Vox populi

Heh heh

*What every [sic] pretends to not know is that any online political site that truly lets the internet dictate its agenda will end with a NORML-Ron Paul joint ticket. Not that it would necessarily be so bad at this point.

Crisis averted

Idiots in defense of treason

Modern day Confederates. Their ignorance and shamelessness are matched only by their cluelessness.

Before a cheering crowd of several hundred men and women, some in period costume and others in crisp suits, an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of “Dixie.”

The participants far outnumbered the spectators, but it was to be the largest event of the year organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and one in a series of commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Confederacy and the War for Southern Independence. (Referring to the Civil War as anything other than an act of unwarranted Northern aggression upon a sovereign republic was rather frowned upon.)

The Sons’ principal message was that the Confederacy was a just exercise in self-determination that had been maligned by “the politically correct crowd” through years of historical distortions. It is the right of secession that they emphasize, not the cause, which they often describe as a complicated mix of tariff and tax disputes and Northern attempts to politically subjugate the South.

The other matter of subjugation — that is, slavery — went unmentioned on Saturday. (Davis himself did not refer to it in his inaugural address, but he emphasized the maintenance of African slavery as a cause for secession in other high-profile settings.). And the issue of slavery was largely brushed aside in interviews as a mere function of the time, and not a defining feature of the Confederacy.

[...]

But even the politics on Saturday were tied up in a larger sense of grievance, a feeling of being marginalized and willfully misunderstood. Expressions of this feeling led to some rather unexpected analogies, like when Kelley Barrow, a teacher from Georgia, declared that people of Confederate heritage “have been forced to go to the back of the bus.”

A teacher. Great.

No Hoover Dams for you

I heard a segment on Marketplace last evening in which an author said (paraphrasing) a country is reflected in its infrastructure and ours is in ruins. He lauded the stimulus for building new rail lines but said they are too long in coming and too vulnerable to being...derailed.

They’re actually running on the platform of making sure the trains not only don’t run on time, but don’t run:

Republicans running for governor in a handful of states could block, or significantly delay, one of President Obama’s signature initiatives: his plan to expand the passenger rail system and to develop the nation’s first bullet-train service.

In his State of the Union address this year, the president called for building high-speed rail, and backed up his words with $8 billion in stimulus money, distributed to various states, for rail projects.

But Republican candidates for governor in some of the states that won the biggest stimulus rail awards are reaching for the emergency brake.

In Wisconsin, which got more than $810 million in federal stimulus money to build a train line between Milwaukee and Madison, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and Republican candidate for governor, has made his opposition to the project central to his campaign.

Mr. Walker, who worries that the state could be required to spend $7 million to $10 million a year to operate the trains once the line is built, started a Web site, www.NoTrain.com, and has run a television advertisement in which he calls the rail project a boondoggle.

“I’m Scott Walker,” he says in the advertisement, “and if I’m elected as your next governor, we’ll stop this train.”

Oh, hell no! We don’t want no efficient high speed transportation around here! We’ll get to work in bumper to bumper traffic in our pick-em-up-trucks with “Jesus is my copilot” and “Palin 2012” bumper stickers, just the way God intended. Turning down a billion dollar train because you will have to pay 8 million a year in maintenance is like giving away a free car because you might have to one day buy windshield wiper fluid.

More on this idiocy here.

The TARP on our politics

It is certainly ironic -- at a time when most of us assumed irony is dead -- that one of the few programs launched by the Bush administration, and now being used to kill the political fortunes of everyone from Bob Bennett to Barack Obama, has succeeded.

WASHINGTON — Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.

A final accounting of the government’s full range of interventions in the economy, including the bailouts of the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is years off and will most likely remain controversial and potentially costly.

But the once-unthinkable possibility that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program could end up costing far less, or even nothing, became more likely on Thursday with the news that the government had negotiated a plan with the American International Group to begin repaying taxpayers.

The rescue of the troubled insurer included $70 billion from the bailout program that was enacted two years ago, at the height of the global financial crisis late in the Bush administration, initially to prop up big banks.

