"We're not going to let the country down"

Last Sunday, the Washington Post Magazine featured a long piece following a class of recruits through all 16 weeks of Secret Service training. Among them are an Iraq veteran missing three fingers on his trigger hand and a 4-foot, 11-inch social worker. It's fascinating.

For the members of Special Agent Training Class No. 283, this is finals time. They have been cramming here for months, since days after the election of Barack Obama, hoping to join the men and women charged with protecting the president.

Not all of them will make it.

If they fail, they will leave humiliated. If they pass, they'll become members of an elite, stealthy service during a period of exceptional pressures. At their annual party, Ralph Basham, the former director, greeted his replacement: "I'm the happiest guy in Washington because I'm not the director of the Secret Service anymore."

With the rise of Islamic terrorism, the agency's roster of protectees has grown. With the election of the first African American president, public scrutiny has exploded. Presidents typically receive 3,000 threats a year, says a Secret Service expert. Obama is outpacing the average.

"We understand the historic significance," says the current director, Mark Sullivan. "If we make a mistake, it's going to be devastating for the country. We're not going to let the country down."

Read the whole thing.

Trey, Rand, the Gays and the Pork

On this Fancy Farm Eve, as they start slurping up the bean soup at the Marshall County Bean Soup Supper and Political Speech Practice Round, Media Czech has a provocative post on the disturbing lack of homophobes among republicans running for Jim Bunning's Senate seat next year.

Gay-hating KY Republicans don't have much to cheer in the 2010 Senate primary.

With the tail-between-legs withdrawal of Senator Jim Bunning from the 2010 Senate race, good ole homophobe gay-hating Republicans in Kentucky are faced with a dilemma. The 2 remaining viable candidates, Trey Grayson and Rand Paul, do not have an rich history of protecting America from the scourge of pedophile molesters who want to tear married spouses away from each other with the lure of the dirty gay sex.

Rand Paul has absolutely nothing bad to say about The Gays on his campaign website, and assuming he has the same states' rights libertarian bent of his Papi, he will certainly face the wrath of good Bible-thumping Gay-haters in the 2010 primary.

Trey Grayson also has a bit of a problem with The Gays. Trey tends to be rather two-faced on this issue, as he shows tolerance towards gays in some rooms, then plays up the God, Guns and Gays routine when amongst the crazy base. Grayson will be forced, very soon, to publicly pick a side in this battle: Does he support DOMA and DADT, while opposing the Hate Crimes Bill and domestic partner rights? Or will he seek to separate himself from the Neanderthal base by moving the Republican Party in a direction that won't turn off voters 30-ish to younger who by a wide-margin are in favor of GLBTQ rights? We'll find out soon. If I had to bet, he'll choose the former.

But if he doesn't, the Republican base is going to be angry and totally apathetic about this Senate race. Republicans do not have a prayer in competitive statewide races if they do not rally the Bible-thumping social conservative hate-mongers among their base. They will not contribute, and they certainly will not turn out to vote in numbers great enough to beat Jack Conway in the general election.

This is why I'm betting that Trey Grayson will find the old-time Gay-hating religion very soon. The question in this case would be, do Republicans trust this last-hour conversion? If not, you can expect 2 things: (1) depressed turnout among the conservative base, and (2) a semi-viable social-Neanderthal Republican challenger popping up at the last minute.

Anyway... maybe somebody will ask Trey these questions at Fancy Farm. Yes?

I won't be there this year, but Media Czech will, and you won't have to wait until Sunday for the news - he'll be bringing it to you via Twitter all day tomorrow.

Coolest Medal Of Freedom Recipients Ever

Today President Obama announced 2009's recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It is the coolest 16-person list ever.

Billie Jean King, Sidney Poitier, Chita Rivera, Muhammad Yunus, Harvey Milk, Desmond Tutu, and this guy:

Joe Medicine Crow joined the army, becoming a scout in the 103rd Infantry Division (United States). Whenever he went into battle, he wore his war paint beneath his uniform and a sacred eagle feather beneath his helmet. Without realizing it, Medicine Crow completed all four task required to become a war chief. He touched a living enemy soldier (1) and disarmed an enemy (2) when he turned a corner and found himself face to face with a young German soldier:

“The collision knocked the German's weapon to the ground. Mr. Crow lowered his own weapon and the two fought hand-to-hand. In the end Mr. Crow got the best of the German, grabbing him by the neck and choking him. He was going to kill the German soldier on the spot when the man screamed out "momma." Mr. Crow then let him go.”

He also led a successful war party (3) and stole an enemy horse (4), making a midnight raid to steal the horses from a battalion of German officers (as he rode off, he sang a traditional Crow honor song.) He is the last member of the Crow tribe to become a war chief. Of his story, noted documentarian Ken Burns said, "The story of Joseph Medicine Crow is something I've wanted to tell for 20 years." Mr. Crow was interviewed and appeared in the 2007 Ken Burns PBS series The War, describing his World War II service.

He stole horses from the SS. Top that, George Tenet.

The President announced today the 16 recipients of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilan honor. The President praised the recipients for breaking down barriers and lifting up their fellow citizens: "These outstanding men and women represent an incredible diversity of backgrounds. Their tremendous accomplishments span fields from science to sports, from fine arts to foreign affairs. Yet they share one overarching trait: Each has been an agent of change. Each saw an imperfect world and set about improving it, often overcoming great obstacles along the way."

The awards will be presented on August 12.

Read details about all the recipients here.

Salesmanship and the Enemy

Congress is sneaking out of town without taking full votes on health care reform, so it's finally time to stop obsessing over every kabuki move in Capitol Hill committees and take the battle to where it counts: the public.

That would be you and me and everybody else, 75 percent of whom want drastic health care reform that reins in the private insurers, lowers costs and offers a Medicare/VA-like option to everyone.

The wingnuts are crowing that the latest polls show the public disapproves of President Obama's "handling" of health care reform, but that's pretty obviously disapproval of his failure to ram it down the repug/Blue Dog throats, not disapproval of his public option/regulation plan.

What this needs, besides every single one of us calling/emailing/confronting in person at town halls our representatives and senators to let them know what we want and what they have to do, is two forgotten ingredients:

Salesmanship and an Enemy.

Kevin Drum nails sales:

Everyone has been so hung up on congressional process that they seem to have forgotten that Congress responds to the public. If constituents are mad as hell that their healthcare isn't as good as France's, they'll flood congressional offices with phone calls. But if they think America has the best healthcare in the world, while the rest of the world is a socialist dystopia of ramshackle hospitals, yearlong waits for hip replacements, and harried doctors who can't see you for months and treat you like a postal customer when you finally get in — well, who's going to get pissed off about the occasional scuffle with their insurance company?

And if the public isn't worked up, then Congress won't get worked up either.

This has always been about public opinion. Everything is about public opinion. It's about public opinion being strong enough to overcome the resistance of whatever corporate interests are on the other side. For some reason, though, liberals don't seem to get that anymore, and because of that we don't spend enough time on either side of the basic vox populi equation: (a) hammering home why individuals, personally, should be unhappy with the status quo, and (b) promising them, personally, lots of cool new stuff if they buy into change.

You don't have to lie to accomplish this. But you do have to sell, the same way any salesman anywhere sells stuff. That means understanding your audience, figuring out what they're afraid of, promising them something that will make them better off, overcoming their objections, and then convincing them that they have to call now to take advantage of this one-time offer! Every pitchman on late light TV understands this. Why don't we?

Last week, Steve M. explained that what Obama needs is an Enemy.

Barack Obama is struggling on health care because, while he wants Americans geared up for war, he won't try to get them truly angry at an enemy.

If you want people worked up, they need to envision, and despise, a foe. The filthy Huns. The dirty Japs. The Red menace. The Butcher of Baghdad. The Islamofascists. (Or, coming from the other side's propaganda works: the crusader infidel, or, earlier, the capitalist running dogs.)

As rage-inducing enemies go, "the status quo" ain't gonna cut it.

Obama saves a permanent place at the table for everyone he could possibly define as the enemy of progress, so he's got nothing left with which to rally the public. The public needs to be angry about what we have now. The public needs to be angry at someone. And he offers no one.

Or, as aimai says in the comments to my last post:

I can't believe anyone ever let him ramble on about the fiscal issues or the phrase "unsustainable." they are simply experience distant terms. He should have said up front "The american people are being nickeled and dimed to death by the same large corporations and vested interests that have just looted the treasury to the tune of trillions of dollars--and they now want to turn around and tell you that you and your neighbors can't afford to choose to come together and pay for a real, national, health care plan?" I would have wound up with "the american people are too big to be allowed to fail--and I won't allow it."

There's a way to take all that fiscal language and turn it to your advantage but you have to set yourself and your party as the saviors.

Yes -- and you have to remind people who and what they're being saved from. Not "the devil you know." The devil.

That would be the criminal, murdering, obscenely rich health insurance corporations.

So find out where your congress critters are going to be holding town halls in August, show up, corner them on health care reform, and don't let them go until they swear - while being recorded - to vote for only a strong public option and regulation.

If they're hiding, keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Idea for the Perfect New Sport

KeninNY at Down with Tyranny improves on the famous Gloucester Cheese Roll:

To the civilized mind, guys or girls chasing rolling cheese down a hill while wearing a horse head or even ending up carried off the course on a spine-immobilizing stretcher may seem somewhat barbaric, but to the vengeful mind, my mind, I find something better. I find inspiration!

Just as Americans of the early 19th century adapted another British sport, cricket, into the national pastime of baseball, why can’t we adapt the cheese roll? Sure, it’s a fantasy, but isn’t life about making our fantasies come true?

Here’s how it would go:

First, I would find a boulder-strewn, pockmarked hill somewhere just outside of Washington, DC, where, as newly elected Benevolent Dictator, I would stage my new, improved version of this hallowed British tradition. Next, I would place some angled six-foot-long very sharp iron spikes at the bottom of the course. Poison-tipping them would be optional, or only for special national holiday races.

Then I would pass a law that decreed that the only way K Street could possibly pass money into the gaping eager pockets of our bribe sponging U.S senawhores would be through events such as what I am proposing. Instead of a large roll of smelly cheese, as shown in the clip, my little game would feature a large roll of stinking cash, provided by K Street. The Senate would be “invited” to participate. If the greedy, evil, good-for-nothing slimebuckets like Max Baucus and Chuck “Grasshole” Grassley want the cash, they have to dash, downhill. I might even give those two a head start.

The element of extreme risk would be introduced and there would be the side benefit of having the greediest, fastest, connivingest, piggiest members of the Senate standing a jolly good chance of impalement at the fantasy line. Who wouldn’t tune in to ESPN to see if Max Baucus got deservedly kababbed at the finish line? I know I would! The whole thing is evolution at work, the greediest and fastest etc. would risk all in a frenzied hopeless endeavor. They think they can win the prize, but the odds are stacked against them.

I’d even let a few win once in a while, like a casino does just to encourage participation. If the K Street Bribery Squads want to peddle some influence, this will be the only legal way for them to do it. This idea could even be adapted to the handing out of bailout money to banksters! All in favor?

Read the whole thing.

The Liberal Option

Yesterday's compromise with House Blue Dogs that left the public option in the health care reform bill intact showed that liberal pushback against DINOs and Blue Dogs may be starting to have an effect.

Steve Benen had a pretty depressing piece Tuesday explaining why liberals and progressives in Congress have less power than the Blue Dogs, even though the Progressive Caucus is larger than the Blue Dog Caucus.

Progressive members of Congress are already on board with reform. They like the tri-committee proposal in the House, and fully embrace the HELP committee's bill in the Senate. They don't need coaxing or deals or enticements or concessions. They have legislation they like, and there's not much more for them to talk about.
For conservatives, it's obviously an entirely different dynamic. Conservatives don't really want to overhaul the system. Democrats on the right are skeptical of the approach, and Republicans on the right oppose reform in a more fundamental way. If reform has to be "bipartisan," and can't pass the House without Blue Dogs, that necessarily means making the bill worse.

It also means conservatives have the leverage. If they don't get the changes they want, they'll kill reform and do extraordinary damage to the Obama presidency -- an outcome they don't consider especially troublesome. If conservatives do get the changes they want, it's assumed liberals will go along, because some reform will be preferable to the status quo, and they have a vested interest in not undermining the White House.

So, it becomes easier to imagine a scenario in the fall in which center-right lawmakers -- some Democrats, some not; some in the Senate, some not -- hold reform hostage until it looks like the kind of bill they want. The left is told, "Take it or leave it." If liberals say it's a bridge too far, conservatives will say, "We had a bipartisan bill ready to go, but the left killed health care." If liberals swallow hard and accept it, the once-in-a-generation opportunity will have passed, and a weak bill will become law.

In comments, sgwhiteinfla responded:

There is another option which few liberals and progressives are talking about in the blogosphere which to me should be a no brainer.

Put a progressive bill up for a vote.

Game Set Match. The Blue Dogs will never be able to keep their coalition together enough to vote down Health Care reform.

Lets be real about some things here. Blue Dogs normally come from red or purple districts. But they STILL get voted in primarily by Democrats. If they vote against health care reform they can kiss their political careers good bye.

Now a few of them may not care because they will have lucrative jobs lined up with health insurance companies much like Tauzin. However most of them will want to keep their job in the House and will break away and vote yea.

Why Pelosi and Waxman can't see this I simply don't know. Put THEM on the spot. Bring the bill to the floor and have them actually put their name behind a no vote.
Their coalition has already splintered over a public option. The upside is if they bring a progressive bill to the floor and put them on the spot, not only will the bill pass, its also likely to shatter the Blue Dog coalition forever.

This is not over, kids. Congress is on vacation for the next month, which gives us 31 days to lay a hurt on the Blue Dogs but good.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Somebody's Gonna Break

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Public Option Still Alive in House - Keep Up the Pressure

So, the indefatigable Henry Waxman managed a health care reform compromise that retains the public option, but delays the actual vote until September.

Which means, boys and girls, that it's our turn. Get to work now, and don't stop until both the House and Senate pass real health care reform with a strong public option, strong subsidies for the middle class, and strong regulations on the private health insurers.

Here's an inspiring letter to get you started:

Dear Friend,

If you’re like most Americans, there’s nothing more important to you about health care than peace of mind.

Given the status quo, that’s understandable. The current system often denies insurance due to pre-existing conditions, charges steep out-of-pocket fees – and sometimes isn’t there at all if you become seriously ill.

It’s time to fix our unsustainable insurance system and create a new foundation for health care security. That means guaranteeing your health care security and stability with eight basic consumer protections:

• No discrimination for pre-existing conditions
• No exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays
• No cost-sharing for preventive care
• No dropping of coverage if you become seriously ill
• No gender discrimination
• No annual or lifetime caps on coverage
• Extended coverage for young adults
• Guaranteed insurance renewal so long as premiums are paid

Learn more about these consumer protections at Whitehouse.gov.

Over the next month there is going to be an avalanche of misinformation and scare tactics from those seeking to perpetuate the status quo. But we know the cost of doing nothing is too high. Health care costs will double over the next decade, millions more will become uninsured, and state and local governments will go bankrupt.

It’s time to act and reform health insurance, drive down costs and guarantee the health care security and stability of every American family. You can help by putting these core principles of reform in the hands of your friends, your family, and the rest of your social network.

Thank you,
Barack Obama

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

The New Southern Strategy

I've never been fond of the "If you are/aren't blank, then you have to be blank" formulation. As in, if you're not for the war in Iraq, then you hate the troops. Probably because even though I was raised in a liberal, reality-based home, my grandparents were the extinct variety of republicans who could hate both FDR and Nixon for entirely rational reasons in both cases.

