Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday

post from Daily Kos on 14 July 2010 09:44:54 AM. © Daily Kos

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Oh! More Things I Know:

> One difference between liberals and conservatives is, liberals correct their mistakes to reflect reality while conservatives correct their reality to reflect their mistakes.

> The next government program I wanna see is Cash for Renters. That'd be swell. Just stuff a few Franklins in my mailbox, Geithner, and we'll call it good.

> You know what I have a lot more respect for since the Oilpocalypse began? Pounds of pressure per square inch.

> When you hear a pundit lament that "Washington is sooooo polarized," it really means, "Republicans are being obstructionist assholes."

> Look, I know we're all really excited about installing millions of windmills that'll generate power, but let's not lose sight of why we're installing them in the first place: to grind grain.

> Kossack "grog" is funny: "Jeers to the humidity. When I was done [with my run], I could have wrapped myself in paper towels and absorbed myself to death."

> My octopus picked the Netherlands. Idiot.

> During the upcoming holiday season, the top-selling toy will be Barbie's Gulf Coast Oil-slick Observation Dream Blimp.

> By poo-pooing an extension of unemployment benefits while calling for more tax cuts for the rich, Republicans on Capitol Hill are acting as a de facto death panel, ruling unanimously in favor of killing the stability and solvency of countless poor and middle-class American families. Look up "heartless bastards" in the dictionary...

> Harry Reid accusing President Obama of not being forceful enough with Republicans is like a birther accusing a climate-change denier of being too "out there."

> The most amazing thing to me about the human body is that we don't shred our tongues when we chew food.

> I get occasional hate mail in which right-wingers call me a faggot. I always respond by thanking them for at least getting something right.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

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We Are All South America Now

post from Firedoglake on 14 July 2010 09:40:47 AM. © Firedoglake

At the point in the World Cup when five South American teams had made it to the knockout round and European teams like Italy and England performed badly, I wondered whether this year's Cup would be a kind of revenge on the IMF. All these South American[...]

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AL Gov: Robert Bentley Wins Republican Primary
Runoff

post from Firedoglake on 14 July 2010 09:11:58 AM. © Firedoglake

State Rep. Robert Bentley was declared the winner of the Republican primary for governor. He defeated Bradley Byrne Tuesday night in a runoff election.[...]

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Get A Job Already!

post from Talking Points Memo on 14 July 2010 09:01:35 AM. © Talking Points Memo

TPM's round-up of Republicans hating on the unemployed (or as one GOPer called them, "hobos"). Republican - United States - Politics - Parties - College Republicans[...]

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As House leaders head to White House, Pelosi
calls Gibbs 'politically inept'

post from AMERICAblog News on 14 July 2010 09:00:28 AM. © AMERICAblog News

This morning, eight House Demcoratic leaders are heading to the White House to meet with President Obama. Among the attendees are Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the Chair of the DCCC, Chris Van Hollen. They're going to be talking about the legislative agenda, but as I said in the open thread, they really need to talk about the upcoming elections. This meeting plays out against the backdrop of the comments from Robert Gibbs that Democrats could lose the House this fall.

Apparently, those comments didn't sit well with the House Democratic caucus -- and the Speaker:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slammed White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs during Tuesday night?s House Democratic Caucus meeting for saying Sunday that Democrats could lose control of the House in November.

Several Democratic sources in the room described a testy scenario that started with Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (N.J.) criticizing Gibbs for saying on NBC?s ?Meet the Press? that there is ?no doubt there?s enough seats in play? to allow for a House GOP takeover in 2012. Things heated up as Pelosi jumped in and blasted Gibbs for making ?politically inept? comments, according to one source.

?It was bad,? another source said. ?She was like: ?I don?t appreciate it. I don?t know who this guy is. I?ve never met him before. And he?s saying that we?re going to lose the House.??

The House has delivered on the Obama agenda. House Democrats have fought harder for the agenda than Obama's White House has.

Gibbs and the White House crew should be trying to figure out how to win in the fall, not giving ammo to the GOPers.

I have no doubt that some politicos think it might be easier for Obama to run for reelection if the GOPers control the House. But, we didn't elect Obama so he can run for reelection. We elected him to enact an agenda. It's been hard enough with Democrats in control. Nothing will happen if the GOPers have real power. Nothing. And, the White House will spend all of its time responding to subpoenas from Darrell Issa.

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Are The Teabaggers Racist

post from DownWithTyranny! on 14 July 2010 09:00:27 AM. © DownWithTyranny!