At the White House on Thursday, the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, briefed President Obama about A.I.G. and about the broader outlook for the expiring rescue program, putting the projected losses at less than $50 billion, at most. Yet neither the White House nor Congressional Democrats are likely to boast much in the month remaining before midterm elections. For most voters, TARP remains a four-letter word.

Brian A. Bethune, the chief financial economist in the United States for IHS/Global Insight, while critical of parts, called the program over all “a tremendous success. Now obviously, they can’t go out on the campaign trail and say that, because certainly, for a lot of voters, it’s just not going to resonate.”

The “bank bailout” was the first big issue, before the Obama administration’s roughly $800 billion stimulus plan and its health insurance overhaul, to stoke the rise of the Tea Party movement. After supporting TARP, several Republicans have lost elections largely because of their votes. For many Americans, TARP is more than a vote; it is a symbol of big government at its worst, intervening in private markets with taxpayers’ billions to save Wall Street plutocrats while average Americans struggle through the recession those financiers spawned.

Fewer than three in 10 Americans say they believe the program was necessary “to prevent the financial industry from failing and drastically hurting the U.S. economy,” according to a poll in July for Bloomberg News.

Of course, what is often forgotten, is that TARP didn't bring out the tea party crazies. It was when the Obama administration proposed helping struggling homeowners stop drowning in their underwater mortgages that set off the righteous, smarmy indignation.

A memorial to stupid

The Sufi Imam leading the group building the Park Place Islamic Center is not "behind the attacks" of the World Trade Center.

One would have hoped that using the victims of 9/11 for political gain would have ended after nine years. After all, we've stopped giving a shit about the health of those who first responded to those attacks.



One would be wrong.

Serwer writes

But look, here's the point: If Kristol's "decent Muslims" exist, there aren't many of them. And they couldn't possibly have any influence on Muslims who have read the Constitution, and therefore got the idea that they have the same rights as everyone else. Pretending to have the consent of "decent Muslims" doesn't change the fundamental principles at stake here, nor does it hide the fact that conservatives are demanding government intervene in the project not because of terrorism, not because of extremism, but because the builders happen to be Muslims. Even if opponents of the project produced a Muslim who met their decency standards, it's not as though American Muslims could collectively abdicate their rights to self-determination through a set of conservative-friendly spokespeople.

And, by the way, this isn't about offending the sensibilities of the millions of "decent (non-Muslim) Americans" passing the joint on their way to work or the Starbucks daring to serve lattes "in the shadow of the Trade Center." This is about 1.) capitalizing on what they perceive as "real America's" hatred for the practitioners of a certain Bronze Age faith; and 2.) hopes that this can tirelessly wear on and become another irrelevant midterm wedge issue...and not just in New York, folks.

After all, I don't recall Kristol's enraged reaction to Bush's warm relations with a "decent Wahhabi," but maybe I wasn't paying attention.

UPDATE: As I was saying, "not just in New York."

Bomber blues

Mitt ("the man") Romney has an op ed screed in the NY Kaplan Post today in which he attacks the strategic arms treaty Obama signed with Russian president Medvedev. Trouble is, Romney -- or his ghost writer -- doesn't know very much about nuclear weapons, according to Fred Kaplan. I don't much about the subject either, but I do know the diference between a missile and a bomb.

"Similarly, multiple nuclear warheads that are mounted on bombers are effectively not counted. Unlike past treaty restrictions, ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers. This means that Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers—including MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) or multiple warheads—without tripping the treaty's limits."

This is where I began to wonder if Romney had fallen prey to someone, perhaps a spy from Sarah Palin's camp, who wanted to make him look like an idiot.

ICBMs are not "mounted on," or loaded inside, bombers. The only nuclear weapons carried by bombers are bombs; that's why they're called bombers. (Many years ago, some B-52s and B-1s were equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, which flew through the atmosphere, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arc outside the atmosphere. These ALCMs no longer exist, in any case.) Certainly bombers are incapable of carrying MIRVs (which, by the way, are "multiple warheads" loaded onto the tips of missiles).