But as Smirky made crystal clear in so many concrete ways, it's us vs. them, and if you're not one of us, you're one of them.

Them, in this case, being Obama-haters, who are, ipso facto, racists.

No, I'm not talking about those of us on the left throwing brickbats because the president hasn't closed Guantanamo or repealed DADT and DOMA, or put an end to Smirky/Darth secrecy or fulfilled any of his many other campaign promises. I'm not talking about the independents and moderates who aren't happy with the slow pace of health care reform or the jobless recovery or the trillions in tax money Wall Street snorted and then flushed.

I'm talking about the haters: the people who could personally witness President Obama make every one of their dearest wishes and wildest dreams come true before their eyes, and still hate him. Just because of who he is: a nigger who stole the White House.

Eric Kleefield reviewed the evidence yesterday.

Today, Steve M. considers how the GOP could possibly consider such blatant racism to be a winning strategy.

This is clearly the party line right now.

But isn't this a terrible strategy for the GOP? Isn't the population becoming less white? Isn't the white population becoming less racist, as evidenced by the success of a black presidential candidate?

Well, it's possible that the GOP isn't looking and further than the 2010 election. It's going to be a midterm election, and Barack Obama won't be on the ballot. If whites -- especially angry whites -- make up a greater percentage of the 2010 electorate, the Republicans assume they'll win. It's the Pat Buchanan strategy.

But don't voters, even angry white voters, want actual solutions to America's problems, not angry rhetoric? I think Republicans are skeptical of that conventional wisdom. They clearly don't feel the need to present a health-care plan of their own -- why would they think they need to present solutions to any of the nation's other problems? Look: it's a two-party system. If you get enough people angry at Obama and the Democrats, where are they going to go? They don't really have a hell of a lot of choices.

Regarding Hispanics, Republicans clearly feel they can't pursue the Bush-Rove strategy of outreach -- sooner or later it would require them to have a policy on immigration other than "Deport 'em all and seal the borders." And any deviation from that infuriates the base.

And GOP outreach to African-Americans never works (for reasons that seem to baffle Republicans).

So the strategy is: make Obama and the Democrats unpopular, keep the base fired up and donating, and then be the only alternative.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Shocking

Digby remind us that while the outrage of repug-undermined health care reform has everyone's attention, other outrages are flying under the radar.

They whooped and hollered when they heard about it.

Taser International unveiled its first new stun gun since 2003 on Monday, a device that can shock three people without being reloaded.

SNIP

While the device can be used against three people, it targets the same person more than once. Smith said each barb would deliver a separate shock.

Gosh, that is such a great improvement. Instead of having to reload to shock people multiple times while they are already compliant and in custody, they can do it in rapid succession. After all, it only leaves a couple of tiny marks.

I hear Taser is working on something really innovative: a chip that can be implanted in every citizen which can be activated by remote control to drop you to the ground writing in pain whenever the authorities perceive that you are being uncooperative. Wouldn't that solve all of these problems? And seriously, what would be the principle against against it?

And that's not all - they figured out a way to make it into an even bigger outrage for taxpayers. Read the whole thing.

How Bipartipartsianship is Killing Health Care Reform, Part 2

As our dear friend Blue Girl often says, if you can't use profanity to describe an obscenity, when can you use it?

The great Rude Pundit once again harnesses his genius for sexual metaphor to explain the obscenity that is Congressional Democrats' idea of bipartisanship.

It is the usual way for Democrats, thinking that bipartisanship means giving Republicans what they want. It's as if the Democrats were a family inviting a Republican family over for the Democratic daughter's My Little Pony birthday party, but the Republican family won't come unless the Democratic family changes it to a Bakugan party so the Republican son can feel welcome. Instead of telling the Republican family to go fuck itself, the Democratic family makes sure that every cute plastic pony is facing down some horrible mutating machine. It's okay for bipartisanship to mean that Democrats invite Republicans to play. If they don't wanna, then the hell with 'em.

SNIP

Who, exactly, are the Blue Dog Democrats (and the Republicans) trying to please here? Fucking Hugh Hewitt and the other conservative drones aren't gonna nuance this shit out. They're not gonna sit there and think, "Well, at least they didn't pass a public plan financed by a tax on rich people" and then accept whatever comes down the pike. If even the mildest health reform passes, the one that says one-legged American orphans with TB must get coverage, Rush Limbaugh will scream like someone at McDonald's told him they couldn't batter his Big Mac and put it in the deep fryer.

In the push to be able to say they got something passed when they had majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Democrats are shifting the organizing principle of the argument from universal coverage to keeping costs for the already-insured down. And you can bet that, even then, the vast, vast majority of Republicans will vote it down because it's not bipartisan enough.

Read the whole thing. Rated X.

RINO Schadenfreude

Back in May, I expressed skepticism about a website claiming that republicans should not trust republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson because he once voted Democratic. I said it was a fake to fool Democrats.

But now the Herald-Leader has picked it up:

Many conservative Republicans concede that Secretary of State Trey Grayson is their party’s likely nominee in Kentucky’s 2010 U.S. Senate race now that incumbent Sen. Jim Bunning has quit the contest, but the thought makes them uneasy.

Some Republicans in the state wonder whether the former Democrat — Grayson voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 — is a true conservative who is tough enough to withstand an intense statewide race that will garner national attention.

“I hope the GOP doesn’t nominate another Arlen Specter as its 2010 nominee?” State Rep. Jamie Comer of Tompkinsville said on his Facebook page Monday night after Bunning decided not to seek a third term and Grayson said he will formally enter the race.

SNIP

Republican political consultant Ted Jackson of Louisville agreed that Grayson has something to prove to conservative Republicans.

“I like his odds of being the Republican nominee next year but, to my knowledge, Trey has never been in a bare-knuckle campaign,” Jackson said.

“It remains to be seen how he reacts and performs in the heat of battle,” he said. “He doesn’t like conflict like some politicians but I think he will rise to the occasion.”

Jackson said Attorney General Jack Conway of Louisville, who some consider the front-runner in next year’s Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate, may have an upper hand on Grayson in “toughness on the campaign trail.”

“Conway was involved in a tough, mean-spirited race for Congress, which he almost won,” Jackson said, referring to Conway’s 2002 race against Republican Anne Northup in Louisville.

The 2010 Senate race likely will take on a more savage tone, said Scott Jennings, a veteran of several Kentucky political campaigns and a former adviser to President George W. Bush.

As someone who has spent years railing against both DINO candidates - repugs pretending to be Democratic - and voters who register Democratic but vote repug, I am looking forward to watching Kentucky repugs struggling with the same dilemma.

No, Grayson is not going to have any trouble winning the primary. But neither is his 17-year-old vote for Clinton going to attract many Democratic voters.

But if his repug opponents succeed in labeling him as a RINO, it could hurt his fundraising and cause at least a few republican voters to skip the Senate race.

Regardless, Democratic voters should not be fooled: Trey Grayson is even less of a real Democrat than Ben Chandler is.

We're from the GOP, and we're here to help

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Taibbi's Right, But Don't Jump Yet

Matt Taibbi's brilliant. I have all his books, purchased new with my own money. I could read his stuff all day long.

But sometimes, I seriously wonder if he's actually trying to make his readers commit suicide.

Before you overreact totoday's piece on the Senate finance committee killing the public option, I promise to show how his cynical take actually reveals an opening for determined activists.

Who among us did not know this would happen? It’s been clear from the start that the Democrats would make a great show of doing something real, then they would fold prematurely, ram through some piece-of-shit bill with some incremental/worthless change in it, and then in the end blame everything on Max Baucus and Bill Nelson, saying, “By golly, we tried our best!”

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with Max Baucus, Bill Nelson, or anyone else. If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. Personally, I think they’re doing a lousy job even of that. I lauded Roddick for playing out the string with heart, and giving a good show. But these Democrats aren’t even pretending to give a shit, not really. I mean, they’re not even willing to give up their vacations.

This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency. What’s left? Third-party politics?

What's left, Matt, is us. Now we've got an opportunity. Everybody's shown their cards. All that's left is sheer force of will and determination.

Every poll shows that more than 75 percent of Americans want the genuine health care reform that the House, liberal Democrats and President Obama are trying to give them: tight regulation of private health insurers, a strong public option, mandates and incentives to ensure universal coverage, and subsidies for the middle class.

But we have to make our members of Congress feel that majority standing behind them with cast-iron skillets, breathing down their necks, ready to clobber them into painful submission if they don't get this done and done right and done right right now.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

What Health Care Reform Will Accomplish in Your District

Henry Waxman's diligent staffers have been hard at it, churning out facts and figures on the impact the House's Affordable Health Choice Act - the good one, with a strong public option and other money-saving measures - will have on each and every individual congressional district in the country - all 438 of them.

The Committee has prepared, for each member, a district-level analysis of the impact of the legislation. This analysis includes information on the impact of the legislation on small businesses, seniors in Medicare, health care providers, and the uninsured.

Here's the report for Blue Dog Ben "DINO" Chandler's district in the Heart of the Bluegrass:

America’s Affordable Health Choices Act would provide significant benefits in the 6th Congressional District of Kentucky: up to 14,900 small businesses could receive tax credits to provide coverage to their employees; 7,900 seniors would avoid the donut hole in Medicare Part D; 1,610 families could escape bankruptcy each year due to unaffordable health care costs; health care providers would receive payment for $113 million in uncompensated care each year; and 95,000 uninsured individuals would gain access to high-quality, affordable health insurance. Congressman Ben Chandler represents the district.

• Help for small businesses. Under the legislation, small businesses with 25 employees or less and average wages of less than $40,000 qualify for tax credits of up to 50% of the costs of providing health insurance. There are up to 14,900 small businesses in the district that could qualify for these credits.
• Help for seniors with drug costs in the Part D donut hole. Each year, 7,900 seniors in the district hit the donut hole and are forced to pay their full drug costs, despite having Part D drug coverage. The legislation would provide them with immediate relief, cutting brand name drug costs in the donut hole by 50%, and ultimately eliminate the donut hole.
• Health care and financial security. There were 1,610 health care-related bankruptcies in the district in 2008, caused primarily by the health care costs not covered by insurance. The bill provides health insurance for almost every American and caps annual out-of-pocket costs at $10,000 per year, ensuring that no citizen will have to face financial ruin because of high health care costs.
• Relieving the burden of uncompensated care for hospitals and health care providers. In 2008, health care providers in the district provided $113 million worth of uncompensated care, care that was provided to individuals who lacked insurance coverage and were unable to pay their bills. Under the legislation, these costs of uncompensated care would be virtually eliminated.
• Coverage of the uninsured. There are 117,000 uninsured individuals in the district, 16% of the district. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that nationwide, 97% of all Americans will have insurance coverage when the bill takes effect. If this benchmark is reached in the district, 95,000 people who currently do not have health insurance will receive coverage.
• No deficit spending. The cost of health care reform under the legislation is fully paid for: half through making the Medicare and Medicaid program more efficient and half through a surtax on the income of the wealthiest individuals. This surtax would affect only 2,500 households in the district. The surtax would not affect 99.2% of taxpayers in the district.

Yep, sounds like a socialist hell-hole, alright.

Click here to get the report for your Congressional District and start pounding your representative today.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Maddeningly Simple, but Apparently Impossible

Baseless Senate Race Speculation

How about a 2010 Senate Race Nightmare Scenario to go with your morning coffee?

No one doubts that Jim Bunning hates Mitch McConnell and the rest of the republican party leadership with a white-hot flame. Back in the spring, he threatened to step down, handing Democratic Governor Steve Beshear the chance to fill the seat with a Democrat.

But that was before Beshear endorsed - albeit as weakly as possible - his lite guv Dan Mongiardo in the Senate race.

And that was before Jack Conway blew the doors off political fundraising in Kentucky with a second-quarter haul of $3.25 million - more than four times what Mongiardo raised.

So here's the nightmare scenario:

Bunning, senile and infuriated, fails to take the changed topography into account and steps down in an attempt to fuck over McConnell by handing Harry Reid a 61st Senator.

But this puts Beshear into an impossible bind. He knows now that Mongiardo is an inexcusably weak candidate, but having endorsed Dr. Dan he can't name somebody else to the seat without looking like an idiot.

So Beshear names Mongiardo to the U.S. Senate, where he attaches himself by the hip to the un-Democratic Blue Dogs and votes against health care reform. A proud-and-out homophobe, Mongiardo also votes against repealing DADT and DOMA.

Next year, republican Trey Grayson slaughters Mongiardo in the general election, keeping the seat safely in McConnell's hands.

There is one way Beshear can avoid that outcome, assuming Bunning does leap off that cliff: he can announce that for the good of the Commonwealth, he can't undermine the integrity of the Democratic primary by appointing someone who is already a candidate. So he appoints someone who is unlikely to run for re-election next year, someone who is a Real Democrat who can be counted on to vote with President Obama, someone to whom neither Mongiardo nor Conway can object.

U.S. Senator Julian Carroll, anyone?

Countdown Alert: Guest Host Howard Dean

Rejoice, Deaniacs! Our very own Howard is going to guest-host Countdown on MSNBC this Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m.

Granted, Howard Dean does not have the world's most melifluous voice, but he doesn't have to do much to improve on Richard "I don't speak American" Wolffe, who guest-hosted Countdown on Friday and if there's any justice buried his TV career for good.

Keith Olbermann kept me going through the Smirky/Darth Interregnum, and I will always worship him for that. If it were up to me, he'd never be allowed to take a vacation or a sick day, especially now that Rachel has her own show and can't guest-host for him.

But if I can't have Keith, I'll take Howard.

Cancel your dinner plans, turn off the phone, shut the kids in the basement with the dog, and for good measure set the DVR. It's a whole, entire hour of Howard - two nights in a row.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Bunning Announces Retirement; Senate Race Now Wide Open

I hate to be the wet blanket here, but Jim Bunning's withdrawal from the 2010 Senate race is not necessarily good news for Democrats.

The republican candidate is no longer a senile, unpopular, broke incumbent hated by his own party leaders, a candidate even Dan Mongiardo could beat.

No, the presumptive republican candidate is now young, smart, popular, rolling-in-dough, loved-by-his-party-leaders Secretary of State Trey Grayson, whom even Jack Conway is going to have trouble beating.

So, Democratic voters, activists, fundraisers and campaigners in Kentucky and nationwide: stop celebrating. Hunker down, dig in and start working. This one's not going to be easy.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Repugs Targeting Chandler on Health Care Reform

Yes, on the RNC's list of Democratic House members to hit with $1 million in attack ads in August is Kentucky's own Blue Dog, Ben "DINO" Chandler.

No, this does not mean Chandler is some big tough dem the repugs are afraid of, and therefore we can relax and take him for granted.

It means that Benny Boy is a fence-sitting repug-fellator the repugs think they can intimidate, and therefore we have to bombard him with demands that he stand tall for a strong public option.

The Republican National Committee will spend nearly $1 million on campaign activities over the next month in an effort to cast doubt on President Obama's proposal to reform health care, a GOP official tells CNN.

The Republican campaign will include television commercials already running in Arkansas, Nevada and North Dakota and new radio ads announced Friday that will air in 33 states.

The RNC did not reveal Friday who the radio ads would target, but CNN has learned the 60 second commercials will run against 60 House Democrats.

The second name on the list? "Kentucky Rep. Ben Chandler."

No shame if you mistake that abbreviation for "Republican" instead of "Representative." The very first thing Ben Chandler did after his election to Congress in a special election in February 2004 - before he unpacked, found the men's room, or figured out what the fuck was going on - was join the Blue Dog Caucus.

