Nadler Takes the Public Option Pledge: NYCEve
SCOOOORE!

Well it is quite the day for health care activism: Not only does Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) relent in the wake of activist pressure to allow a public plan out of the HELP Committee, but Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) takes the pledge.[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/07/02/nadler-takes-the-pledge-nyceve-sco
ooore/

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The GOP's Selective Scientific Outrage

Let's review.

When former oil industry lobbyists in George W. Bush's White House rewrote scientific reports to downplay concerns about global warming and manufacture false doubts and controversy, Republicans stayed absolutely silent.

Now that the EPA is "ignoring a scientific study by a non-scientist that it never commissioned and which hasn't been published in any scientific journal," Republicans are claiming it's one of the biggest political scandals in American history.

You know, it's too bad Republicans have stood up against science on evolution, stem cells, Terri Schiavo, and climate change (just to name a few). Otherwise, their outrage might carry a shred of credibility.

But who needs credibility? That doesn't matter to the mainstream media. They have no choice but to uncritically report everything Republicans say. I mean, that's what journalism is all about, right?

Read The Full Article:
http://thegreenmiles.blogspot.com/2009/07/gops-selective-scientific-outrage.html

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White Supremacists see conservative Teabagging
parties as recruitment opportunity

It ought to give conservatives pause when their only usefulness in politics is serving as a recruiting opportunity for white supremciasts. From the Anti-Defamation League.

White supremacists and neo-Nazi hate groups plan to take advantage of the anti-tax ?Tea Parties? set to occur in more than 1,000 cities and localities over the July 4 holiday weekend to disseminate racist fliers and other materials and attempt to recruit others to their cause, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

ADL?s Center on Extremism, which monitors extremist groups and provides information to law enforcement and the public, has released information on its Web site describing the attempt by white supremacists to co-opt the anti-tax message of the events as a means to spread racism and anti-Semitism.

On Stormfront, the most popular white supremacist Internet forum, members have discussed becoming local organizers of the ?Tea Parties? and finding ways to involve themselves in the events. Many racists have voiced their intent to attend these rallies for the purpose of cultivating an ?organized grassroots White mass movement,? with some suggesting that they would do so without openly identifying themselves as racists.

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Bernie Sanders: The Democrats Need to Commit to
Stopping a Filibuster on Health Care Reform

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David Shuster talks to Sen. Bernie Sanders about his demand that the Democrats in the Senate commit to stopping a filibuster on health care reform. Sanders reiterated his earlier statements as reported by Sam Stein at the HuffPo:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called on the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress to ensure that party members agree unanimously to support cloture on legislation that would revamp the nation's health care system. Democratic senators on the fence, he added, could still oppose the bill. But at the very least they should be required to let the legislation come to an up-or-down vote.

"I think that with Al Franken coming on board, you have effectively 60 Democrats in the caucus, 58 and two Independents," Sanders said in an interview with the Huffington Post. "I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn't take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, 'I'm not gonna vote for this bill, it's too radical, blah, blah, blah, that's fine.'"

"I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy," Sanders added.

If we only had a few more Bernie Sanders in the Senate, the United States would be a better place to live in. I hope he keeps the pressure on the Democrats to do the right thing.

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We Could Get The Third Stimulus Wrong

Originally posted by Harry Moroz at DMIBlog.As state governments across the country grappled this[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OpenLeft-FrontPage/~3/iBAu2JBrDRs/we-could-get-the
-third-stimulus-wrong

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Barbara's Daily BuzzFlash Minute for July 2, 2009

BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZFLASH MINUTE

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The White Supremacist in Us

In recent weeks, Americans struggled to make sense of tragic shootings that seemed disconnected at first glance. Anti-Semite James Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. George Tiller's murder a few days earlier seemed to be about abortion, yet his shooter, Scott Roeder, also had roots in the racial purity movement. Two weeks ago, it was reported that the murders of Raul Flores and his daughter in Arizona were charged to three people with white supremacist ambitions.

There's been lots of discussion about why hate crimes are rising and how to prevent future tragedies, yet we've largely missed the relationship between extremist racism and the less obvious version that plays out in our political debates. These shooters all felt that people of color (along with women and Jews) have stolen the birthright of white men. In his book "Kill the Best Gentiles," Von Brunn rails against "the calculated destruction of the White Race." Roeder was a member of the Montana Freemen; commenters on white supremacist websites praised him for ensuring that Tiller would never "kill another White baby." Flores' alleged murderers appear to have been preparing for a white uprising.

