jesus "reform" persona around campaign finance reform, which is all well and good, but he did absolutely nothing to rein in the excesses of the marketplace. He's a maverick in name only. He toed the GOP company line when it came to the really important stuff.

People don't know this story and they need to. This is a good place to start:

noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:00:01 PDT

Bold Progressives

by digby

As the exciting prospect of an Obama presidency after eight long years of Republican rule begins to look as if it might actually happen, progressives must remember the words of another Democratic president:

FDR was, of course, a consummate political leader. In one situation, a group came to him urging specific actions in support of a cause in which they deeply believed. He replied: I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it. He understood that a President does not rule by fiat and unilateral commands to a nation. He must build the political support that makes his decisions acceptable to our countrymen. He read the public opinion polls not to define who he was but to determine where the country was – and then to strategize how he could move the country to the objectives he thought had to be carried out.

To that end, online progressives are organizing around this concept:

Anyone with common sense will vote for Barack Obama and Democratic congressional candidates this November. But it's time for citizens to fight back and take this pledge -- will you join in signing it?
"In 2009 and beyond, I will be part of the movement that pushes Democrats to be bold progressives -- and that helps pass a bold progressive agenda into law."

What does taking the pledge mean? It means that when Democratic "leaders" tell Americans we must settle for watered-down solutions while bold back-benchers in the House or Senate are pushing strong progressive alternatives, we will clamor for those bold alternatives together until they are passed into law.

What else does it mean? It means we will turn those bold back-benchers into leaders. Just as grassroots progressives fueled Howard Dean's election as Democratic National Committee chair and pushed aside insiders who wanted more of the same, we will make sure that Democratic "leaders" are the ones who actually show bold progressive leadership.

What else does it mean? It means we will no longer just write checks to the Democratic Party and assume they know how best to spend it. We'll give our money to bold progressive candidates -- bypassing the influence of corporate lobbyists and entrenched Democratic insiders who are used to picking the winners and using their purse strings to make bold progressives in Congress fall in line.

Sign the pledge...

The netroots and grassroots going to take FDRs advice and make them do it.

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noreply@blogger.com (tristero) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:00:01 PDT

St. John

by tristero

Think there's some truth behind the myth of St. John McCain? Don't you believe it:

Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: 'Appearance of corruption, anyone?'

RTWT.

noreply@blogger.com (tristero) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:00:00 PDT

A Pathological Liar

by tristero

In a long discussion two nights ago with longtime Finnish friends, I tried to explain what makes Sarah Palin so exceedingly awful. "It's not that she's completely unqualified," I said, adding, "And isn't it incredible that's not the worst thing about her?

"And it's not that she is so far to the right she has direct ties to the Alaska secessionist movement. That, too, makes it simply unbelievable that she is a major party candidate.

"No," I said. "The worst thing about Sarah Palin is that she is a pathological liar who, no matter what, cannot tell the truth." And, sure enough, as fast as you can say, "Waterboarding isn't torture if Bush says it isn't,"a new Palin lie is uncovered.

noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:00:00 PDT

Blaming Everyone But Their Liege Lords

by digby

From Edroso:

Barney Frank used to live with a top executive at Fannie Mae. Though this had been reported as far back as 1992, conservatives are working it hard now, perhaps feeling that if their attempt to blame the financial crisis on black people doesn't work, they can get some traction blaming it on manlove.

"PART OF WHY THE USA GOT IT UP THE YOU KNOW WHAT," bellows The Astute Bloggers. "HOMO BARNEY FRANK WAS SLEEPING WITH MALE FANNIE MAE EXEC FOR YEARS." Ace O'Spades is of course on it like Lindsay Lohan on Samantha Ronson, and his commenters spray milk (at least we think it's milk) out their noses ("This sickens me on so many levels"). Dad29 assails "back-door-banditry" and asks, "Why should THEY worry about imposing a huge national debt on children?" (Please don't tell Dad29 they're allowed to adopt now, or he'll wear out his slur thesaurus.)

So, far we have blacks, Mexicans and ngays being blamed for the financial crisis. Surely, they can't mean to leave out environmentalists and feminists? What about atheists? The conservatives are in such disarray they haven't even managed to find a way to blame Hollywood? They really are losing their touch.

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noreply@blogger.com (dday) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:00:00 PDT

The Fall Of Iceland

by dday

There may not be another nation in the world I have more of an interest in visiting than Iceland; friends have described it as an entire country run by young indie music fans. It's very distressing to see them on the business end of this financial crisis.

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland's currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country's three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won't send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.