He wasn't one a them librul commie terist Democrats, oh, no. He and the rest of the Blue Dogs voted for every one of Smirky/Darth's deficit-exploding budgets, every one of the bills to flush hundrds of billions outside the budget down the Iraq clusterfuck contractor toilet, the Military Commissions Act that gutted habeas corpus and gave the president the right to lock up innocent American citizens just because, the FISA reauthorization that legalized unconstitutional wiretapping and idemnified the criminals who committed it, etc., etc., etc. ad infinitum.

Any budget-busting, military-destroying, Constitution-shredding, economy-tanking thing that war criminal of an administration - that republican administration - wanted was just hunky-fucking-dory with Benny Boy and his Blue Dog BFFs.

But now, now that we have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress that want to pass desperately-needed health care reform, reform that more than 70 percent of Americans of all parties want, suddenly the Blue Dogs are clutching their pearls and fainting.

And the repugs are there to catch them and remind them how very, very good it feels to vote with same people they've been voting with all along: republicans.

Don't let them intimidate Ben Chandler or any of the other Blue Dogs on their list.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

The Real Democratic Party

I am sometimes admonished for drawing distinctions between Blue Dogs, DINOs and others repugs in dem clothing, and those I salute as Real Democrats: Liberals, Progressives and other members of Paul Wellstone's Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

"You can't say that," the critics whine. "The Democratic Party stands for inclusiveness. We don't reject people because they disagree with us."

OK, first of all, that makes no sense. The whole point of a political party is to bring together people who agree on a particular set of principles.

Second, the post-1972 demise of the Democratic Party can be tied directly to its willingness to draw to its bosom the poisonous asp of republicanism.

Down With Tyranny examines what the Democratic Party stands for.

With Blue Dogs and DLC scumbags endeavoring almost as hard as their Republican allies to maintain the status quo, derail health care reform, turn back the clock on women's choice, deny equality to gay men and women, ignore the dual looming climate change/energy crisis and, most important, keep the corrupt corporate money flowing in their direction, I thought it might be a good time to re-familairize ourselves with something Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a great Democrat, said when I was just a schoolboy, working for him (as an elevator operator in his NYC campaign headquarters):

In this entire century the Democratic Party has never been invested with power on the basis of a program which promised to keep things as they were. We have won when we pledged to meet the new challenges of each succeeding year. We have triumphed not in spite of controversy but because of it; not because we avoided problems but because we faced them. We have won not because we bent and diluted our principles, but because we stood fast to the ideals which represent the most noble and generous portion of the American spirit.

Make no mistake: genuine health care reform with at minimum a strong public option is the live-or-die moment for the Democratic Party. Anyone who opposes it not only hates America and Americans, but hates the Democratic Party and wants the Democratic Party to fail to death.

Read the whole thing.

Harry and Louise 16 Years Later: Still Wrong

"... with a little less politics, we can get it done this time."

Louise, you slut, shut the fuck up.

The fact is, bipartisanship is killing health care reform. Every attempt to attract the votes of repugs - who will never, EVER, vote for health care reform proposed by a Democratic president - and Blue Dogs - who don't give a flying fuck about health care or any other policy and just want to be the center of attention - dilutes, undermines, sabotages, poisons and destroys our last, best chance at saving not just health care but the economy.

If Congress and the White House were actually playing partisan politics, every single Democratic representative who refuses to support President Obama's strong public option would already have a 2010 primary opponent holding a blank check from the DCCC. Every single Democratic senator who refuses to support President Obama's strong public option would be stripped of seniority, committee chairs and every other perk the majority has the power to take away.

Rather than less politics, what we need is for President Obama and the Democratic leadership to throw pure single-payer on the table and dare anybody to vote against it.

That will "get it done this time."

Steve Benen has a great post shredding the latest NYT thumbsucker crying for bipartisanship.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Good Little Colored Girl

In a post perfectly titled "Sotomayor and the Politics of Public Humiliation," Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell explains why the all-white, all-male repug members of the Senate judiciary committee got to spew racist, sexist insults and hysterical accusations at a nominee for the Supreme Court, while that nominee had to sit there and swallow it all.

One of the most enduring images of the Civil Rights Movement is of Elizabeth Eckford. She is being harassed and taunted by a group of white students, parents, and police on her way to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. On that morning Eckford missed connecting with the eight other African American students of the Little Rock Nine and their NAACP leader, Daisy Bates. Eckford was alone when the angry crowd surrounded and confronted her.

The photo is now iconic. Eckford's dignity, strength, and self-possession are stunning counterpoint to the contorted, hate-filled faces of those following her.

This image of Eckford kept returning to me as I watched the Senate confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor. Although Sotomayor herself deplores metaphor and analogy, Eckford's harassment seemed an apt comparison to the hearings. Although her confirmation was nearly certain, Republican senators were determined to make Sotomayor walk a gauntlet on her way to the Supreme Court.

SNIP

Like Eckford, Sotomayor has been praised for her dignity, her stillness, and the evenness of her voice as she responded to hostile mischaracterizations. She managed to laugh off sexist jokes. She didn't flinch when she was repeatedly interrupted. Senator Lindsey Graham warned that her confirmation could only be derailed if she had "a complete meltdown." The rules of the game were set: the Senators could mischaracterize her record, accuse her of racial bias, and mispronounce her name but she could not respond in kind. She could not be hurt or offended or angry. She had to remain a pillar of rationality and neutrality and control.

The hearing was a performance of a broader set of social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American politics. Women, and most especially black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. The ability to bear up under public degradation is a test of worth. America's favorite black woman heroine is Rosa Parks, a woman who is remembered as silently enduring the humiliation of being ejected from a public bus for refusing to comply with segregated seating.

SNIP

The Republican attacks on Sotomayor were not meant to derail her nomination. They were meant to degrade and humiliate as a warning: if you attempt to assert your equality within a system still dominated by white male racial privilege you may get a place at the table, but not without public punishment.

Read the whole thing.

It's We the People, Not Invisible Sky Wizards

As Rachel Maddow explained on Monday, pace Pat Buchanan, this nation was not built by white people alone.

"It‘s just not factually true to generalize from white experience to explain how America came to be."

But a freakazoid Congressman thinks it's fine to force American taxpayers of every shade of belief and non-belief on the planet to pay to deface the U.S. Capitol with an endorsement of his personal superstition.

Now a group of freethinkers has stepped forward to stop it.

A California Republican congressman wants to do a little writing on the walls of Washington's newest federal building. If Rep. Dan Lungren gets his way, Congress will spend nearly $100,000 to engrave the words "In God We Trust" and the Pledge of Allegiance in prominent spots at the Capitol Visitor Center.

Lungren's proposal drew only a whimper of opposition last week when the House of Representatives voted 410-8 to approve it. Now, however, Lungren finds himself tussling with a national atheists and agnostics group.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc. sued this week to stop the engraving, accusing Lungren of trying to force his religious beliefs on as many as 15 percent of all U.S. adults. That comprises "atheists, agnostics, skeptics and freethinkers, none of whom possess a belief in a god," according to the lawsuit.

"It really is a Judeo-Christian endorsement by our government, and so Lungren is wrong," said Dan Barker of Madison, Wis., a co-president of the foundation. "Lungren and others are pro-religious, and they want to actually use the machinery of government to promote their particular private religious views. That is unconstitutional, and that's what we're asking the court to decide."

SNIP

Barker said that atheists regarded the phrase "In God We Trust" as rude, uncivil and un-American.

"Tens of millions of really good Americans don't believe in God," he said. "In fact, there's many more nonbelievers than there are Jews, and we wouldn't think of offending Jews on our national monuments. . . . Why is it wrong to offend a Jewish minority but it's not wrong to offend those of us who serve in the military and sit on juries but we don't believe in God?"

Read the whole thing.

Support the Freedom from Religion Foundation here.

Congress on Vacation? Time for Us to Get to Work!

The prospect of Congress recessing without voting on health care reform is no reason to give up on getting real reform with a strong public option, but neither is it reason to slack off and wait until Congress gets back to work after Labor Day.

Your Senators and Representatives are going to be home for a month, wandering around holding town halls and pretending to care what you think. So let 'em know!

In the meantime, there are still two weeks before the recess, and given the events of the last week, almost anything can happen. So keep the pressure on:

Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

And if you need a corrective to the gloom-and-doom in the liberal blogosphere, Kevin Drum has some encouraging words:

I'm not sure there's much that can be done about this, but there's more than one way to look at it anyway. The first way is the conventional one: Republicans are hoping that the August recess will slow things down. It gives them more time for attack ads, more time to manufacture uncertainty, and more time to drive wedges between unsteady allies on the pro-reform side.

That's all true. But the main thing that happens during the August recess is that everyone in Washington goes home and talks to people in their district. If their constituents are largely opposed to healthcare reform, it hurts the cause. But if they're pissed off about the status quo and want to know why Congress can't get off its butt and do something — well, that can actually speed things up.

Now, that's not normally what happens. And it won't this time either — unless Barack Obama's army of supporters are still ready to go out and answer the call of reform. I've long been skeptical about whether his famous electoral machine would continue to work after the campaign was over, but if there was ever a time to prove me wrong, it's now. If Obama's army is still willing to go out and do battle, they should show up now and start putting the fear of God into their congressmen. If that happens, the August recess will be the best thing that ever happened to healthcare reform.

I wouldn't bet the farm on that happening. But congressmen listen to their constituents when they go home for the holidays, and there's no reason reform advocates can't use that to their advantage. It all depends on whether we're really as motivated and as angry as the opposition. Are we?

Don't assume your representative and senators have already made up their minds or can't be persuaded by sustained public pressure. There's a big difference between voting against a bill with a public option and voting to support a filibuster to prevent that bill from coming to a vote in the Senate, or helping the Blue Dogs sabotage the public option in committee.

This game is nowhere near over, and before it is we'll need everybody to come off the bench.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Cronkite's Epitaph

Walter Cronkite was buried Thursday, in front of a gravestone that unfortunately did not read what should be his epitaph:

I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

As Glenn Greenwald writes:

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.

Read the whole thing.

Blue Dogs Get Smacked Down

So the spoiled little brats finally threw one temper tantrum too many and got smacked down hard.

Closed-door negotiations over health care reform between House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and conservative Blue Dog Democrats broke down Friday afternoon and appeared dead.

A visibly angry Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), the Blue Dog health care task force chairman, said Waxman reneged on deals the two sides had previously agreed on: an independent Medicare commission and adopting Senate language on a public insurance option. He also said Waxman's threats to bring the bill straight to the floor -- and bypass a markup in Energy and Commerce -- were not helpful.

Well of course not - when hostages manage to escape from vicious kidnappers threatening to kill them, the kidnappers rarely find the escape "helpful."

"We are actually trying to save the bill and we are trying to save our party," Ross said after the meeting ended.

The bill they're trying to save is the Health Insurance Corporation Bailout and PorkFest, and the party they're trying to save is the GOP.

Perhaps the two sides can find some additional areas of agreement in their next meeting? That's unlikely -- Ross said today's discussion "will be the last meeting we have."

I should hope so. When you get a bunch of people together to try to solve a massive problem like the ginormous clusterfuck U.S. health care has become, one of the first things you need to do is send all the recalcitrant naysayers out for coffee - in another city.

House Democratic leaders certainly made an effort to work with the conservative Democrats on some kind of solution.

Which was their big mistake. The Blue Dogs don't want a solution and they never did. They want to stop President Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership from achieving the greatest legislative success since the New Deal. Because such a success would eliminate all the Blue Dogs' power.

Blue Dogs, you see, are not Democrats. They are repugs, pretending to be dems in order to play little "centrist" games that so entertain the Beltway Villagers. Blue Dogs are diapered infants who have to be the center of attention. They don't care about party loyalty; they don't care about their constituents, they don't care about policy, they sure as hell don't care about deficits (every single one of them voted orgasmically for Smirky's trillion-dolllar tax cuts and trillion-dollar war "supplementals" that exploded the deficit.)

Blue Dogs are political sociopaths: utterly amoral users with no empathy, no conscience, no remorse.

Since their founding by Billy Tauzin in 1994, they have cut a broad swath of destruction through the American political landscape, partnering with their natural allies in the looniest wing of the repugs to undermine Clinton's presidency and legitimize the terrorist dictatorship of Smirky/Darth.

And after every betrayal of Democratic Party principles, every treasonous vote to wage illegal war and commit war crimes and destroy the military and eliminate the middle class and shred the Constitution and campaign for repug candidates, Democratic Party "leaders" always forgave them and rewarded them and welcomed the next shiv in the back.

Until today.

But after many hours of talks, the Blue Dogs wanted to move the legislation even further to the right, and Waxman and Democratic leaders simply could go as far as the conservatives insisted. Blue Dogs, Waxman said, wanted to "eviscerate" the reform bill.

So, what happens next? At this point, it seems likely the leadership will simply bring the tri-committee bill to the floor, bypassing the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Blue Dog Rep. Charlie Melancon (D) of Louisiana, who was reportedly livid this afternoon, said 40 to 45 conservative Dems would oppose health care reform -- enough to defeat the bill -- and said Democratic leaders will "find out they have more problems with the Blue Dogs."

And you, Charlie, will find out that Henry Waxman hasn't spent four decades in the House playing Mah-Jongg.

Bring it on, fuckers. Bring. It. On.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Why Policing is Not Soldiering

The recent epidemic of police over-reaction - from tasering loud students in a library to pepper-spraying AARP members to arresting Harvard professors for jimmying their own front doors - has some people justifying such misconduct with hysterical paens to the extreme danger of police work.

Josh Marshall has a couple of nice correctives.

Following up on the post below, just how dangerous is police work?

Turns out it's pretty dangerous. But by no means the most dangerous line of work. In 2007, policing was the tenth most dangerous job in the country. In 2005, the profession was not in the top ten.

The most dangerous jobs are fisherman, loggers, pilots, iron and steel workers, farmers, truckers, construction workers, etc.

"The post below" to which Josh refers is is this one, quoting an email from reader JS:

Police work is not that dangerous compared to, say, driving a cab. Firefighters have a far more physically dangerous job. However, cops have a heroic job: much harder in so many ways than firefighting. Firefighters are almost never in a morally ambiguous zone and almost always are in the business of making people feel good. Cops handle humans at their worst.

This distinction matters. When cops stress the (low) physical danger of their job, they're setting themselves up to be military. That's no good for the country. Large cities probably need a SWAT team, but that is not the model for most police work. Collateral damage is simply not acceptable for police. It also leads to police cowardice. A lot of civilian damage is justified by the military concept: "force protection." Highly-armed and highly-trained cops use a lot more violence against citizens than a court would deem acceptable if one citizen used it against another.

Cops do not stress the (high) psychological danger of their job, because that makes them social workers with guns, able to handle difficult people with aplomb and an absolute minimum of violence, either threatened or applied. And that's what they should be.

So don't play into fascist stereotypes of manly danger. Police work is hard, dirty, and noble. But it is not particularly dangerous. And it shouldn't be viewed that way.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Torturers Still Getting Away With It

Saving real healthcare reform and forcing Congress to get it done before they go on vacation is still the top priority, of course. But we can't let equally critical issues fall by the wayside.

Like the Obama DOJ pretending it's going to prosecute those actually responsible for torture and other war crimes.

Glenn Greenwald explains:

Amazingly, reports that Eric Holder is considering commencing an investigation into Bush-era torture crimes has created extreme consternation in multiple Beltway circles despite how narrow and limited those investigations would be. As I wrote last week, numerous reports indicate that Holder wants to replicate the Abu Ghraib travesty by investigating only low-level interrogators who exceeded the torture limits approved by John Yoo and George Bush, and not investigate the high-level policy makers who instituted the criminal torture regime or the DOJ lawyers who authorized it.