Our discussion of these events has boiled down to the idea that racism is an intentional, violent act of a lone crazy white man. Underlying this idea, however, is the unspoken assumption that since we criminalized such hatred through civil rights laws, there's nothing else we can do as a country. Collectively, we bemoan the backwardness of "some" people before we move on, thinking of racism as isolated extremism.

But social psychologists who developed the Implicit Associations Test at Harvard and the Universities of Virginia and Washington in 1998 tell us that notions of the innate goodness of white people and the equally innate badness of people of color are so deeply imbedded in our minds that we're totally unaware of making such judgments. Even I, a woman of color and racial justice activist for 25 years, have taken their online test with dismaying results. White supremacists speak their beliefs aloud, but we all have similar ideas and act on them in tiny ways that add up.

The notion that people of color get more than our share plays out again and again in our institutions and policies, expanding the racial divide. If we think that Black people manufactured the foreclosure crisis in order to get a handout, the law limits their ability to get relief. If we think that undocumented immigrants are leeching off the U.S., we will not pass an immigration reform that changes their status. If we think that children of color can't learn, we don't do what's needed to improve public schools.

As a nation, we are about to make critical decisions about all our systems. Unconscious biases already permeate these debates every time we ask who deserves how much of health care, education, jobs. Our discourse is heavily coded. There's no need to say that "illegal" equals Mexican, or that the "irresponsible" homeowner is black, or that "unqualified" means woman of color. Even if we don't rhetorically attach these ideas to particular groups of people, our brains have been conditioned to make the connections anyway.

There's particular danger in characterizing racism as isolated madness during the greatest recession in 60 years. We now have to rebuild our economy - will we continue with a model that includes stark inequality? That seems likely if we can't grapple honestly with the racial gap, since structural inequality will always make our economy more vulnerable to a crash. That inequality is also what keeps us apart, in separate neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. That distance makes it much easier for violent extremists to recruit struggling white people into their ranks.

As white communities, particularly men, face conditions that have been chronic in communities of color, their vulnerability to racist ideas could disrupt the possibility of working together for real solutions. The unemployment of white men has more than doubled over the past year, from 4.2 to 8.5 percent. They are shocked, angry, and ready to direct all that heat somewhere. The most productive place for that energy is in alliance with communities of color, so that together, we can focus on changing the policies that allowed elites to run off with all our assets.

It is possible to craft truly universal social and economic policy that can both generate racial equity and improve life for everyone, including unemployed white men. There were racially-fueled murders before last week, and there's every reason to think there will be more. As we grieve, the Obama Administration and Congress continue the immense task of rebuilding the economy and reforming immigration and healthcare. Something positive can emerge from these tragic events if our efforts to understand them led to policies that actually brought us together - in our lives, as well as in our minds.

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9th Circuit Judge Gets Public Admonishment for
Explicit Postings on Internet

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals today ended its disciplinary investigation into Judge Alex Kozinski for posting explicit matter on the Internet and allowing it to remain there after he knew it was publicly accessible with a public admonition.

“We find that the judge’s possession of sexually explicit offensive material combined with his carelessness in failing to safeguard his sphere of privacy was judicially imprudent,” said the report by Anthony J. Scirica.

[More...]

The panel, headed by Scirica, found that Kozinski allowed such material to remain on the Internet, even after discovering that it could be accessed by the public.

The panel admonished Kozinski for “exhibiting poor judgment ... [that] created a public controversy that can reasonably be seen as having resulted in embarrassment to the federal judiciary.”

Kozinski was presiding over an obscenity trial when his postings were publicly reported. He declared a mistrial.

As TChris said at the time, this was much ado about nothing.

As I wrote at the time,

Combine a disgruntled litigant with a reporter focused on sensationalism and the public got a false story the rest of the media was only too happy to run with. I'm not surprised.

Count me as one firmly in Judge Kozinski's corner.

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How a Kos diarist helped spark McCain-Palin
infighting

While the elitist #dickwhisperers at the Washington Post dream up ways of monetizing their "access," let's take a trip down memory lane to shortly 4AM Eastern time on September 1, 2008, less than 72 hours after John McCain announced Sarah Palin would be his VP.

At a quarter-past the hour, Daily Kos diarist Liz Arnett posted a diary featuring several videos tying Sarah Palin to the Alaskan Independence Party, a pro-secession fringe group in Alaska. The diary rocketed up the rec. list and a few hours later, georgia10 followed up with a front page post summarizing the questions raised by Palin's apparent connections.