I think Romney's ghostwriter might have mixed up one of his talking points. New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There's no way to verify how many it's carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States' advantage, not Russia's. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney's ghostwriter meant to take note of, it's not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

The problem is, as Marc Ambinder muses, if Romney is pushing out propaganda about the treaty, it means he means to make it part of the 2012 campaign. Which means the treaty, which has the support of most U.S. experts as well as the Pentagon brass, will be another Republican talking-point and will surely not get the bipartisan support these treaties generally receive, whether negotiated by a Democratic or a Republican administration.

Blue Hoovers

Of course this makes no sense for an economy that is just barely in recovery mode, but "Blue Dog" Democrats mistake economic literacy for fiscal discipline. As for their jobs being on the line if jobs gains don't materialize soon, I'd say don't count on that.

The Medicaid provision, which would extend assistance first granted in last year’s stimulus package, was considered such a sure bet by many governors and legislative leaders that they prematurely included the money in their budgeting. But under pressure from conservative Democrats to rein in deficit spending, House leaders in late May eliminated $24 billion in aid to states from a tax and jobs bill that was approved and forwarded to the Senate.

The voting public -- at least those with jobs or getting Social Security checks -- appears to be less concerned with massive job cuts then they are with the federal deficit of which they know nothing and are not helped by our Big Media Pundits.

Civil rights imagery

A timely show opens in New York.

This clip opens the show, organized by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. And it is an example of a type of image to which black Americans were once expected to conform: the servant or underling. Another role was the clown, as seen in 1940s Aunt Jemima figures and postcards of black kids eating watermelon.

Such images didn’t reflect reality; they created it, or tried to. They were a common part of the cultural landscape until the 1960s, as were, in the South at least, racist enforcer emblems like “Whites Only” signs.

At the same time, black Americans were responding with images of their own, self-images. In the first decade of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois founded journals that combined reporting on race-based abuses with affirmative visual content, often in the form of photographic portraits of blacks. And in 1945 a young entrepreneur, John H. Johnson, started Ebony, a Life look-alike that covered the burgeoning civil rights movement and addressed itself to the lifestyle interests of a rising black middle class. Many other such magazines — Jet, Sepia, Hue — followed.

Their arrival coincided with the rise of celebrity athletes like Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson, who also caught the eye of the mainstream white press. And television gave visibility to black performers. While early situation comedies like “Amos ’n’ Andy” still traded in old stereotypes, integrated variety shows introduced an urbane new generation of singers. Even there, the limits to acceptance remained stringent. When Nat King Cole ventured into a variety show of his own in 1956, sponsors stayed clear for fear of alienating their Southern markets.

The South was still a place to fear. A year before Cole’s show was broadcast, a Chicago teenager named Emmett Till visited relatives in Money, Miss. Word went out that he had rashly asked a white woman for a date. Three days later, the woman’s husband and two other men dragged him from where he was staying, beat him to a pulp and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River.

When the mutilated corpse was recovered, Till’s mother demanded that it be returned to Chicago and put on public view. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she said. The black press was present. Pictures were taken and printed in Jet magazine. A copy of the issue is in the show, open to the photographs. Some historians point to their publication as the spark that ignited the civil rights movement.

True or not, the Montgomery Bus Boycott started three months later, and soon after that white newspapers began to turn to subjects the black press had been covering for years. But by the late 1950s, television was poised to become the prime mainstream vehicle for the civil rights story. In 1963, when half-hour news programs became the norm, that shift happened. Televised images of police turning fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., had an instant effect on public opinion and national politics.

Rand Paul and his fellow proudly ignorant glibertarians should be required to see such images. Though I doubt anything can shake their belief that "freedom" is about "me."

Ramblumenthal

Hard to say just how bad a candidate he is.

In 2003, he addressed a rally in Bridgeport, where about 100 military families gathered to express support for American troops overseas. “When we returned, we saw nothing like this,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Let us do better by this generation of men and women.”

At a 2008 ceremony in front of the Veterans War Memorial Building in Shelton, he praised the audience for paying tribute to troops fighting abroad, noting that America had not always done so.

“I served during the Vietnam era,” he said. “I remember the taunts, the insults, sometimes even physical abuse.”

Except he had something like five deferments and eventually ended up in the Marine Reserves. He never served in Vietnam.