Since then, the Newsweek reporter who first printed what DOJ officials told him about Holder's intentions, Daniel Klaidman, confirmed in an interview on The Young Turks that Holder intends to confine any investigations only to "rogue" interrogators who exceeded John Yoo's torture permission slips while shielding high-level Bush officials who acted in accordance with Yoo's decrees.

SNIP

If low-level CIA interrogators -- and only them -- end up as the targets of investigations because they used more water than John Yoo allowed, or turned the thermostat lower than the hypothermic levels which the DOJ permitted, or waterboarded with more frequency than Jay Bybee approved, I wouldn't blame the CIA for being furious. It was the regime itself, implemented at the highest levels of our government, that was criminal. Prosecuting only low-level interrogators who followed the torturing spirit of those policies but transgressed some bureaucratic guidelines would be a travesty on par with what happened with the Abu Ghraib "investigations." Though there is the potential benefit that a prosecutor could follow the trail to high-level officials notwithstanding Holder's attempts to limit the investigation (a result I think is quite unlikely), there is a strong argument to make -- as I made here -- that prosecuting only low-level "rogue" interrogators would be worse than no prosecutions at all, as that would only serve to further bolster our two-tiered system of justice.

SNIP

UPDATE: In comments, LBoogie makes an important point about the purported Holder approach of only investigating those who exceeded what John Yoo permitted:

The huge problem here is precedent. In specifically directing an investigation of those who exceeded Bush's torture authorization, our Justice Department is actually giving legal credence to Yoo, Bybee, and the Bush gang who sought to legalize these clearly illegal methods. Investigating only those who went beyond Yoo's memos affirms, as legal basis, Bush's detention and torture policies as the backdrop to be measured against; in effect establishing those practices listed in the memo as the legal standard.

It is less damaging to investigate no one at all than to use the Bush standard to measure those few who exceeded even those most grotesque of practices against. All we'll end up with is a few more Charles Graners in prison, everyone above middle management getting away without so much as public acknowledgment of having done something wrong, and a de facto Justice Department affirmation that not only will Bush's team not be investigated for having done something wrong, but that they never did anything wrong at all as those same standards become accepted baseline to measure future prosecutions against.

This is far worse than Obama's previous "look forward, not backward" stance. This is looking backward and establishing crimes and indignities against humanity as solid legal footing.

Exactly. It's one thing for a prosecutor to decide, as a matter of standard prosecutorial discretion, that those memos would make it too difficult to obtain a conviction, but to declare ahead of time that they constitute immunity as a matter of DOJ policy is another thing entirely. An investigation grounded in this premise would be to institutionalize the incomparably dangerous notion that anything the President does is legal provided he finds some low-level DOJ functionary to write a memo saying it is. The torture tactics Bush ordered are criminal no matter how many memos John Yoo wrote saying they weren't.

Read the whole thing.

Yes, President Obama has a lot on his plate, but that means we have even more on ours. He can kick the torture can down the road with Holder's head-fake, so it's up to us to call him on it and demand real prosecutions of the real war criminals, because anything less continues to shred the Constitution and turn this country into a rogue nation.

Keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Freakazoids Back Down

Could one effect of the recession be that local freakazoids are less able to defend their unconstitutional proselytizing against lawsuits? In Kentucky, the same state in which county officials took their courthouse bible-thumping defense right to the Supreme Court just two years ago, another bunch of xian talibanistas has caved before the fight even began.

Jackson County officials have removed several displays of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse in the wake of a federal lawsuit challenging their constitutionality.

County officials removed 10 displays of the commandments from various locations in hallways, entrance ways, a stairwell and a courtroom.

"We think it's a positive first step and a reflection that the law is certainly pretty clear regarding this situation," said lawyer William Sharp of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. "We're hopeful that this is a sign that the parties would be able to reach a mutually agreeable resolution in short order."

SNIP

Jackson County Judge-Executive William O. Smith did not immediately return a message seeking comment. But he told Hazard-based WYMT television that removing the commandments "was probably the best solution to the immediate problem."

He added: "From a financial standpoint, we do not want to jeopardize the taxpayers of our community and make them liable for something which is unfair."

SNIP

(Local resident Eugene Phillips Jr. said) "My objection to the displays was never based on an opposition to religion generally or the Ten Commandments in particular but rather on my opposition to governmental expressions of religious endorsement," he said. "When government gets into the business of favoring one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion, it intrudes on the individuals' choice to believe or not as he sees fit."

Thank you, Mr. Phillips, and the ACLU of Kentucky, for your courage and determination.

Sense, Nonsense and Moyers on Healthcare Reform

Obama press conference highlights from the Associated Press:



The White House has the full video.

Heather at Crooks and Liars brings us Mitch McConnell on Meet the Press revealing his elitist disdain for people who actually work for a living:

Mitch McConnell came on Meet the Press to spew some more Frank Luntz talking points on health care reform, but when asked whether the United States actually has the "best health care in the world", McConnell punts and retreats to the Republican mantra of more tax cuts and then adds this little gem when asked if it's a moral issue that 47 million Americans go without health insurance:

McCONNELL: Well, they don't go without health care. It's not the most efficient way to provide it. As we know, the doctors in the hospitals are sworn to provide health care. We all agree it is not the most efficient way to provide health care to find somebody only in the emergency room and then pass those costs on to those who are paying for insurance. So it is important, I think, to reduce the number of uninsured. The question is, what is the best way to do that?

So in other words, Americans have access to health care because they can go get in line at the emergency room, and the hospital cannot turn them away. I'm curious if Sen. McConnell would care to opt out of his government run health care plan and take a vow only to use the emergency room when he needs to see a doctor from now on since he believes it would mean he has access to health care? Anyone think he'd take me up on it?

Still agree with the MSM bloviators that "cost" is the reason to delay health care reform? Then listen to the voice of passionate reality, Bill Moyers, on what the real cost issue is:

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Here's the difference. To Dr. Regina Benjamin, health care is a service, helping people in need with grace and compassion. To Ed Hanway and his highly paid friends, it's big business, a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. And woe to anyone who gets between them and the profits they reap from sick people.

Here's the full transcript.

And keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

The Misery Index

Years ago, Texas gadfly and commentator Jim Hightower started agitating for a "Doug Jones Index" to counter the "Dow Jones Index." He insisted that checking the pulse of a couple dozen blue-chip corporations had nothing do with how ordinary guys on Main Street like Doug were actually thriving or suffering economically.

We still don't have a Doug Jones Index, but Huffington Post has developed the next best thing: a realistic Misery Index.

The Huffington Post has developed a new feature that aims to provide a more accurate gauge of what is happening in the lives of millions of Americans as a result of the ongoing economic hard times.

We're calling it the Real Misery Index.

The original Misery Index is a formula created by economist Arthur Okun that adds the current unemployment rate to the yearly increase in the consumer price index (a measure of inflation). It's an easily digestible number that the media loves to use to give a snapshot of how well or poorly the economy is doing.

Unfortunately, it's not a very useful statistic.

SNIP

So, after consulting with experts who study economic trends, and receiving suggestions from many of our readers, we have created the Real Misery Index. It combines a more accurate unemployment statistic (the U6 formulation), with the inflation rate for three essentials (food and beverages, gas, medical costs), and year-over-year percent increases in credit card delinquencies, housing prices, food stamp participation, and home equity loan deficiencies.

Read the whole thing.

"This Is Not About Me"

Excerpts from President Obama's opening remarks at tonight's news conference, now in progress.

That is why I’ve said that even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, we must rebuild it stronger than before. And health insurance reform is central to that effort.

This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage if they become too sick, or lose their job, or change their job. It’s about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage because it became too expensive. And it’s about the fact that the biggest driving force behind our federal deficit is the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

So let me be clear: if we do not control these costs, we will not be able to control our deficit. If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket. If we do not act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day. These are the consequences of inaction. These are the stakes of the debate we’re having right now.

I realize that with all the charges and criticisms being thrown around in Washington, many Americans may be wondering, "What’s in this for me? How does my family stand to benefit from health insurance reform?"

Tonight I want to answer those questions. Because even though Congress is still working through a few key issues, we already have agreement on the following areas:

If you already have health insurance, the reform we’re proposing will provide you with more security and more stability. It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your insurance if you’re happy with it. It will prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick. It will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job, move, or change your job, you will still be able to have coverage. It will limit the amount your insurance company can force you to pay for your medical costs out of your own pocket. And it will cover preventive care like check-ups and mammograms that save lives and money.

If you don’t have health insurance, or are a small business looking to cover your employees, you’ll be able to choose a quality, affordable health plan through a health insurance exchange – a marketplace that promotes choice and competition Finally, no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition.

I have also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade – and I mean it.

…

I understand how easy it is for this town to become consumed in the game of politics – to turn every issue into running tally of who’s up and who’s down. I’ve heard that one Republican strategist told his party that even though they may want to compromise, it’s better politics to "go for the kill." Another Republican Senator said that defeating health reform is about "breaking" me.

So let me be clear: This isn’t about me. I have great health insurance, and so does every Member of Congress. This debate is about the letters I read when I sit in the Oval Office every day, and the stories I hear at town hall meetings…This debate is not a game for these Americans, and they cannot afford to wait for reform any longer. They are counting on us to get this done. They are looking to us for leadership. And we must not let them down. We will pass reform that lowers cost, promotes choice, and provides coverage that every American can count on. And we will do it this year.

Oh, dog, Chuck Todd is being stupid. I may not last long enough to get you the full video tonight.

Report: Public Option Will Save $200 Billion

You read that right. The public option in health care reform will not only not increase the cost of health care reform, it will save $200 billion.

thebagofhealthandpolitics at Firedoglake explains:

A new study from the Commonwealth Fund finds that the public option could save the country $265 billion. The same study found that (republican Senator) Grassley's favored approach--allowing insurance companies to maintain their near-monopoly status--would cost the country $32 billion.

According the to the report, a combination of insurance regulations aimed at eliminating the insurance industry's ability to discriminate against the chronically ill, broader pooling of risks, and a more stream lined administrative system that the House bill would bring about saves money.

Read the whole thing.

Firedoglake is also sponsoring this petition to make the House of Representatives finish its work on health care reform before it leaves for vacation.

What would you choose - going on vacation or passing health care reform?

That is the choice facing the House of Representatives, who are nearing a vote on historic health reform legislation but are scheduled to go on vacation at the end of next week.

The choice is fairly obvious: the House should keep working until they pass a health reform bill - health care is more important than vacation.

We just created a petition asking the House to stay in session to pass health reform. Click here to sign the petition.

We'll deliver your signature to the House at the end of this week.

Some Members of Congress want three weeks of vacation before they tackle health care reform.

There is a real human cost for going on vacation. Three weeks in America without health care means:

• 143,250 people will lose their health insurance coverage
• 53,507 people will file for bankruptcy because they can't pay their medical bills
• 1,265 people will die because they lack coverage
  

The House is so close to passing a health reform bill - they should not go on vacation now when thousands are losing their health care or worse every day.

Click here to sign the petition and ask the House to stay in session to pass health care instead of going on vacation.

The coolest part is the box in which you can write the reason you think the House should have to finish its work before it goes on vacation.

Try to keep the profanity to no more than 50 percent of the total word count.

And keep the pressure on. Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

KY legislators Defy State Law

Looks like Speaker of the Kentucky House Greg Stumbo needs another reminder:

Public service is a sacrifice, not a package of perks.

And one of those sacrifices is that your public duties are a matter of public record, all details subject to the state Open Records law. especially when you're spending big taxpayer bucks.

Kentucky lawmakers say it’s important they spend this week in Philadelphia at the National Conference of State Legislatures summit — but they won’t say how many of them are there or what it’s expected to cost the taxpayers.

Last summer, about 50 of the state’s 138 lawmakers went to the NCSL summit in New Orleans. House and Senate leadership brought Kentucky State Police with them as personal protection, as is their custom.

But on Tuesday, House Speaker Greg Stumbo and Senate President David Williams‘ offices refused to say how many House and Senate members asked for permission to travel to Philadelphia this week, while the state government — and the nation — grapple with a serious recession.

Stumbo and Williams are there, as are about 25 legislative staffers. But the identities of other lawmakers in attendance, the overall number and the estimated cost of sending them remains a mystery to the public.

“We’re not releasing any information right now,” said Stumbo spokesman Brian Wilkerson.

Wrong. You don't get to say that, Wilkerson. You release that information right this fucking instant, or you haul your filthy lawbreaking ass directly to jail.

Kentucky's Open Records Act is more than 30 years old. Stripped of details, it's pretty damn simple and straightforward:

Anything and everything done in the name of the people of the Commonwealth, by the representatives of the people of the Commonwealth, paid for with the money of the people of the Commonwealth, is the property of the people of the Commonwealth, to be shown to them at their request.

I expect crap like this from Senate president David Williams, who's a typical dictatorial repug, but Stumbo's endangering his man of the people reputation. I'm open to supporting Stumbo for Governor in 2011, but not if he keeps acting as if he's above the law.

Read the whole thing.

The Uses of Violence

I don't own a gun. Never have. Never even fired one, although I've got plenty of close family members and dear friends who do it all the time. As long as they don't do it while aiming at me or someone I love, what the fuck do I care?

But I wouldn't call myself non-violent. If someone physically attacks me, I'm going to do my best to rip his fucking head off. I might not succeed, but it won't be for lack of trying. And if the only way to save my own life or the life of a loved one is to pick up a gun and fire it at an attacker, you bet your ass I'm going to do it.

But what the wingnut freakazoids are threatening to use violence over is the self-defense equivalent of a mildly insulting remark. The Rude Pundit explains:

Did you get that? If you don't trust the government, go out and buy a gun. Because why? Because you can use the muzzle to push the buttons in a voting booth? Or because you can use it to shoot and kill any government motherfuckers who are going to...well, do what?

See, all the savage (and Savage) talk on the right that has inspired wackanoids to go out and shoot up unitarian churches and Holocaust Museum guards is for punk ass reasons. Glenn Beck, who may truly be straitjacket-and-rhino-tranq-his-ass crazy, and his ilk on markets large and small are whipping their frightened, underinsured, teetering on the brink listeners and viewers to a peaking froth because of their idiots' understanding of policy and history. They've reduced the American Revolution to being about taxes. Well, sure, and when a foreign government at the point of a gun and bayonet forces them to pay their tribute to the king, join their military, and quarter their soldiers, then we can talk.

SNIP

So what is driving the good right wing to talk more and more openly about arming themselves for some coming uprising? Has Barack Obama sent the FBI to break down law-abiding conservatives' doors, take their guns, shoot their women, and rape their dogs? Did Joe Biden start an enemies list and had a handcuffed Sean Hannity dragged to a prison where he can be beaten until he gives the whereabouts of Steve Doocy? Holy shit, an ignorant outside observer might think, what is so deadly that a media figure like Beck is, in essence, telling people to buy guns now?

And the answer is a slight raise in the marginal tax rate on the wealthy? An attempt to provide health care to uninsured Americans? A legally-elected government in a representative democracy spending money in the way those campaigning said it would be spent? If Ben Franklin were around, he'd scoff, "Pussies," beat Glenn Beck unconscious with his cane, let Thomas Paine sodomize him, and head back to Paris for more time with whores.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

The New Misogynists

Every time I start to feel glad the Democratic Party's inclusiveness allows it to avoid the pitfalls of narrow ideology that are condemning the repugs to irrelevance, some idiotic interest group that claims to be Democratic gets me contemplating the usefulness of party purges.

Blue Dogs are perennial annoyances, of course, but now we've got a bunch of anti-choice misogynists sneaking into our tent and stealing all the booze.