People talk about whether a new emergency unity government is needed and if the EU would fast-track the country to membership. On Friday the queues at the banks were huge, as people moved savings into the most secure accounts. Yesterday people were buying up supplies of olive oil and pasta after a supermarket spokesman announced on Friday night that they had no means of paying the foreign currency advances needed to import more foodstuffs.

They bought up lots and lots of international credit in the late 1990s and now the debt is mounting and the currency is plummeting. And this is happening, albeit to a lesser degree, throughout Europe, suggesting that this is a global crisis which is moving in waves.

This is going to be a painful few years. Many more banks will fail, and the resultant fallout will leave a financial industry with bigger firms than ever, hardly eliminating the number of those that are "too big to fail." The Treasury Department buyout of those toxic assets is going to be slow and unlikely to do anything but put a tourniquet on things, and this line is astonishing:

Even after working feverishly over the last two weeks, the Treasury will not buy its first distressed asset from a bank for roughly six weeks, and almost certainly not until after the Nov. 4 elections.

Good thing we rushed into action, then, and put together such an expansive authority.

This is the final reckoning of a corrupt bargain that deindustrialized this country (for the sake of world peace, so it was told to us) while maintaining our quality of life through borrowing. Ultimately we created a market for all that debt, magnifying the consequences exponentially when the financial industry could no longer cover its bets. This is drowning the entire world as they try to recoup their losses and make back some of the money from their American counterparts.

The deindustrialization legacy can be best seen right now from Reykjavik, walking through an empty aisle at the supermarket. The next half-decade will be a time to rebuild.

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noreply@blogger.com (digby) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:00:00 PDT

Depressing

by digby

... but not surprising:

The presidential campaign, in the almost all-white counties of southwestern Virginia, has produced an outcome that few people expected: a frank discussion of race. Voters sometimes sound as if they are reasoning with themselves and working through their own complex views as they talk through the choice they face this November.

"I've never been prejudiced in my life," said Sharon Fleming, 69, the wife of a retired coal miner, who spends hours at the union hall calling voters on behalf of Obama. "My niece married a black, and I don't have a problem with it. Now, I wouldn't want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I'm voting for Obama."

Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton convincingly in the Virginia Democratic primary, but his supporters have known they face a challenge in this part of the state, just as Obama has faced challenges elsewhere among white voters from rural and working-class households.

He took 64% of the primary vote statewide but just 9% here in coal-rich Buchanan County, for instance, and 12% in neighboring Dickenson County. Though he is now the Democratic nominee, many voters are cool to him -- even some of the party's own leaders and precinct captains.

"I haven't found in my precinct one out of five that will vote for Obama," said Tommy Street, the party's vice chairman in Buchanan (pronounced buck-AN-in) County.

Street, 78, counts himself among the doubters, citing Obama's alliance with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He has always voted Democratic, he said, but this year plans to leave the presidential ballot blank.

Some here blame Obama's troubles on his mixed-race background (his mother was a white Kansan, his father a black Kenyan). Others say his journey from Hawaii and Indonesia to Harvard and big-city Chicago politics makes him an oddity.

[...]

Ben and Beth Bailey sat in the back and clapped politely, but they remained unpersuaded. They said they were likely to break from their tradition of voting Democratic and might well not vote at all.

Obama "just doesn't seem like he's from America," said Beth Bailey, 25. Ben Bailey, 32, noted that Obama's middle name is Hussein, "and we know what that means."

Beth's father, Josh Viers, is the party's Whitewood precinct chairman, responsible for working the polls and urging Democrats to vote the party line. He came around to backing Obama only recently, and reluctantly.

"Am I racial? Am I prejudiced? No, I'm not," said Viers. Still, he is frustrated that his job is to persuade other Democrats to back a black man.

"Somebody in Buchanan County or in the United States can look at him and say, 'He's not my color,' " said Viers. "Why put yourself in that position? We had a shot four years ago, and the people listened to lies, rumors, negative ads and got us beat. Bush got him a second term, and look what it got us."

Viers said he will do his best to help Obama on election day. But local Democratic leaders said they could not rely on all of their precinct chairs to follow suit.

These attitudes are dying out, but they obviously aren't gone yet. I heard an NPR report from rural Pennsylvania he other day in which the people interviewed sounded very much like this, so it isn't just the south. But we knew that.