Yesterday the NAACP condemned the teabaggers' "explicitly racist behavior," while Glenn Beck, their spiritual leader, amped up his campaign to trivialize and denigrate both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King by holding a racist rally in Washington on August 28, the anniversary of King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech. The resolution, which was submitted by the NAACP's Kansas City branch points out that teabaggers have "displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically" and calls "the racist elements" within the tea party "a threat to progress." It calls on "the leadership and members of the tea party to recognize the historic and present racist factions within it and to repudiate those factions."

Good luck with that. As anyone who's every attended a teabagger event well knows, divisiveness in general and racism in particular are the very organizing principles around the "movement." They can't very well go out and try to gin all that faux grassroots populism based on bigger bonuses for insurance company CEOs. At the teabagger rally I went to in Alhambra, the "anchor baby" theme was far more dominant than ever "read the bill."

And this might be as good a moment as any to bring up Ryan Murdough, both the New Hampshire state chairman of American Third Position and the Republican candidate for the New Hampshire state senate. Murdough:

For far too long white Americans have been told that diversity is something beneficial to their existence. Statistics prove that the opposite is true. New Hampshire residents must seek to preserve their racial identity if we want future generations to have to possibility to live in such a great state. Affirmative action, illegal and legal non-white immigration, anti-white public school systems, and an anti-white media have done much damage to the United States of America and especially New Hampshire. It is time for white people in New Hampshire and across the country to take a stand. We are only 8 percent of the world's population and we need our own homeland, just like any other non-white group of people deserve their own homeland.

Like the teabaggers you see on TV, Murdough vociferously denies being a racist. Really. Limbaugh and Beck do too. So does the Republican Party in general. And their nutroots. Sarah Palin was tweeting furiously. And on her Facebook page she wrote, self-righteously, "I am saddened by the NAACP?s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America?s Constitutional rights are somehow ?racists.? The charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand.

"President Reagan called America?s past racism 'a legacy of evil' against which we have seen the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights. He condemned any sort of racism, as all good and decent people do today. He also called it a 'point of pride for all Americans' that as a nation, we have successfully struggled to overcome this evil. Reagan rightly declared that 'there is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country,' and he warned that we must never go back to the racism of our past." I guess the GOP shock troops at the teabagger rally in the photo to the right missed that speech. Or maybe they don't consider that racism. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don't.

Take CNN's Eric Erickson, for example. He's a GOP polemicist embedded with CNN and he had some advice for his party leaders yesterday that was reported to a mainstream audience by Media Matters. He feels the path to a GOP victory in November is scaring people about how the Black Panthers want to kill white children. "The Democrats will scream racism," he wrote. "Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway."

Had Horton been white, the Republicans still would have used the ad. But Horton was black and the ad was powerfully effective-- so effective that it and Dukakis's stupid answer about opposing the death penalty even if his wife were murdered destroyed the Democrats in 1988-- the Democrats screamed racism at the top of their lungs and their accomplices in the media have forever agreed. Willie Horton = racism.

Nonsense. The ad worked. It was powerful. It was the truth. That's why the Democrats screamed racism so loud. It was the only way to stop the GOP from going this direction again. They know the GOP lives in perpetual quixotic quest for the day it gets a significant share of the black vote.

Now we have King Samir Shabazz. He showed up at a polling location in Pennsylvania and intimidated voters going into the polls. The Justice Department pursued the case and, having received a verdict it the government's favor, Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder stopped pursuing the New Black Panthers.

Video has subsequently come out of King Samir Shabazz encouraging the murder of white children.
Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls.

No racism there, of course. And speaking of sociopathic right-wing racism, yesterday the House was back from vacation and one of the first bills to pass, HR 4514, Colonel Charles Young Home Study Act passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, 350-26. All 225 Democrats voted yes, as did 125 Republicans. The 26 NO votes were from 26 right-wing, racist Republicans, including, notably, notorious and rabid haters like Paul Broun (R-GA), John Campbell (R-CA), John Culberson (R-TX), Virginia Foxx (R-VA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Steve King (R-IA), Jack Kingston (R-GA), Doug Lamborn (R-CO), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), and Paul Ryan (R-WI). The entire GOP leadership voted YES, even Boehner and Cantor (although the leader racist in the leadership, Mike Pence, didn't vote at all. The bill directs the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a special resource study of the Colonel Charles Young Home, a National Historic Landmark in Xenia, Ohio, to determine the suitability and feasibility of designating the Home as a unit of the National Park System. (Colonel Charles Young was a distinguished African-American officer in the U.S. Army, a pioneer of techniques in military intelligence, as well as a commander of troops in combat in the Spanish-American War and the Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa.) Even Mean Jean Schmidt signed on as a co-sponsor. We'll just leave it at that.

video details and more

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Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

post from Daily Kos on 14 July 2010 09:00:20 AM. © Daily Kos

Wednesday punditry. And National League wins All-Star Game.