In the anti-abortion movement there is a romantic thread about women and pregnancy that includes the notion of submission alongside of passivity. However difficult the pregnancy or the circumstances of a woman's life might be, the sign of a good woman is that she submits to the cosmic event. The alteration of her identity from self-identified autonomous person to pregnant woman and to mother are conditions she has no control over -- other than to say no to sex.

Francis Kissling goes on to illuminate the four basic assumptions that prove these infiltrators are about as "feminist" as "Democratic" as the Taliban:

• Deny there is any "need" for abortion - just make women stop having them! Problem solved!
• Oppose contraception, the one thing that if made easily available would actually reduce the need for abortions.
• View sex as a religious, rather than a biological, activity.
• Define pregnancy as a "gift" to the sperm donor.
  

No, these people don't see women as receptacles; they see them as incubators. I wonder how many women, if forced to choose between the two, would take the former.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Terri at Barefoot and Progressive.

Answering the Call

It's put up or shut up time for President Obama AND us leftists bitching "so where's the change?"

Obama put the call out yesterday to bloggers and by extension our readers:

Blue Dogs and repugs are getting close to killing health care reform, so it's all hands on deck.

Dday recaps the president's call with bloggers today below, (here's the recording), but there were a couple of things he said that dday didn't mention. Obama had two specific things he thought the blogs could be helpful with: countering the lies and misinformation about costs and keeping pressure on members of congress.

So let's start with countering the lies about costs.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its score of the House health care reform bill and the headlines are painting a distorted picture of the findings. For example, Congressional Quarterly’s article on the subject is titled “CBO: Health Bill Would Hike Deficit by $239 Billion,” and claims:

“The CBO estimate released late Friday pegs the gross cost of the bill (HR 3200) at $1.04 trillion, with the price tag partially offset by a surtax on the wealthy and other revenue raisers that would raise $583 billion and anticipated efficiencies that would squeeze $219 billion out of Medicare and Medicaid...The big deficit number — larger than the one run by the government for all of fiscal 2007 — is likely to add weight to the burden of Democratic leaders, who have said they plan to pass the bill on the House floor before Congress leaves town for its annual August recess.”

Surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal framed the story more accurately in its article, “Doctors' Payments Snag Health Bill”:

“A plan to end a program that would cut government payments to doctors is emerging as the flash point in the debate over whether President Barack Obama's effort to overhaul the health system would increase the federal budget deficit.

SNIP

The House health care reform bill has tackled the problem head on and those who want to kill health care reform are using the House’s courage against it. The bottom line is without the Medicare physician payment fix, the House health reform bill is budget neutral and even produces a surplus, as the House Energy and Commerce Committee explained in its statement, “CBO Scores Confirms Deficit Neutrality of Health Reform Bill”:

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window — and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs."

As for keeping the pressure on, here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

Do or Die Time for Health Care Reform

Yes, we're all justifiably pissed that Obama didn't step on heads back two or three months ago when it would have done some good, and that he wasted time playing footsie with the repugs, but now is when he really needs us to stand up and say to Congress, this is what we want.

Josh Marshall nails it.

Since the fiasco of 1994, health care has been a drum Democrats have banged away on at election time with the more or less open understanding that it would be safely stowed away again after November. But now we're at a point where we should soon see whether this is an issue that can ever be conquered or dealt with in any real way. The Dems went into this round with as many advantages as they're likely ever to have -- a president with commanding authority, big majorities in Congress and a mood in the country that seemed decidedly favorable if not quite sold on the prospect of major reform. The one big exception to this favorable picture was the near collapse of the country's economy (which ain't nothing), but which the White House has nonetheless (and with real merit) argued is a reason for moving now on health care reform rather than delay.

But a series of developments over just the last couple of weeks have transformed this from what seemed like almost a done deal to a really, really tough challenge. Health care is a really complex issue. And the entrenched interests are probably as powerful as any other issue a president can face. Let's not pretend it's even close to easy, ever. But conservative Democrats are digging in on the cost front; the insurance companies have a hold over a lot of senators and representatives on the public option; and for a number of reasons, the president's own popularity has come down significantly.

It is definitely true that the president is still quite popular. But his numbers are now the sort that don't necessarily scare elected officials on the margins or give reassurance to House Democrats in marginal districts. And let's face it, a lot of these members of Congress are simply owned by different parts of the health care industry -- something that a president needs a lot of public support to overcome.

This is a clearly testing time for Obama. But much more for the Democrats. If not now, really, when? Is the hill just too steep?

Click here to get contact information for your members of Congress. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Dan Mongiardo Copies Sarah Palin

The prospect of losing an election he thought was in the bag can make a politician do stupid things. It made Bill Clinton talk like a racist, it made John McCain choose a running mate who guaranteed his landslide loss, and it's making Dan Mongiardo antagonize the voters he can't win without.

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains:

Apart for the electoral stupidity, the notion that Louisville isn't the "real Kentucky" rankles in the same way as Sarah Palin's assertions about "Real America." Dividing the country between the pure heartland and the decadent urban cesspools has been a Republican electoral tactic since at least the 1960s, and it still carries a heavy stench of exclusion. One out of every six citizens of Kentucky lives in Louisville, and they're just as real as anyone else in the state. More importantly, their votes count just as much; there is no Electoral College for the US Senate in Kentucky. I detest the notion that rural voters are somehow more authentic than urban voters, and this seems to be what the Mongiardo folks are pushing in order to explain away a weak fundraising quarter.

Read the whole thing.

The Real Reason Blue Dogs are Sabotaging Health Care Reform

Because they want President Obama to fail. Seriously. When a strong Democratic President with strong Congressional majorities succeeds in passing legislation a strong majority of Americans want, Blue Dogs lose their power. Nobody needs them anymore, so people stop listening to their pathetic whining and temper tantrums.

And because Blue Dogs - who are actually repugs who pretend to be dems so they can play these little "centrist" games - are in Congress not to make the world a better place but to accumulate power to make up for the tininess of their dicks, the actual value of the legislation in question is irrelevant.

Steve Benen explains:

Republicans don't want to reform the health care system and don't want President Obama to be the president who finally delivers the overhaul Americans have been waiting for over the last several decades. The GOP has every possible reason to see this initiative fail, but that hasn't stopped some Democrats from a) insisting that Republican support for a reform effort they oppose is paramount; and b) making it easier to see their own party's efforts fail.

It occurs to me, then, that there's at least a possibility that "centrist" Democrats -- Blue Dogs, New Democrats, Lieberman, et al -- might not see failure as such a horrible option here. In other words, they may realize that coming up short on health care, letting this opportunity slip away, and hurting millions of Americans in the process may be devastating for the Democratic majority, but these same "centrist" Democrats may prefer a smaller majority, or perhaps even a GOP majority to "balance" the Democratic president. They may very well disagree with the party's leadership on most issues, and think the best course of action is taking away their power by undermining the party's agenda.

It seems odd that these "centrist" Democrats would forget the lessons of 1993 and 1994. But alternatively, are we sure they have forgotten those lessons, or have they learned those lessons all too well?

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

"Health Care Reform Costs Too Much" - Compared to What?

As even strong proponents of real health care reform - public option, single-payer - are panicking over the Congressional Budget Office calling reform too expensive, here's how to respond:

"Compared to what?"

Because even if reform costs more than $100 billion a year, more than $200 billion a year, it's still less than doing nothing. It's still less than a bill with no public option, which would be just a giant handout to the health insurance industry dwarfing the Wall Street bailout, which would be worse than nothing.

Besides which, CBO director Elmendorf is full of it because the real cost-cutting measures have yet to be added to the bills.

Jonathan Cohn at TNR explains:

The key thing to remember about Elmendorf's remarks is that CBO has, so far, seen just two pieces of legislation. One is the bill that the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee passed earlier this week. That bill doesn't include the types of reforms that would make a big difference in long-term spending trends, but that's mostly a function of jurisdiction. HELP can't touch Medicare or Medicaid, nor can it fiddle with the tax code. Yet it's through those two levers Congress would most likely influence the growth in health care costs. (It remains to be seen what the Senate Finance Committee, which has that jurisdiction, will do.)

The other piece of legislation CBO has seen--the bill produced by three House committees working together--is another story. That's a complete bill, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the tax system. And the experts who have studied the language closely--or, at least, those I've contacted in the last few days--seem to agree with Elmendorf: The bill, they say, doesn't include the sorts of big reforms that would reduce costs significantly.

But that bill is still very much a work in progress, as House leaders themselves acknowledge. And the White House, among others, has some ideas about how to shape it.

Despite a vow not to draw lines in the sand about reform legislation, President Obama has been adamant that any bill make substantial progress on cost reduction--a pledge his Budget Director, Peter Orszag, reiterated in the course of a brief (and previously scheduled) interview he gave TNR Thursday afternoon. "The legislation that emerges from this process has to contain key provisions that will bend the curve over the long term," Orszag said. "The president has said that and we're in the middle of a legislative process, so it's not surprising that, as you go through that process, there are modifications that are necessary."

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Spare the Regs, Spoil the Bank

Record profits at Goldman Sachs while unemployment climbs is yet more proof that the pretend economy of Wall Street succeeds at the direct expense of the real economy of Main Street.

But this time it's worse, because Main Street is not just suffering while the bankers party, and Main Street is not just indirectly subsidizing Goldman through investors. Main Street is taking Goldman's windfall profits directly in the throat because the federal government has kindly transferred all Wall Street's risk to us taxpayers.

Paul Krugman explains that the failure to attach strong regulation to the Wall Street bailout makes an even bigger recession more likely.

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

SNIP

Now the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

Read the whole thing.

Mark Sanford: It's God's Fault I'm a Lying, Cheating Asshole

It must be great to have god hanging around just waiting to be used as your all-purpose excuse. Invading pissant countries, torturing innocent detainees, condemning poor children to starvation and death ... it's god's will! Don't blame me!

I mean, how totally cool is a god so eager to help you avoid all personal responsibility that it even takes the rap for your adultery.

"It's in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience to both trust God in his larger work of changing me, and from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader," (Gov. Mark Sanford) wrote (in an op-ed.)

And how much does god really, really, really love Mark Sanford that it not only forgives Sanford for repeatedly violating one of the Big Commandments, but is dropping everything else to fix a guy far more deserving of a lightning bolt to the gonads.

Senate Minority Leader John Land, also frequently at odds with Sanford, doubts the governor can change or knows how to compromise.

"If he didn't get his way, he'd take his balls and go home, so he left a lot of things on the table," the Manning Democrat said.

"You don't all of a sudden have a mid-life crisis and suddenly get along with people."

Well, obviously Land is one of those horrible members of the reality-based community, a big meanie who doesn't understand that the only one Sanford has to get along with is his own very personal invisible sky wizard.

Read the whole thing.

Andy Borowitz has god's reaction.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

Why Conservatives and Repugs Think Empathy is Racist

David Neiwart at Crooks and Liars explains the fearful logic of racism:

"Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another." -- Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama

What Sessions is describing is not empathy but rather the crude tribalism that underscores and animates most racist belief systems, and has done so since time immemorial. It is, essentially, an almost astonishing confession to being racist on Sessions' part.

And it animates not just Sessions but nearly the whole of movement conservatism and the Republican Party. If you were to poll Republican senators this week and ask them if they agreed with Sessions' "logic," I'd wager the numbers would be in the vicinity of 90 percent.

Nor is it just the senators. Look at Pat Buchanan yesterday, and Rush Limbaugh every day. The same core belief -- that empathy for Latinos, or black people, or any nonwhite, equals prejudice against whites -- indeed animates nearly the entirety of the conservative movement. I'd like to find a single conservative who would repudiate Sessions' formula. I bet I won't.

Read the whole thing.

When It Was News

Just half an hour per day with Cronkite, and we had more news - more essential information - than we get from 24-hour coverage today.
Wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that Cronkite never covered sports, weather, gossip, local crime, celebrities or Murrow forbid "entertainment."

48 times more coverage today, and we're one-forty-eighth as informed.

Cronkite stepped down from the news desk in 1980, and broadcast news has been going downhill ever since. Here's one reason why:

On Feb. 27, 1968, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite broadcast an editorial criticizing the escalation of U.S. forces in Vietnam. In the aftermath of the Tet offensive, Cronkite had traveled to Vietnam to interview soldiers and civilians. Returning to the United States, Cronkite shared his observations with the American public. In favor of diplomatic negotiations, Cronkite rejected President Lyndon B. Johnson's optimism for further military deployment to end the standoff between U.S. and Viet Cong forces. In a 1996 interview, Cronkite remembers the effect his editorial had on President Johnson, who was reported to have said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."

Orwell Laughing His Dead Ass Off

The Universe - or more probably someone at Penguin Signet Classics - has a twisted sense of humor.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

For we bibliophiles who will stop paying the mortgage and buying food before we stop buying actual, real, bound-paper books, this is irony enough to last us for a few days. We told you that stupid electronic thing wasn't for reading real books.

But there's more - deliciously, perfectly more.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Here's a clue for giant corporations that think they can throw their weight around without consequences: when the reality of what you're planning to do would make a good headline in The Onion, it's time to step back and rethink it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

"I Will Not Defend the Status Quo"

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on the stakes in delaying a health care vote past August:

"If we're able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Here's the thing about laid-back people: Do not piss them off. You will regret it.

Senate repugs are crowing about destroying Obama's presidency by shutting down health care reform, and Senate DINOs are showing off their tiny dicks by demanding a fatal delay in the legislation.

Rejoice, liberals! For both obstructionist groups have crossed the line. This president is willing to sacrifice Main Street to the rapacious hordes of Wall Street. He is willing to shred the Constitution with preventive detention. He is willing to destroy the remnants of the Bush-battered military by breaking his promise to repeal DADT. He is willing to risk a quagmire in Afghanistan that will make the Iraq clusterfuck look like the "invasion" of Grenada.

But Barack Obama knows better than anyone that health care reform is the defining legislation of his presidency. I'm cynical enough to think it's possible that he will kill the public option to save a bill that will no longer be worthy of the name "reform" - possible, but not likely.

While his 4 p.m. health care statement at the White House was less than inspiring, I'll take heart from his take-no-prisoners rallying cry this morning.



Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

"We just want your truthful and spiritual support."

In Quill, Bruce Swaffield interviews Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, "a reporter based in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. He was trained by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and has dedicated his life to telling the truth. Currently, his brother is serving a 20-year prison sentence for blasphemy against Islam."

His experience is yet more proof that the one thing on which even the deadliest enemies agree is denying and punishing free speech.

Due to misunderstandings of the international community, namely the United States on the situation in Afghanistan, the values of democracy, especially freedom of speech, have been getting worse since 2005 in Afghanistan. The field of information is under control of many factions.

All the factions have made a very dangerous circle around freedom of speech. It is very dangerous for a journalist to get out the right and correct information from this hell and to process a balanced story for a newspaper.

Warlords are afraid of freedom of speech because if there is really freedom for the media, then [warlords] would be faced with war crimes tribunals when their crimes are revealed by the media.

The government controls the field of information. [The government] is corrupted and does not want a newspaper to write about the corruption in all stages of the regime.

Mullahs are ideologically against all the values of democracy; they also are the physical enemies of TV.

International troops don’t want the correct facts and figures of civilian casualties to be covered exactly by the media. The position of the Taliban against freedom of information is clear to everyone.

All the factions have come together and made a limitation for the media.

He goes on to describe injustices that won't surprise anyone familiar with how reporters are treated in war zones, but his request for help might:

The first thing is we realize any journalist has a strong influence inside their society. Now the U.S. is the biggest supporter of Afghanistan, and when we face a death sentence or are imprisoned, please don’t be silent. Put pressure on your government to talk about it (even single cases) with the Afghan government and resolve that [issue]. We don’t want money or anything else. Please, we just want your truthful and spiritual support.