Never has a Senate candidate had an easier path down which he stumbles.

UPDATE: Well, this is interesting. Blumenthal's deep-pockets possible opponent, wife of the WWF founder, claims that the NYT story was a result of their campaign's oppo research.

Making the claim more explicitly, McMahon's campaign website has re-posted, as an "In Case You Missed It," a blog entry by Kevin Rennie of South Windsor, a lawyer and a former Republican state senator and representative:

“McMahon Strikes Blumenthal In NYT Article ... The piece, fed to the paper by the Linda McMahon Senate campaign, is accompanied by a chilling 2008 video of Blumenthal blithely making the false claim. ... The Blumenthal Bombshell comes at the end of more than 2 months of deep, persistent research by Republican Linda McMahon's Senate campaign. It gave the explosive Norwalk video recording to The Times. This is what comes of $16 million, a crack opposition research operation.”

Rennie quotes no sources. The campaign’s decision to trumpet his dispatch allows Democrats to contend the expose was political — an argument that may not work, but at least gives them a talking point on a tough day. By late morning, the page featuring the blog entry was no longer live, showing a "Not Found" message.

Stupid.

I hope that this is a a wake up call for the Blumenthal campaign. He's not going to be annointed and better figure out his message and start campaigning for the office.

When Tigers attack!

Tiger speaks. Market comes to a halt.

Chauffeured Ford

Shorter Harold Ford, former Tennessee congressman, turned banker/TV pundit, turned wannabe Senator from the Great State of New York: Universal health care would cost New Yorkers money but doing something about excessive pay at banks violates the very tenets of Holy Capitalism.

Greenwald has more, and DougJ at Balloon Juice wonders about what kind of future "access" the million bucks per year Ford's been earning from BofA will buy the bank should Ford get elected to the Senate (or head the DNC).

It is funny, as Greenwald points out, that we find ourselves rallying around Kristen Gillibrand considering that when Gov. Patterson appointed her, the collected response was either "WTF?", or, "Who?" She was an upstate Blue Dog congress woman who reflected the views of her conservative district, much like Ford in Tennessee. I think the difference is that she has transformed herself in deeds more than words, becoming rather reliably progressive (Ford would say Schumer's and Reid's minion). Ford, on the other hand, will not even admit that his "former" pro-choice, flag-burning amendment-supporting, anti-gay, seal the border with Mexico, and I love the NRA stances were reflections of the people he represented. Now he wants us to believe that proclaiming himself "pro-choice" was some kind of framing instrument.

Mr. Ford twice voted for legislation in the House that would make same-sex marriage illegal. In 2006, when Tennessee voters considered a ballot initiative to outlaw the practice, he vowed to support it. “I oppose gay marriage,” he said at the time.

But in the interview, he said he had changed his mind. He said that he had endorsed civil unions since entering Congress, and that, after watching the debate about marriage unfold in state legislatures and courtrooms, his position had evolved.

“I don’t think it’s a great leap to go from civil unions to gay marriage,” he said. “I may be in the minority in believing that. But I don’t think there is.”

When pressed, he said he would seek to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage, and said he would “revisit” the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Mr. Ford has repeatedly described himself as “pro-life,” and has voted to ban a procedure opponents call partial-birth abortions and to require that minors receive parental consent before receiving an abortion.

In the interview, however, he said: “To describe me as pro-life is just wrong. I am personally pro-choice and legislatively pro-choice.”

Explaining the previous remarks, he said he refused to cede “the language of life” to the political right. Mr. Ford said that he had always supported abortion rights, but that when he campaigned in Tennessee, he used the phrase “pro-life” more broadly to highlight what he saw as the hypocrisy of Republican policies that denied benefits to returning war veterans, or equal pay to National Guardsmen.

He said he would not abandon his opposition to partial-birth abortion and support for parental consent, saying that if a 15-year-old girl cannot see an R-rated movie without an adult, she should not receive an abortion without a parent’s permission.

He supported Congressional legislation in 2006 to allow local police officers to investigate and arrest illegal immigrants, despite the objections of many advocates and lawmakers, like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who said it would discourage people from cooperating with the police. He says his views on the subject have changed.