Later that day, the story was picked up by reporters at ABC, The Atlantic, and TPM. They fleshed out some of the important details: it was Todd, not Sarah, who was actually a member of the party, they found, but Sarah had addressed the AIP and members of the AIP felt Sarah was sympathetic to their pro-secession cause.

Flash-forward six weeks, and Salon published a detailed article by Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert showing the tight connections between the Palins and the secessionists, attracting CNN's interest.

That brings us to today. In a gripping new article, CBS News' Scott Conroy and special contributor Shushannah Walshe explain what happened next:

On the morning of Oct. 15, Palin was aboard her campaign jet and en route to New Hampshire when she happened to catch a disparaging CNN segment that touted the Salon.com story, complete with a provocative graphic at the bottom of the screen reading, "THE PALINS AND THE FRINGE."

While shaking hands after a rally later that afternoon, someone on the rope line shouted a remark at Palin about the AIP.

The comment set her off. She worried that the campaign was not sufficiently mitigating the issue of her alleged connection to the party, which despite a platform that harkens more to the Civil War than the 21st century, continued to play a serious role in Alaska politics.

Palin blasted out an e-mail with the subject line "Todd" to Schmidt, campaign manager Rick Davis and senior advisor Nicolle Wallace, copying her husband on the message (all of the e-mails are reprinted below as written).

"Pls get in front of that ridiculous issue that's cropped up all day today - two reporters, a protestor's sign, and many shout-outs all claiming Todd's involvement in an anti-American political party," Palin wrote. "It's bull, and I don't want to have to keep reacting to it ... Pls have statement given on this so it's put to bed."

According to e-mails obtained by Conroy and Walshe, McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt told Palin to "ignore" the controversy and simply state that Todd loved America. Schmidt (smartly) wanted to limit the amount of specific information given to the media because any hint of inaccuracy would have set off another media bonfire.

In his e-mail, Schmidt said that it was his understanding that secession was part of AIP's platform, infuriating Palin. She responded to him, cc'ing several more staffers, prodding him to defend her.

"That's not part of their platform and he was only a 'member' bc independent alaskans too often check that 'Alaska Independent' box on voter registrations thinking it just means non partisan," Palin wrote. "He caught his error when changing our address and checked the right box. I still want it fixed."

The problem for Palin was that her claims were inaccurate -- the registration form says "Alaskan Independence Party," and scads of evidence showed that both she and Todd Palin were aware of the true nature of the party, having attended several AIP functions.

Schmidt put the matter to rest with an breathtaking reply to Palin:

"Secession," he wrote. "It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

We will not put out a statement and inflame this and create a situation where john has to adress this."

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this e-mail is that Steve Schmidt seems to have agreed with not only with the basic facts of the Palin-AIP association (that she and Todd were affiliated with a pro-secession party), but also that she sought to mislead the media.

To Sarah Palin's critics, it's been obvious from the start that she has a terrible relationship with the truth. It's a nice validation to see John McCain's campaign manager saying essentially the same thing.

More importantly, it's validation of the blogosphere. Without question, there's still good reporting going on in mainstream outlets -- but it's also equally without question true that there's good reporting going on outside the gates as well.

And it is breaking through.

Update -- 11:21AM: Comment from citizenx:

According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews.

Our media at work!

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More Obama Secrecy -- This Time On Cheney's Plame
Interview

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at this point. But the latest example of the Obama administration mimicking the Bushies in opting for secrecy over openness feels like one of the most infuriating yet.

The Justice Department is declining to release Dick Cheney's interview with federal investigators looking into the Valerie Plame leak, arguing -- as it did under President Bush -- that doing so would discourage future high-level officials from cooperating with criminal investigations.

The good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had filed a lawsuit seeking to have the interview released.

CREW points out in a press release that Cheney was never promised confidentiality in the investigation. And its executive director, Melanie Sloan, notes:

It is astonishing that a top Department of Justice political appointee is suggesting other high-level appointees are unlikely to cooperate with legitimate law enforcement investigations. What is wrong with this picture?

It's really hard to see how this stance jibes with the president's much-hyped claim, upon taking office, that his administration would privilege transparency. In several previous instances where the Obama-ites have opted for secrecy -- such as the controversy over photos that show detainee abuse -- there was at least an argument to be made that the path of openness would endanger American troops or otherwise threaten national security.

In this case, no such argument can be made.

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