You have a very long background of democracy. You have suffered what we are suffering now, and you know how to support us in each situation. We are fighting here for what you wanted in your society 300 years ago. So our goals are the same, but we need support.

Without freedom of speech and mind, nothing is possible for a society [to move] towards democracy.

Read the whole thing. Then help spread the word.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

The GOP's Internal Class War

Political historian Rick Perlstein, chronicler of the rise and fall of American conservatism, explains how Princess Tundra Trash has exposed the class war fracturing the GOP.

... populism has never been an entirely comfortable fit for elite conservatives. Majorities of middle-class Americans can be persuaded to support tax cuts for the rich—even repeal of the estate tax—out of an optimism that they may eventually become rich themselves. But they are also susceptible to appeals like the one George Wallace made in the recession year of 1976. He built his campaign on both hellfire-and-brimstone moralism and a pledge of soak-the-rich tax policies. The elite conservative fears that the temptation to woo working-class voters will, you know, shade into policies that actually advantage the working class. That fear surfaced recently when Rush Limbaugh—whom Frum himself has singled out as one of the dangerous populists dragging the Republicans down—dismissed those who criticized the AIG bonuses as "peasants with their pitchforks" who must be silenced for the sake of conservative orthodoxy. But it's harder to persuade the economically less fortunate to respect conservative orthodoxy during a recession. That's starting to make some conservatives nervous.

Another thing that makes some elite conservatives nervous in this recession is the sheer level of unhinged, even violent irrationality at the grassroots. In postwar America, a panicky, violence-prone underbrush has always been revealed in moments of liberal ascendency. In the Kennedy years, the right-wing militia known as the Minutemen armed for what they believed would be an imminent Russian takeover. In the Carter years it was the Posse Comitatus; Bill Clinton's rise saw six anti-abortion murders and the Oklahoma City bombings. Each time, the conservative mainstream was able to adroitly hive off the embarrassing fringe while laying claim to some of the grassroots anger that inspired it. Now the violence is back. But this time, the line between the violent fringe and the on-air harvesters of righteous rage has been harder to find. This spring the alleged white-supremacist cop killer in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, professed allegiance to conspiracist Alex Jones, whose theories Fox TV host Glenn Beck had recently been promoting. And when Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered in church, Fox star Bill O'Reilly was forced to devote airtime to defending himself against a charge many observers found self-evident: that O'Reilly's claim that "Tiller the baby killer" was getting away with "Nazi stuff" helped contribute to an atmosphere in which Tiller's alleged assassin believed he was doing something heroic.

At least in the past, those who wished to represent their movement as cosmopolitan and urbane could simply point to William F. Buckley as the right's most prominent spokesman. Now Buckley is gone, and the most prominent spokesmen—the Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Becks—can be heard mouthing attitudes once confined to the violent fringe. For the second time in three months, Fox heavily promoted anti-administration "tea party" events this past Fourth of July—rallies in praise of secession and the Articles of Confederation, at which speakers "joked" about a coup against the communist Muslim Barack Obama like the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. "What's going on at Fox News?" Frum recently asked, excoriating Beck for passing out to followers books by the nutty far-right conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. If you were an elite conservative, you might be embarrassed too.

The conservative intellectuals once were able to work together more effectively with the conservative unwashed. Now, more and more, their recent irritation renders them akin to the Stalinist commissars mocked by poet Bertolt -Brecht, who asked if they might "dissolve the people/And elect another." The bargain the right has offered the downwardly mobile, culturally insecure traditionalist—give us your votes, and we will give you existential certitudes in a world that seems somehow to have gone crazy—is looking less like good politics all the time.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Crooks and Liars.

Assassinations R Us

Along with Glenn Greenwald and PZ Myers, Talking Points Memo is one of the blogs in which the comments are not to be missed.

Zach Roth's piece today on the CIA's secret assassination program got speculation running rife about likely victims over the last eight years.

The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the "presidential finding" with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001:

The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency's actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.

"No geographical limitations" presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone -- including even the US itself. And it seems likely that they would be carried out without notifying the foreign country in question.

Of course, we've frequently, and quite openly, used the military to carry out attacks on specific Qaeda leaders -- even before 9/11. But using the CIA to do so, and with such broad authority to operate anywhere in the world, as this program seems to have given the agency, would appear to take things into a different realm.

Zach didn't know the half of it.

Commenter FPN:

How about some of the people targeted may not have "just" been "high value" Al Qaeda, but high ranking members of a royal family/intelligence:

"On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 43, and on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car accident at the age of 41. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was found dead, having "died of thirst" at the age of 25. Prince Turki was fired from his position as head of Saudi Intelligence on September 1, 2001, and became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain in 2002.

On February 20, 2003, Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife, and fifteen others were killed in a plane crash.

None of this appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, though it might have been planned for that document. This is because the Bush administration censored 28 pages of material about Saudi connections to 9/11 from the report on the grounds of national security."

Commenter martin dreadnought:

Again, the crux of this entire story is not that Cheney himself was involved, it's a question of who was targeted and why.

We already know of many deaths which came at convenient times for the Bush administration. I'm not sure I need to go through all of these again, but just a few of them would be Paul Wellstone, Pat Tillman, Dr. David Kelly, Bruce Ivins, and the DC Madam Debra Palfrey.

All of these people had the ability to cause significant damage to the Bush administration and every one of them died a suspicious death. I think the chances of all of these deaths happening in a vaccuum are close to nil.

Commenter danger:

Could also include Nicola Calipari, Benazir Bhutto, the guy at Minot AFB in the nuke transport snafu, and to a lesser extent Rafik Hariri and even Alexander Litvinenko.

Should also point out that in the case of Calipari, the real target would have been Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who as a feminist, pacifist communist who openly sided with the Iraqi people before she was kidnapped would have definitely been a thorn in the side to the administration.

Commenter MyMY:

This clearly demands thorough investigation!

The last word to commenter Mr. E:

Or at the very least, I wide re-airing of Wag the Dog.

Those #^&!*$% Socialist Veterans

Actual Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, I-VT, knows that compared to single-payer systems Medicare and VA, the public option being proposed for health care reform is capitalism on steroids.

So yesterday, Sanders had a little fun with Senator John McCain, R-LOSER.

Heather at Crooks and Liars:

Bernie Sanders gives John McCain an uncomfortable moment asking him if the VA is socialized health care, and if he or anyone else in the Senate is advocating doing away with it. Sanders is exactly right. It is not the job of the Senate to protect the private health insurance industry. It's a shame the best we may get out of the Senate is a public option and that we don't have a few more Bernie Sanders out there fighting for real health care reform.

See the video here.

Broke, Humiliated Mongiardo Keeps Lying About Cap and Trade

From the Paducah Sun, via Penn Energy.

Mongiardo, seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate next year, said at a Paducah news conference (July 15) that the so-called "Cap and Trade Bill" would increase electric rates in Kentucky by at least 70 percent, harm the state's coal industry, and force steel and aluminum plants to close.

As the story was written by Bill Bartleman of the wingnut Paducah Sun, do I need to tell you that Bartleman made no attempt to counter Mongiardo's lies with the facts?

On Sunday, Joe Gerth at the Courier-Journal discussed Mongiardo's and Jack Conway's views on cap-and-trade, and although he let Dan get away with lying for several opening grafs, eventually he pointed out the facts.

There is agreement that the legislation would cost consumers more, but estimates of those costs vary. And the legislation that passed the House attempted to offset some of the costs.

E.On U.S., the parent company of LG&E and Kentucky Utilities, has said that residential customers in Kentucky would see their rates rise about $10.50 a month in three years and about $19 by 2020. Commercial customers could see their rates rise as much as 39 percent by 2020.

Let's review: on the same day that Mongiardo's campaign admitted that in the second quarter it raised less than one-fourth of what Conway raised, Mongiardo goes to DINO-friendly territory to claim cap-and-trade would almost double electric rates, apparently immediately.

This after the biggest electricity supplier in Kentucky explains that cap-and-trade will cause no increase for three years, and then raise rates slowly over the next eight years to a maximum of $19 per month per household. For me, that's a 20 percent increase eleven years from now.

Dan Mongiardo: liar, corporate shill, homophobe, pathetic fundraiser, incompetent campaigner, loser.

New Questions About the 2010 Senate Race

Now that we finally know just how few pennies Dan Mongiardo managed to beg from even his BFFs in the Magic Buggy Whip industry, here are some new questions that need to be answered ASAP:

How long will it take for the MSM to stop referring to the Homophobe-in-Chief as the "favorite" to challenge Jim Bunning?

Will Dan Mongiardo drop out of the race before Governor Beshear names somebody else to be his running mate in 2011?

If he does, will Beshear take him back?

If Beshear pretends he didn't hear about Dr. Dan dropping out and goes ahead and names another running mate, will Mongiardo resign or go for the Lame Duck Embarassment Guinness World Record?

If Mongiardo doesn't drop out before Beshear names another running mate, how long will he stay in the race?

If he stays in the race, how much money is he likely to raise in the third quarter, and will anyone take my bet that it will be less than 50K?

If he stays in the race, will he dare to show his face at Fancy Farm? If he does, can we get Jon Stewart to MC?

If he actually stays in the race all the way through the primary election in May, how few votes will he get, and will anyone actually admit casting one of them?

If Mongiardo drops out, will anyone else jump into the race to challenge Conway? And if nobody does, will we all die of boredom before May?

It's now about four hours since the news broke about Mongiardo's pathetic fundraising - has Jack Conway's campaign staff stopped laughing yet?

It's the Money, Stupid

UPDATE 7:05 p.m. Three hundred grand? Are you fucking kidding me? I think my local girl scout troop did more than $300K in cookies this March. Read Media Czech's full takedown.

It's now been a week since Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo's Senate campaign said it would release its second-quarter fundraising totals.

But first thing that morning, Attorney General Jack Conway's Senate campaign announced that Conway had set new Kentucky fundraising records by collecting $1.325 million.

We've been waiting for Mongiardo's numbers ever since. We're still waiting.

Now Page One Kentucky reports a rumor that Mongiardo's fundraising fell short of Conway's by a million dollars.

Taylor Shelton wondered in comments how soon Mongiardo would drop out of the race.

Last Thursday, I speculated in comments at Barefoot and Progressive that Mongiardo would raise less than $500K, and would raise less in his own home region of Eastern Kentucky than the $125,000 Louisvillian Conway raised in the same region.

I don't think Mongiardo's going to drop out, no matter how little money he raised in the second quarter. I think he's going to keep lying, and shilling for the Magic Buggy Whip industry, and fucking over Eastern Kentucky, and bashing gays, and whining about those mean ol' liberal bloggers and how much they love that elitist Jack Conway right up until the day after the 2010 May primary when he sets a new Kentucky record for fewest votes cast.

The Health Care Reform Senate DINOs Don't Want You to Have

Here it is, via Kevin Drum:

The so-called "Tri-Committee" healthcare plan has just been released, and it's so called because it's a joint effort from the House committees on Education and Labor, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. It looks pretty good at first glance, but honestly, I haven't read through it in any detail yet. So more on that front later.

For now, though, let's take a look at the PR effort. Here are the talking points from the "What's In It For You?" handout:

WHAT’S IN THE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL FOR YOU?

Without reform, the cost of health care for the average family of four is projected to rise $1,800 every year for years to come—and insurance companies will make more health care decisions.

America’s middle class deserves better. Here’s what America’s Affordable Health Choices Act means for you:

LOWER COSTS

• No more co-pays or deductibles for preventive care
• No more rate increases for pre-existing conditions, gender, or occupation
• An annual cap on your out-of-pocket expenses
• Group rates of a national pool if you buy your own plan
• Guaranteed, affordable oral, hearing, and vision care for your kids

GREATER CHOICE

• Keep your doctor, and your current plan, if you like them
• More choice, with a high quality public health insurance option competing with private insurers
  

HIGHER QUALITY

• You and your doctors make health care decisions — not insurance companies
• More family doctors and nurses will enter the workforce, helping guarantee access
• Mental health care must be covered
  

STABILITY & PEACE OF MIND

• No more coverage denials for pre-existing conditions
• No more lifetime limits on how much insurance companies will pay
• No reason to ever make a job or life decision again based on health care coverage

Think it sounds pretty good? Then YUR A LIBRUL COMMIE TERRIST!

So here's the deal I think the House should offer to the Bayh-partisans in the Senate: only librul commie terrists get access to "government-run health care." All the ril murkins can stay in the loving embrace of the private health insurance industry.

Not Just for Meat Eaters

I'm an unrepentant carnivore, but even the strictest vegan suffers from the ridiculous over-use of antibiotics in factory farms. Now President Obama is acting to restrict the practice.

Good news from the NYT:

"The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.

In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle -- done to encourage rapid growth -- should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.

Both practices lead to the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments, he said.

This is really important. Antibiotics make diseases that used to be fatal into minor annoyances. But resistance to antibiotics is rising, and we are not developing new antibiotics to replace the ones bacteria are becoming resistant to. This is in part because spending money to develop new antibiotics doesn't make sense for pharmaceutical companies.

SNIP

We need to find a way to promote the development of new antibiotics. In the meantime, however, we should try not to do things that promote antibiotic resistance. Feeding antibiotics to farm animals not to treat diseases, but just to make them grow faster, is one of those things. There are lots of ways of promoting animals' growth that do not put people's lives at risk. We should find them.

(Note: this would probably also lead to improvements in the treatment of farm animals. When farm animals are fed antibiotics, you can get away with much more dubious hygiene than you could otherwise. This would also be a very good thing -- though I don't support factory farming in any form.)

Hilzoy, who posted the above at the Washington Monthly, is retiring from blogging. Hilzoy's blogging at the Monthly has been a revelation to me, providing me with not just great material but superb insight. Hilzoy, you will be missed.

The Moral Relativity of Investigations

As with all things related to Dick Cheney, nobody gets to the filthy heart of the latest obscenity like the Rude Pundit.

Yet, bizarrely, some Republicans are saying there shouldn't be an investigation into the potential that the CIA was putting together a death squad and that the Vice President told the CIA to lie to Congress about it. It's as if they're throwing up their hands in a comical "what can you do?" gesture, as if they're saying, "Well, that's just Cheney," and a laugh track will play to cover their asses.

SNIP

There's your scales of Republican justice: travel office employees fired? It's a crisis that demands millions of dollars spent to discover nothing. Potential secret CIA death squads and the involvement of at least the Vice President in lying to Congress in violation of the law? Nah, why bother? Let's move forward, not look back.

Yet the very nature of investigation and criminal proceedings is to look backward, with the knowledge that the past very much impacts the present. If Attorney General Eric Holder does go forward with a probe of Bush-era torture policies and if Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats are serious about looking into the CIA/Cheney story, then we will be making baby steps back to being a nation that actually gives a flying rat's fuck about the laws we pass.

And if we don't look back, if we simply attempt to bury the past in our inexorable march forward with the knowledge that unpunished crimes have been committed, then we, all of us, become co-conspirators. We all carry that burden then, that we know we are a country that has done wrong, but we are unwilling to prove it and punish those who ordered the commission of crimes in our name.

Read the whole thing. Warning: Opening sexual metaphor is Triple-X rated.

National Treasure Interviews National Hero

Just when you think an issue has been covered and analyzed to death, Bill Moyers turns up to show the rest of us how it's done.

In his first television interview since leaving the health insurance industry, Wendell Potter tells Bill Moyers why he left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation's largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry. "I didn't intend to [speak out], until it became really clear to me that the industry is resorting to the same tactics they've used over the years, and particularly back in the early '90s, when they were leading the effort to kill the Clinton plan."