Dana Milbank:

It would not be accurate to say that Democrats are worried about losing control of the House in November. It would be accurate to say that Democrats are in a screaming panic about losing control of the House in November.

The panic threshold was crossed Sunday morning on "Meet the Press," when White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, "There's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control."

Excellent example of how political reporting has deteriorated into simply making things fit a pre-conceived storyline. See? Gibbs is in a "screaming panic". Milbank's example proves it. Better coverage, same paper:

Chris Cillizza:

Now, Democrats are being forced into a process conversation about whether or not their majority is in jeopardy -- a conversation that the House leadership did their damnedest to avoid by adopting a concerted strategy not to mention publicly the idea that control was at stake in the fall.

The counter-argument -- and, yes, this is politics so there is always a counter argument -- is that in acknowledging that the House could switch control effectively set the stakes for voters this fall.

Politico:

As he walked through the Capitol recently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was asked repeatedly about Democratic attacks on his Republican opponent Sharron Angle, but he would not say a word about her.

In fact, Reid has been remarkably quiet about Angle, letting surrogates do the dirty work while he keeps his lips sealed.

Why say a word? Let her positions speak.

David S. Abraham/NY Times:

Congress has proven adept at placing blame for the gulf oil spill — depending on whom you listen to on Capitol Hill, BP bears the bulk of the responsibility, or the Interior Department and its increasingly inadequate regulations, or both.

There’s no question that each of these deserves blame. But there’s also no question that the responsibility for developing safe offshore operations extends much further, to Congress itself.

For more than a decade, legislators have allowed themselves to be lulled by industry assurances that drilling in deep water posed little danger. One could say that Congress, just like the companies it has attacked, was obsessed with oil.

Oil is just like any other corrupt special interest with unlimited amounts of money. I apologize for this NY Times op-ed." -Joe Barton (R-TX).

Kathleen Parker:

Sarah's long-term plans are anybody's guess. Anyone who thinks she won't run for president because she's making too much money on the celebrity circuit is missing a big point. You make money as a presidential candidate, too. If you win, you're president. If you lose, you're rich.

And don't tell her she can't. If you do, she's just gonna get feistier and cuter. Next thing you know she'll be a dadgum lioness givin' heck to those media hyenas, just the way they can't stand it.

Look outcha!

If you can make money at it, Sarah's there.

Katrina vanden Heuvel:

Will this argument work? It may well energize some of Obama's discouraged supporters, along with drifting independents, by training their focus on the primary source of their frustrations. These groups include people who have been hit especially hard by the economic downturn and may be incensed at the ability of entrenched interests to delay, dilute and defer vital reforms.

These two groups are also especially in need of energizing. According to political analyst Charlie Cook, election enthusiasm, compared to November 2008, is up among those who voted for Republican John McCain; the biggest decline in enthusiasm is among "liberals, African-Americans, self-described Democrats, moderates, those living in either the Northeast or West, and younger voters 18 to 34 years of age." At the same time, recent polls have shown independents moving away from Obama and Democrats and toward the right. The president's backward-or-forward framework has a chance to reverse that shift.

There are a couple of problems, however. A number of conservative Blue Dogs have joined with Republicans in opposing reforms. And by highlighting obstructionism, the Obama administration may be making members of its own party vulnerable.

All politics is still local.

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If we don't free child rapists, the terrorists
have won

post from Crooks and Liars on 14 July 2010 09:00:07 AM. © Crooks and Liars

Oh look, it's yet another Washington Post editorial coming to the defense of poor Roman Polanski. This time it's written by Richard Cohen and it's called:

Thank you, Switzerland, for freeing Polanski

And see, right off the bat things get weird. Thanking a foreign country for freeing a child rapist is a little strange. It's akin to saying, "Thank you, North Korea, for crushing those dissidents" or "Thank you, China, for undermining our export sector." In other words, you don't normally pat countries on the head for doing things like this. Anyway, let's see where he's headed with this:

The Swiss got it right. Their refusal to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States on a 33-year-old sex charge is the proper dénouement for this mess of a case. There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze. There is no doubt also that after all these years there is something stale about the case, not to mention a ?victim,? Samantha Geimer, who has long ago forgiven her assailant and dearly wishes the whole thing would go away. So do I.

The scare quotes around the word "victim" are truly a sight to behold. Under Cohen's calculus, we should just free people who commit crimes if they've managed to escape the law for long enough. After all, getting an underage girl drunk and then raping her can totally be forgiven if it happened a long time ago.