“I have come to better understand the issue,” he said. “Empowering local enforcement to do what federal law enforcement was not doing seemed to make sense in my state,” he said, referring to Tennessee. Mr. Ford, a member of the National Rifle Association, also voted for legislation to limit lawsuits against gun makers, and he cast one of the few Democratic votes for a bill to repeal the District of Columbia’s restrictions on guns.

When asked about the tough restrictions that mayors in New York and Newark have put in place, however, he said, “All of Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Booker’s efforts in the region, I support.”

The only constituency he seems to genuinely be beholding to now is Wall Street.

Turning a corner, but not at The Corner

From the Corner of Ignorance and Spite, Charles Krauthammer shares his unique perspective on how to fix the economy.

On the White House jobs summit:

Well, it is obviously a PR maneuver. Unemployment is high. People showed [concern] on Election Day in November that the administration and Congress are spending all their time on health care, which is not a high priority. High priority is the economy.

It is the conceit of liberals in power to imagine that the government not only should but can create jobs. Outside of world wars, it doesn't. Generally it gets in the way.

I mean, there are things that you can do by clearing the brush:

Number one, kill health care with all of the job-killing mandates and penalties which are holding up employment.

Secondly, kill cap and trade, which will destroy what's left of the industrial Midwest.

Kill the stimulus package, and distribute the remaining billions either to individuals or to the Treasury.

The other thing they can do is to approve the free trade agreements with Columbia and South Korea, which will create American jobs …

And lastly, and the most important here, is sort of a reprise of 2008 — lift the unbelievably absurd restrictions on drilling for gas and oil, which would create a gold rush of jobs in the country and help us in terms of national security and the economy.

I thought we were tired of "clearing the brush" as a response to national crisis, but whatever.

Yes, as everyone knows, South Koreans and Colombians are just dying for our protectionist tariffs to fall so they can buy oodles of our stuff...Wait.

And as everyone also knows, it's the "absurd restrictions on drilling" -- not the fact that oil is now trading below $77 per barrel and the price of natural gas is at a 52-week low -- that are keeping the oil companies from launching their own WPA program to put unemployed wretches to work to pump more into the over-capacity pipes.

I won't even mention the "jobs killing" of health care reform which is based on...what? Or that cap & trade will destroy midwest industries (as opposed to...free trade agreements?).

And yes, let's "kill the stimulus" since it's such a fucking failure from keeping us from Great Depression II.

From NBC's Mark Murray
During President Obama's first 10-plus months in office, most of the economic news hasn't been positive. The unemployment rate is in double digits for the first time since the early 1980s. Critics have argued that the $787 billion stimulus hasn't worked the way some hoped it would. And Republicans, not surprisingly, have pounced on these shortcomings.

But as the economic news begins to get better -- positive growth in the 3rd quarter, the CBO estimating that between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs in the 3rd quarter were created or saved by the stimulus, and today's best monthly jobs report in nearly two years -- Democrats are now pointing to what they see as the GOP's disconnect on the economy.

"There is a real disconnect," said Doug Thornell, a top Democratic congressional spokesman. "At what point are they going to acknowledge the positive steps taken that have pulled us away from the brink?"

I guess we can answer Doug Thornell's question:

How's never? Does never work for you?

Horse shit and climate change

Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific review of Superfreakonomics, in which she concludes,

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Paul Krugman laments that the Times will not permit him to use such descriptive language.

Keep guvmint outta my public transportation system

John Cole is right, stuff like this makes blogging very hard.

Funny, I recall a debate on states' rights

It was called the Civil War. Over 600,000 men died.

The governor of Minnesota seems unaware of that historical blip.

"I'm with stupid"

You can't make this shit up.'

Via Sullivan.

Things I won't be reading today

Today, on washingtonpost.com:

Newt Gingrich, Christine Todd Whitman, Harold Ford Jr. and others debate how Obama could regain his political footing

Maybe a Bible would have been better?

The historical perspective and self-awareness of the Cornered are stunning to behold.

The bus drivers

Just average middle class Americans.

Unfortunately, I don't think telling enraged idiots that they're being used as tools of corporate and Republican interests is going to allay their collective angry.