Potter began his trip from health care spokesperson to reform advocate while back home in Tennessee. Potter attended a "health care expedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls."

Looking back over his long career, Potter sees an industry corrupted by Wall Street expectations and greed. According to Potter, insurers have every incentive to deny coverage — every dollar they don't pay out to a claim is a dollar they can add to their profits, and Wall Street investors demand they pay out less every year. Under these conditions, Potter says, "You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations."

Preview Part One:



Preview Part Two:



Watch the full interview here.

Read the transcript here.

Keep Your Religious Insanity to Your Own Damn Self

As much as it seems here in the U.S. that we are surrounded by the Xian freakazoids' demands that everyone follow their silly, illogical rules, at least they're not assaulting people who don't observe blue laws.

No, they're just murdering doctors.

Orthodox Jews are rioting in Jerusalem. The reason: because the city allows a parking lot to remain open on Saturday, which means people are able to drive on their holy day, which they consider sacred. Anne Barker was there to record the event as a journalist, and she switched on her recorder to document it all — when the protesters turned on her.

I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.

It was like rain, coming at me from all directions - hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.

Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face.

Somewhere behind me - I didn't see him - a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

I wasn't even sure why the mob was angry with me. Was it because I was a journalist? Or a woman? Because I wasn't Jewish in an Orthodox area? Was I not dressed conservatively enough?

In fact, I was later told, it was because using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I'm not Jewish and don't observe the Sabbath.

This is something too many religious people fail to understand — you can practice your religion, other people can practice their religion, but you don't get to tell other people that they must practice your religion. If your crazy superstition says you aren't allowed to push a button on a certain day of the week, then don't. If your old myths claim that your god turns into a cracker when the right ritual is carried out, go ahead and believe that. If your dogma dictates that you should visit a certain magic rock before you die, then go ahead, make your pilgrimage.

But excuse us, everyone who doesn't have these wacky ideas has a perfect right to push the button, disrespect your cracker, or stay home and skip the crowds…and we also have the right to point and laugh at you. And if you are so intolerant, so irrational, and so vicious as to try and impose your foolishness on others, especially in such disgusting ways, then we have an obligation to use civic law and the power of the state to protect those others' liberties.

A Challenge to Africa

Steve Benen notes that President Obama continues to address the rest of the world with straightforward respect leavening blunt challenge.

President Obama challenged practically all of Africa today in a blunt and powerful speech to Ghana's parliament today.

SNIP

The "tough love" aspect of the speech was Obama urging his audience to take responsibility for the continent's future. He conceded the serious consequences of colonialism, "unnatural" borders written by outsiders that have bred division, and unbalanced trade practices.

SNIP

As with Cairo in June, Obama wasn't rebuking the continent or issuing condemnations, he was issuing a challenge and pointing towards the basis for new growth and new relationships.

It was also a reminder that this president, no matter where he is, doesn't talk down to his audiences, or shy away from nuanced or difficult ideas.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Read the full transcript here.

President Obama on Recovery and Jobs of the Future

"I am confident that the United States of America will weather this economic storm. But once we clear away the wreckage, the real question is what we will build in its place. Even as we rescue this economy from a full blown crisis, I have insisted that we must rebuild it better than before."



Full transcript here.

Tent Cities Aren't New: They Never Went Away

In The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich shows that the growing number and size of tent cities around the country are less a manifestation of the foreclosure crisis and the recession than a newly-visible symptom of our structural economic dysfunction.

Tent City is less a single location than a nomadic but constant phenomenon, a shifting blue-tarped shadow to the glass and steel American metropolis. In good times and bad, Tent City comes and goes, forms and scatters and takes shape again. Despite its momentary dispersal in Sacramento, it is still out there--in Seattle, Portland, Reno, Providence, Fresno, even in the sprawling exurbs of southern California in the small city of Ontario. Tent City existed at the height of the real estate boom too, hidden in plain view, an omen for anyone willing to look.

While recent media accounts portrayed Tent City's incarnations as creatures of the recession--reborn Hoovervilles for the laid off and the foreclosed--shantytowns have been a periodic but permanent feature of American urban life for at least the past two decades. They are what connects us to São Paulo, Lagos and Mumbai, physical manifestations of our growing inequality and societal neglect.

SNIP

The rise of Tent City, though, says John Foley, director of the nonprofit Sacramento Self-Help Housing, had "almost nothing to do with the recession." But the recession has made poverty visible again, and Tent City tells the grueling backstory to the current recession--nearly thirty years of cuts in social services to the poor and mentally ill, the decimation of the industrial economy and the cruel underside of the housing boom. Kraintz, despite his soil-caked clothes and matted hair, summarized that narrative with more precision than most white-shirted economists can manage: "We've seen falling wages and rising rents. The two finally collided."

SNIP

Most of Tent City's residents, though, have been homeless for years. The original causes of their homelessness--an illness or injury, addiction, some life-shattering tragedy--blurred out in the distant past. "But on a structural, societal level," says Burke, the causes of homelessness are far from hazy: "It's the lack of housing that people can afford."

"I used to be a Republican. I voted for Ronald Reagan," a man who identified himself only as Tom M. told me, laughing. But it was Reagan who in his first year as president halved the budget for public housing. Over the course of his first term, more than half a million people were thrown off the disability rolls. "Until then," says Tim Brown, director of Sacramento County's Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative, "basically there was no homelessness." Since then, neither the disability nor the housing budget has come close to recovering. Clinton-era welfare reforms cut all but the last remaining threads of the Great Society safety net.

SNIP

In April I asked Brenda Hill, who had been there from the start, if she knew where she'd go if Sacramento closed Tent City. She shook her head sadly. "Nope," she said. "Nowhere."

Read the whole thing.

Lucky Kansas City MO

For their representative in Congress is Emanuel Cleaver II*, proud member of the Progressive Caucus and outspoken proponent of a strong public option in the health care reform bill.



From Firedoglake:

Mike Stark was on Capitol Hill for us yesterday and he interviewed about 15 members of Congress, asking them on video if they'd take the Pledge. They were mostly non-committal, seemed really uncomfortable that anyone would be asking this question and really didn't want to be bothered. The one bright spot was Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who gave -- without question -- the strongest statement that any member of Congress has given about the principles he is committed to on health care:

My name Emanuel Cleaver. I represent the 5th Congressional District of Missouri. I have said from the very beginning and I will say even to the end that I will not support any health care program that does not have a very strong public option. If there is no way to guarantee from the very beginning that every American will have access to adequate insurance coverage, that I will not support it.

The individuals who support this program will do it only if they have bargaining power and accountability to Congress and to the people of this country and particularly for me, Missouri's 5th Congressional District.

Health care should be available to everyone without limitation, and I think that those of us in the Progressive Caucus -- and frankly, I'm the Vice Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus -- and we have not taken an official vote on it, but I can tell you now that this is the direction we are moving in. We are going to support only those plans with the public option that would have some accessibility for every American to have quality health care.

That is just awesome. No equivocation, no back doors, no "I have to see the bill first," no weasel words. At a time when progressives should be standing up and taking charge of the health care debate, Emanuel Cleaver does just that.

We've started an Act Blue page for members of Congress who have taken the pledge. Right now, on the list are Raul Grijalva, Keith Elison, Lynn Woolsey, Jerrold Nadler, Rush Holt, Maxine Waters, Phil Hare and Cleaver. We hope there will soon be many more.

John Yarmuth, Louisville's own Proud Liberal Representative, why aren't you on that list? Just this week you were interviewed "drawing a line in the sand" on the public option. Why haven't you taken the Pledge?

* Our good friend Blue Girl is represented in Congress by Emanuel Cleaver. We are so envious.

The Perfect Repug Candidate

It gets more difficult every day to satirize the repugs, because they passed self-parody way back with Mark Foley. But Thers at Firedoglake throws his back into it, and comes up with a winner.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF WINGNUTTIA: Our candidate for president in 2012 will be a baked potato.

TEH LIBERALS: ...?

TPPoW: You heard us! We see the danger facing us in the Obama presidency as so powerful and so imminent that we demand a candidate who wants to devote time and speeches to fighting it in a very public way. That candidate is a baked potato. In fact, this baked potato right over here. ------>

TL: You're nominating a baked potato? What the hell are you talking about?

TPPoW: Ha! We knew that would drive you libtards crazy! Clearly, this potato has earned the eternal enmity of the liberal elite for the affront of who it is: a working-class, pro-life vegetable with decidedly red-state mores. Unlike you out-of-touch coastal elites with your pommes frites, the baked potato is from the real America -- these small towns that we get to visit, these wonderful little pockets of what we call the real America, the hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

TL: Are you on drugs? Who the hell is going to vote for a potato?

It gets even better. Read the whole thing.

Kissinger Will Never Cry

Jonathan Schell has a superb piece in The Nation about the day, 42 years ago, when he confronted Robert McNamara with his own eyewitness account of the U.S. bombing civilian villages in Vietnam.

Schell does not by any means absolve McNamara of responsibility for Vietnam, any more than McNamara sought to absolve himself. But he does make clear why McNamara, of all the many who contributed to that catastrophe, deserves to be singled out:

Certainly, if one puts McNamara's tears in one pan of a scales and the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans in the other, there is no doubt which way the scales would tip.

On the other hand, how many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, "I made a mistake," or "I was terribly wrong," or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara. I deduce that such acts of repentance are very hard to perform.

If a statue is ever made to him, as probably there will not be, let it show him weeping. It was the best of him.

Read the whole thing.

40 > 59: Only in the Democratic Senate

Since when is 59 not a majority of 100?

Since Democrats took over the U.S. Senate in 2007, as Steve Benen explains.

But there's another detail that the Post article didn't mention, and which is summarily ignored by the political establishment: we're dealing with a procedural dynamic that has never existed in American history. There's never been a time in U.S. history in which a Senate minority caucus could simply stop the majority from bringing all bills and/or mildly controversial nominees to the floor for a vote.

... the piece makes the current dynamic -- every vote gets a filibuster, and it's up to an easily-divided Democratic caucus to overcome this hurdle -- seem customary and normal, as this is just the way the American government has always operated.

It's not. Without a hint of debate, the rules have changed, and mandatory supermajorities on everything have become routine. Matt Yglesias recently noted, "This is a very new 'tradition' in American governance, it goes against everyone's common understanding of how democratic procedures are supposed to work, and there's very little reason to believe that the results will be beneficial in the long run."

Quickly and quietly, the political establishment came to accept that 60-vote minimums on everything of significance are customary. It's become something everyone simply "knows," despite the fact that this is a fairly radical departure from American norms.

If the nation is comfortable with this dramatic departure from the way the system was designed to function, fine. But let's not pretend this is normal.

No, it's not remotely close to "fine" and it never will be. Even if a majority of the country were in favor of changing the rules of math to make 40 greater than 59, it still would not be "fine," because not even a majority can eliminate majority rule.

The number of votes required to approve anything - bills, amendments, procedures, resolutions, bathroom breaks - in the 100-member U.S. Senate is 51. That's because - if there are any innumerate Democratic Senators reading this - 51 is 50 percent of 100 plus one. That's the definition of a majority.

And the repugs know it. That's why 49 Democratic Senators couldn't stop the repug Senate from wreaking havoc from 2003 to 2007: because repugs know that a majority is 51, and any party with fewer than 51 votes has to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

Yet even after all those years of being ignored and shut out of all decision-making because they had "only" 49 votes, today's 60-member Democratic majority is still letting the repugs - the 40-member repugs - dictate what happens and obstruct everything.

Writing specifically about the ludicrousness of Senate dems seeking repug votes for healthcare reform, Anonymous Liberal addresses this difference in party dynamics.

If you doubt any of this, you really haven't been paying any attention to politics over the last decade. Anyone who claims that the parties are mirror images of each other is a fool or liar. Republicans and Democrats just don't approach politics in the same way.

Conditions will never be more favorable for the Democrats than they are right now. And yet there is a real chance that they will fail to pass their signature policy. And this is because a number of Democrats in the Senate are reluctant to even step up to the plate to end a Republican filibuster--on a key Democratic initiative with widespread popular support and an electoral mandate behind it. I wonder if Republicans realize how lucky they are. I doubt that any majority party in history has ever made it easier for the opposition party to stay relevant.

I used to accuse the Democrats of bringing knives to the repug gun fight. That's not what they're doing anymore. Now, Democrats are bringing guns to the fight - then handing them over to the repugs and baring their own chests for killing shots.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

MTR Thugs

So, it seems the people blasting mountains to smithereens are not just thugs in how they treat irreplaceable mountains, forests and streams, but also thugs in the way they interact with their peaceful neighbors.

What a lovely site (sic): fat, drunken, violent pro-corporate thugs just dying to bring bloodshed to a peaceful 4th of July celebration.

Via Barefoot and Progressive, which points out that these thugs are MTR-lover Dan Mongiardo's supporters.

Letting the Fox Guard the Henhouse is Not Bipartisanship

Is there some kind of virulent bad appointments contagion going around?

Because President Obama is considering doing it again.

Sometimes I'm just rendered speechless, and this is one of those times. Natasha Chart via Sustainable Food at Change.org:

Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.

Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I'm just swimming in the changeiness.

Kids, if you care about your food, you know what to do:

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Or click here.

Monsanto, of course, is the company driving third-world farmers into destitution and starvation by selling them genetically-modified seed that cannot reproduce itself, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year instead of saving seed from each harvest.

The president might ask the organic vegetable gardening First Lady what she thinks of that.

Geithner, Summers, now Collins: Another Horrific Obama Appointment

President Obama caves to the freakazoids and appoints accomodationist Francis Collins to head the NIH.

As I wrote back in May:

More dangerous even than President Obama's eagerness for republican cooperation is his apparent tolerance for believers in invisible sky wizards and other fairy tales.

While it's remotely possible that someone who suffers from superstition could be trusted to run, say, the White House motor pool, you really don't want him in charge of things that require an acceptance of facts.

And you especially don't want him in charge of things like scientific research if he has made a career of publicizing his belief in myths that contradict scientific facts.

Obama is rapidly solidifying a reputation as the Great Compromiser. Bad enough he's already compromised the economic stimulus into ineffectiveness and is likely to compromise health care reform into an HMO bailout. Appointing freakazoid Collins to run the NIH would be killing scientific integrity.

Between science and superstition there can be no common ground, no meeting halfway, no compromise.

PZ Myers gets the last word.

He'll do a fine job…he's a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.

We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn't it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?

Dignified Senator Franken Can Still Bring the Funny

Via Talking Points Memo:

Here's a video from yesterday, courtesy of our friends at The Uptake, of Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) speaking to a reception held in his honor at the Hart Senate Office Building after he'd been sworn in.

When speaking of his family, his friends, supporters, and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, Franken was frequently choking back tears -- as he noted, he has a tendency to stop just short of actually crying. And he also got in some nice jokes:

"If I thanked everyone here individually, who helped in this campaign, I would be thanking virtually everybody in this room," Franken said. "There's a couple of you who are kind of -- just here for the ride. (The crowd laughs.) But, 95% of you in this room had a tremendous amount to do with this victory."

$1.325 million: Conway for Senate sets fundraising record

Jonathan Meador at LeoWeekly's Fat Lip blog has the cleverest take:

Jack Conway’s campaign just sent out a blanket email earlier today announcing the $1.325 his apparatus has raised during this first quarter of fundraising season. Sure, the figure is notable for a couple of reasons (it’s apparently the largest amount raised by a candidate in Kentucky history; it triples the amount raised by his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, and more than doubles the amount collected by KY secretary of state/Republican cyborg Trey Grayson), but it’s a painfully obvious conclusion to draw when you consider two things.