There are only bad reasons to proceed with the prosecution.

Really? I can think of a good one right off the bat: He drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. That's a pretty good reason in and of itself, even if "Chinatown" was a pretty sweet movie.

The first is to rebut the argument that some sort of legal or moral exception ought to be made for Polanski on account of his talent. Having just seen his film ?The Pianist? for the second time, I salute his genius as, if I knew something about poetry, I might that of Ezra Pound.

Wait, I don't get the logic here. Per Cohen, one of the bad reasons to prosecute Polanski is because it will refute the morons who think we shouldn't prosecute people who make good movies? Does that make a lick of sense to you? And look, the movies aren't relevant to anything. He should go to jail because he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl.

The only argument in favor of Polanski?s continued freedom is that he is the victim of judicial misconduct. He had good reason to believe that the trial judge in his case was going to break the plea agreement and throw the book at him. He had already pleaded guilty to a reduced charge; he had already spent 42 days in Chino State Prison under psychiatric examination. [...] He ran from the prospect of a judge who was going to make his reputation at Polanski?s expense and send him to jail for a very long time. I would have done the same.

Well that's good to know, Rich! We'll keep that in mind if you ever get arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl!

But seriously, can anyone make sense of Cohen's moral reasoning here? His argument is that if you drug and rape a 13-year-old girl and you suspect that a mean and nasty judge might have it in for you then you have the right to... flee the country?!

Look, dude, we have an appeals process in this country for people who feel that they've been wrongfully imprisoned. And Roman wouldn't have been wrongfully imprisoned since he, you know, drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl.

(I know I keep mentioning this pesky little fact over and over again, but it's a pretty horrible crime that Polanski's defenders don't like to bring up. They should be reminded on a regular basis the sort of thing they're defending.)

OK, so where was I? Oh yeah: Even if poor, poor Roman Polanski had received a super-mean sentence from that nasty little judge, he could have easily appealed it. And given the fact that he's rich and can afford good legal help, his appeal probably would have been successful. Having a judge who doesn't like you doesn't give you a carte blanche to run off to France to escape justice, no matter how many times "The Pianist" made Richard Cohen cry.

It was this alleged -- but virtually proven -- miscarriage of justice that impressed the Swiss authorities and why they rejected the American requests for extradition. That was good. It would have been better, though, if at the same time they denounced the many artists and intellectuals who haughtily dismissed what Polanski had done on the basis of his talent and achievements. They thought of his films; they should have thought of their own daughters.

Wait, so now he's back to trashing people who defend Polanski on the basis of his artistic talents. Did Cohen write this column while sampling whatever vile concoction Polanski uses to ply his victims (or "victims," in Cohen's version)? I have no idea. I do know that it looks like Cohen vomited alphabet soup onto his computer screen and decided to file it as an opinion piece.

But on the other hand, "Rosemary's Baby" was a pretty sweet movie.

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You Paid For It; It's Yours; Demand They Give It
To You

No, not the taxes you pay for highways and clean water and law enforcement. The Social Security you earned that the Deficit Liars are trying to steal.

From Aimai:

Saw this piece from The Sideshow via Athenae at First Draft.
You worked hard and played by the rules, and now people in expensive suits who sat in offices recklessly gambling with other people's money want to stop you from being able to retire.
They exported jobs to other countries and made it harder to start new businesses to create new jobs. They slashed government spending to the point where even schools are closing. They failed to honor contracts that said they would put money into your pension fund, and now there is no pension fund. And now they want your unemployment insurance so they can gamble that away, too.
They say you need to tighten your belt to pay for their mistakes.
Well, why should you?
You paid for insurance to protect you from this. Demand what you paid for.
Social Security: You paid for it. We have the money. You earned it. You deserve it. And they don't.
Or something like that.

This is basically it. It cuts Sarah Palin's Common Sense Solutions talk all to shreds. It runs right over Harry Reid's mealy mouthed "we'll get that conference report out ASAP" and leaves it flattened in the dust. It kicks Wall Street and its enablers in the gonads and leaves them gasping. Just say it, damn it. And say it and say it. "Where'd my retirement go? Where'd my kid's education go? Where'd my job go? I paid for it--we paid for it--in blood, sweat, tears and taxes and now the Republican party, and every other banker and fat cat at the bailout trough is telling me we can't have it?"

Call your members of Congress and tell them:

"Where'd my retirement go? Where'd my kid's education go? Where'd my job go? I paid for it--we paid for it--in blood, sweat, tears and taxes and now the Republican party, and every other banker and fat cat at the bailout trough is telling me we can't have it?"

Fuck that shit.

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