Probably of more importance is the fact that Virginia, like virtually all the swing states is very likely to be the scene of some shenanigans with the electoral system itself:

On July 31, 2008 Montgomery County held 47,604 voters. On October 1, the number increased to 51,796 voters. While the number may not seem like a titanic increase, Wertz said that, on average, voter rolls stay roughly consistent from year to year, especially in more transient communities such as those that house large universities.
This influx of voter registration forms filled up by students is causing hassle in the Montgomery County Government Center.
At one point, Wertz had received 3,000 in one week's time. Registrars from other districts and volunteers have been staffing the registrar's office nearly around the clock, often working through the weekends and until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. to process all of the new registrations. Wertz said he "can't even fathom the number" of eventual registrations.
In the 2004 election, 45,079 citizens were registered to vote in Montgomery County, up from 41,063 in 2000. In Blacksburg alone the tally was 14,779 on July 1, 2008. The number rose to 14,821 on Aug. 1, 2008 and 15,401 on Sept. 1, 2008. The total number of registered voters in Blacksburg in the 2004 election, as of Sept. 1, 2004, was14,166.
These numbers may have been exacerbated by a surfeit of misinformation from voter registration drives concerning absentee balloting. Wertz expressed concern over reports reaching him from students and parents about misinformation coming from campaigners.
Campaigners are reported to have been "telling people that they should not vote absentee. That by voting absentee their votes would not be counted. 'The only time that absentee ballots are counted is when it's a tight race,' (campaigners) were telling people," Wertz said.
[...]
Republican Del. Dave Nutter said that he had seen polling data suggesting that 80 percent of Virginians may turn out to vote on Election Day. The high voter registrations in the several different districts is sure to cause long lines on Election Day, Wertz said. Further, a spike in registrations from the E-1 district, encompassing the majority of student residence halls on the south side of campus, from 3,526 registered voters on June 3 to 4,829 on Oct. 1, makes E-1 the largest voting precinct in Montgomery County.
Elected officials, political parties and poll workers alike foresee a crowded Nov. 4. ...To quicken the pace at the polls, students should attempt to bring their voter registration card, mailed to the address at which they registered, with them to the polling site. Failing this, any first-time voter will have to produce a form of government-issued identification -- a driver's license or a Hokie Passport -- or proof of their local residence, such as a utility bill or car registration ...
First-time voters, however, without some form of identification will be asked to fill out the identity statement. Then, these voters will cast a provisional ballot, a paper ballot that will be counted along with absentee ballots at the close of polls if no irregularities arise.
[...]
An issue that could thwart these preventive measures is a practice known as voter caging. The procedure for challenging a voter's registration in Virginia is as follows: Virginia Code 24.2-651 states that "any qualified voter may, and the officers of election shall, challenge the vote of any person who is listed on the poll book but is known or suspected not to be a qualified voter."
Officers of elections can, however, remove anyone from a polling place for being unduly disruptive of the voting process, Wertz said.
A political tactic with a history of challenging minority voters, the practice involves the challenging of voter rolls of a given locale in the hopes of disenfranchising legitimate voters. While not necessarily illegal, challenging can pose significant problems in terms of discounting those without documentation and may cause general frustration, leading to longer lines.
In Ohio in 2004, 35,000 people were challenged while going to the polls. While representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties have said that neither side has plans to challenge voters, the flood of student voters and students' typical leftward leanings may leave the question of voter caging heavy on the minds of some.
"If Virginia proves to be, as many speculate, a battleground state, the stakes are higher. The games are dirtier. If we see come Election Day, Virginia could come in play; unfortunately we will probably see some attempts to prevent people from voting," Willis said.

John Fund, who wrote a book recently about the (bogus) right wing issue of voter fraud, is talking constantly about how the Democrats are going to try to get election officials to count the votes of people who are unregistered via the provisional ballots.One of the reasons why they would want to do this, aside from making the lines so long that people will not be able to devote the time, is to throw the election into doubt and have the courts intervene, (which we know they are willing to do.) I suspect that it isn't going to be close enough at this point to work, but if it is, the fact that Obama will be winning with a lot of new younger voters and minorities is likely to create the myth that he is an illegitimate president.

The Right loves nothing more than to take a liberal complaint and project it back into our faces like a laser beam. If the jokers over at the Corner can shriek about sexism against Palin, as if they all wear funny hats every day in solidarity with Bella Abzug, then they can surely claim that the Democrats stole the election. You know they're going to if they can.

Here is a web site with state by state election laws. If you aren't registered, you need to do it quickly and you need to read carefully about what the state law requires at the polling place. You may have to bring a DNA sample and the family Bible in some states these days, since the Supreme Court decided that even though there are no known cases of systematic voter fraud, the Republicans should still be able to suppress the vote by making it a royal pain in the ass.

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