Namely, the Commonwealth’s liberal blogosphere is virtually united behind the dashing AG, therefore securing his web supremacy for what will probably be a heated and ugly primary, conducted in true Kentucky fashion. (Fancy Farm will certainly host a hot one this year…)

It also doesn’t hurt Conway’s chances that Mongiardo is a baggage-laden ass clown whose participation in an increasingly disliked gubernatorial administration can only render futile any attempt the latter might undertake toward repackaging himself as something other than a baggage-laden ass clown. As PageOne hath noted, even Eastern Kentucky — Mongiardo’s hometurf — knows this: They gave Conway nearly $125,000. And these are people who can smell a carpetbagger from a mile off.

So what does it all mean? Nothing you didn’t already suspect, I guess, except that you’ll be seeing way more of Jack’s purdy mug on your digitally-transitioned TV sets than you will Lil’ Danny’s.

Media Czech has the breakdown:

Conway April-June Fundraising Facts:

• Conway more than tripled Dan Mongiardo's first-quarter filing on March 30. In just 60 days, it appears Conway has more than doubled the cash-on-hand that Mongiardo is expected to have accumulated after six months.

• More than $175,000 in on-line contributions.

• Labor PAC support from the Teamsters and UFCW, reflecting Conway's endorsement from the "Change to Win" labor coalition.

• 82% of contributions were from Kentucky. In a show of national viability for the top targeted seat in the country, Conway held major events in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.

• About 40 percent of contributions ($560,000) came from Conway's electoral and financial base of Jefferson County, which represents more than 20 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary.

• More than $124,000 came from Eastern Kentucky, the home of Dan Mongiardo. With the support of House Speaker Greg Stumbo and a majority of the elected leadership in high turnout counties, Conway is well-positioned to compete and win in Eastern Kentucky.

• Over $125,000 came from Northern Kentucky events, which is the backyard of Senator Jim Bunning and potential candidate Trey Grayson.

Read the whole thing.

Anti-taxers Speeding for the Cliff Edge

Steve M considers the logical conclusion of the GOP's anti-tax extremism and sees history repeating itself.

"Well, we'll just get by the way we did in the Great Depression -- on our own," [Ken] McGarva said, swatting mosquitoes on his porch after another hard day of herding dogies on his 1,000-head ranch. "We'll grow a vegetable garden, we'll use milk cows." If the roads are closed, he said, they always have horses....

This is delusional -- but it's increasingly widespread, and you should think of it as the wingnut version of late-'60s/early-'70s back-to-the-landism (which could also be pretty damn delusional). These folks don't have a coherent plan, but they think they have solid principles: Tax us less spend! Spend less! Oh, but give us everything we need from government. Just cut waste!

The next election cycle is going to be 1972, except in reverse. The out party's presidential candidate is going to have to seem sympathetic to those who wave the freak flag high. That's why Sarah Palin is still very much in the running. And if there's more right-wing violence in the next couple of years, the analogy could be even more precise, and Barack Obama's 2012 numbers could look like Nixon's forty years earlier.

Read the whole thing.

Gatewood for Governor

Oh, Hallelujah, Kentucky's own indefatigable Gatewood Galbraith will challenge Cowardly Waste of Oxygen Steve Beshear's re-election in 2011.

Whole encyclopedias could be written about Gatewood, but here's the short version: he's a pot head gun nut.

You read that right. He is also the most entertaining Kentucky politician since Happy Chandler.

Galbraith said he was running for governor “to combat Kentucky’s electile dysfunction. Nothing has happened in this state for years and it’s the fault of both major political parties. I want to help the electorate change that.”

Galbraith, 62, has maintained that he has no concerns about being a perennial candidate. “Kentucky has perennial problems,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

Gatewood for Governor!

Dr. Dan Channels His Inner Mitch McConnell

It appears the real reason Mitch McConnell doesn't want Jim Bunning to run for re-election is because homophobic DINO, coal industry apologist and no-hoper Senate candidate Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo would be a more reliable republican vote.

Page One nails it:

Daniel Mongiardo says he supports universal health care but not socialized medicine. And he rattles on with Republican talking points about cap and trade.

“The Cap and Trade is basically putting a tax on carbon, on CO2, which means anything that produces CO2, coal being number one, is going to be impacted negatively,” says Mongiardo.

Even though Mongiardo endorsed president Obama in the presidential election, he says the Cap and Trade bill is one area they do not agree on. “The tax that’s going to be levied on Kentucky families, Kentucky businesses, and our economy would be devastating. There’s no way that anyone in this whole state could possibly be “for” this Cap and Trade.”

But Mongiardo says he does agree with the President’s views on health care. “I am for universal health care where everyone has some form of insurance of some form of coverage. I am certainly not for socialized medicine.

What does he think government-run health care is? Socialized medicine, single-payer, universal. It’s all the same thing run by the same government for the same people. Does Lt. Dan think Kentuckians are stupid?

You’ll want want to watch WKYT/WYMT’s story. Click here for that.

Dan Mongiardo: Corporate whore, repug shill, shameless liar or hopeless idiot? How about all of the above? And who cares?

Jack Conway for Senate.

The Vietnam Rorschach Test of Robert McNamara

The Vietnam War did not end in 1975. The Vietnam War will not be over until the last Vietnam veteran, the youngest of whom is 52 years old, has died.

However, the death of the man generally considered the "architect" of that war offers an opportunity to consider why people on all sides of that war, people who agree on absolutely nothing else, agree on hating Robert McNamara.

Although I hate, have always hated and always will hate the Vietnam War, McNamara ranks relatively low on my list of Vietnam War villains, which is topped by War Criminals Henry Kissinger, Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland and Richard Nixon, not to mention Lt. William Calley and the many like him.

Nevertheless, Michael Lind's metaphor holds:

The clue to McNamara's significance is that he was demonized by the left, the right and the center. If there is a Rorschach Prize, he deserved it. Other American public figures have been hated by one side, but usually they have been defended by the other. I can't think of anybody else in American history whom liberals, conservatives and moderates all joined in denouncing.

Why? The vitriol that was directed against McNamara always seemed excessive and even unhinged to me. After all, he wasn't the president. Why not blame Kennedy for deepening the U.S. involvement in Indochina, or Johnson for escalating it, or Nixon for prolonging it? But Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon have had their partisans, who have sought to minimize the collateral damage done to the reputations of these presidents by their failed Vietnam policies.

SNIP

For whatever reason, McNamara instead of other figures below the presidential level was singled out in the public mind as the iconic symbol of failure in Vietnam. But this still does not explain how people who disagreed on everything else have so often agreed to make McNamara the symbol of all that was wrong in American foreign policy.

The solution to the mystery is simple, if subtle. There have been three influential critiques of the Vietnam War. The critiques are those of the antiwar left, the pro-war right and the realist center. Each critique generated its own image of McNamara to fit its own theory of the Vietnam War.

SNIP

The Vietnam War was a crime to the left, a betrayal to the right, and a mistake to the realists. It followed that Robert McNamara, the ritual scapegoat chosen to stand in for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was a war criminal to the left, a near-traitor to the right, and a fool to the realists. Had another scapegoat like Bundy or Rostow been chosen instead of McNamara to symbolize the failure of Vietnam, that individual would have been denounced with equal fervor as a hubristic fool by the realists, a near-traitor by the conservatives, and a Nazi-like war criminal by the radical left.

SNIP

What will historians in the future say about Robert McNamara and his role in Vietnam? I suspect that in the decades to come, historians will increasingly integrate the Second Indochina War -- and the first, and the third -- into the overall history of the Cold War, rather than treat it as an isolated episode or free-standing morality play. Beyond that, it will all depend on who writes the history. One prediction is safe: What historians of tomorrow think of Robert McNamara will depend on their view of the Vietnam War.

Read the whole thing.

HuffPo Snags Froomkin

I was rooting for Josh Marshall to dump that useless Villager Matt Cooper and replace him with WaPo escapee Dan Froomkin, but Adriana snatched him up first.

Glenn Greenwald explains both the pros and cons of Froomkin going to HuffPo, plus how this move signals the real change in American journalism.

Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal. The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides." Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."

While this pairing is, in some ways, a natural one (even the Post Ombudsman suggested that "Web sites like The Huffington Post or Politico would seem a perfect fit"), there are also potential sources of tension. As a practitioner of what he calls "accountability journalism" -- "explaining how Washington works; pulling no punches" -- Froomkin has been a vehement critic of the Obama administration for the last several months, while The Huffington Post frequently trumpeted (some might say "cheerleading") the Obama campaign and even his presidency (though it has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option"). Will Froomkin's harsh criticisms of Obama alienate an Obama-loving HuffPost readership?

And given the central importance of Arianna Huffington's personal relationships with key media figures and those in power, will Froomkin's unrestrained criticisms of many of those same people undermine a key aspect of The Huffington Post's business and promotional strategies? Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice.

For all the self-serving talk about how political journalism is dying, it is striking how new and online media outlets continue to thrive. Yesterday, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo -- which began as a one-person blog -- announced a major investment from Netscape founder Marc Andreesen that is allowing it to double its reporting staff. And now today, a columnist fired by an old, struggling establishment outlet claiming "business reasons" as a motive is not only almost immediately hired by a new media entity, but was inundated with expressions of interest and even other offers from an electic mix of reporting outlets.

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

Read the whole thing.

Xian Fanatics At It Again in Kentucky

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled at least twice that posting the Ten Commandments in public spaces is unconstitutional, disallowed and really fucking annoying, the dominionist freakazoids never quit.

The courthouse in Jackson County should have to take down several copies of the Ten Commandments because they are an improper governmental endorsement of religion, a federal lawsuit argues.

The lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky and a county resident, Eugene Phillips Jr., seeks a ruling that nine copies of the biblical laws on the courthouse walls in McKee are unconstitutional. It also seeks an injunction ordering the county to take down the copies.

SNIP

(Jackson County Judge-Executive William O.) Smith said he had not seen a copy of the lawsuit but that most county residents would support keeping the Ten Commandments displayed in the courthouse. He said a judge might order the county to remove the Commandments, but "that doesn't mean it's right."

Thank you, Judge Smith, for reminding us that the courtesy title "Judge" given to county execs in Kentucky doesn't hide the lack of legal - or even basic educational - qualifications for the job.

The lawsuit was filed last week. The lawsuit says that Phillips and other ACLU members in Jackson County must use the courthouse to do business such as paying taxes.

When they do, exposure to the Ten Commandments displays is "direct and unwelcome," because the citizens see the copies as a message of religious endorsement by the county, in violation of the First Amendment, the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs say that the First Amendment correctly seeks to protect individual freedom by preventing undue government interference in the exercise of religious beliefs, and by barring the government from favoring one religion over another, or religion over non-religion, the lawsuit says.

The ACLU and a handful of courageous citizens like Eugene Phillips are the only things standing between the secular republic the founders risked their lives to establish and the Dominionist nightmare the freakazoids want to impose.

If you haven't joined the ACLU yet, do it today. Or at least send them a check.

Yellow Dog for Chair of Texas Oil and Gas Commission

Because I, Yellow Dog, hate everything to do with the Oil and Gas Industry, and believe the Oil and Gas Industry is the source of all evil in this world and the cause of the Decline of Capitalism, Western Civilization and the American Way, and demand that the Oil and Gas Industry should be outlawed immediately - For The Children - I expect to be immediately appointed head of whatever Texas state agency oversees the oil and gas industry.

No, I'm not insane. I'm just taking advantage of Texas Governor Rick Perry's new habit of appointing as heads of agencies people who are dedicated to destroying everything that agency stands for.

Could it get any worse? Could someone who despises public education soon be heading up the board tasked with managing the Texas public school system? Well, the buzz suggesting that Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, may be the next chair of the Texas State Board of Education is growing louder, writes Hearst Capitol bureau reporter Gary Scharrer for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.

Look, we were under no illusions when the Texas Senate wisely rejected the confirmation of Don McLeroy as board chair in May. We knew Gov. Rick Perry would likely choose another member of the board’s far-right faction as chair (even though there are other far more responsible conservative Republicans on the board). After all, the far-right faction represents his electoral base, which he will need in his re-election battle next year.

But surely even the governor realizes that choosing an extremist like Dunbar would be almost inconceivably reckless and irresponsible. Dunbar has clearly expressed her loathing for public education in her book One Nation Under God, calling public schools a “tool of perversion,” “unconstitutional” and “tryannical.” She has also personally rejected the public school system, home-schooling her children. In fact, she wrote in her book that sending our children to public schools is “throwing them into the enemy’s flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”

Just before the November election, Dunbar also authored a vicious Internet rant in which she called Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer who wants to seize total power by declaring martial law. In another Internet screed, she charged that Obama is promoting Marxism by calling for “shared sacrifice and social responsibility.” (Not surprisingly, both essays have been removed from the Web sites that published them.)

By appointing Dunbar, Gov. Perry would be sending a clear message that he shares Dunbar’s extremism and her contempt for public education. He would be putting his political fortunes ahead of the education of nearly 5 million Texas schoolchildren. In short, such an appointment would be a shocking betrayal of all those children and their families.

Perry's predecessor Smirky pioneered this technique, of course, but Perry has taken it to a new level. Capitol Annex sees it as Perry's desperation to get the super-freakazoid vote in his primary battle for re-election next year.

Down with Tyranny sees it as Perry's desperation to claim the "crazier than a shithouse rat" crown from Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin.

Ignore them, Governor Perry. Just think about this: I absolutely guarantee you that I hate the Oil and Gas Industry WAY more than Cynthia Dunbar hates public education.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

No, "Anyone" Can Not Be President

Anonymous Liberal has a great takedown of Ross Douthat's ridiculous claim that Sarah Palin represents the "Democratic ideal."

This last line from Ross's column also bothers me:

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

This is a ridiculous statement. If you want evidence that anyone can grow up to be president, how about looking at the current President. It's hard to imagine a more unlikely future president than the biracial son of a teenage mother in Hawaii who was given the name of his absentee Muslim father. But Obama did well in school, worked hard, impressed everyone he met with his intellect and managed to put himself in a position to become president.

Others have said the same, but AL's last graf makes what to me is the more important point:

Palin stands for a very different proposition, that if you have the right backers, anyone, no matter how unqualified or unsuited for the job, can potentially become president. That's scary. While I very much want to believe that a smart kid who works hard and plays her cards right can become president someday, no matter where she comes from, I don't want to believe that any random schmuck can become president. The president shouldn't be an average person. The president should be someone who is most decidedly above average in most respects. Pedigree doesn't matter to me, but capability does. And it should to all Americans.

"Anyone can grow up to be president" does not mean any semi-literate, arrested-development, narcissistic psychopath with a cute smile can be president. It means for anyone willing to work her ass off studying, questioning, learning, gaining skills and improving herself, no disadvantages of birth or poverty can stop her.

Or as I believe Jon Stewart put it, I don't want a president I want to have a beer with; I want a president who is light years smarter than me.

The Left is Not Backing Off: Not Now, Not Ever

I can't speak for Move On, Democracy for America, Service Employees International Union or even the Left Side of the Kentucky Blogosphere, but in response to President Obama's request that the Left stop pressuring Senate Blue Dogs, I'll say this:

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Because as President Obama should know better than anyone, it has never been more important that liberal Americans - online, offline and outaline - keep the pressure on all our elected officials to pass the liberal legislation: single-payer healthcare, sharp carbon reductions to stop global warming, EFCA to restore worker rights, tight regulations on the finance industry, massive infrastructure investment, and repealing DOMA and DADT.

That Obama had to whine out loud about the pressure being felt by Senate Blue Dogs who oppose the public option in health care reform proves the pressure is working and it's time to double down on it.

As I wrote in a comment yesterday:

Obama can't suggest, must less achieve, liberal policies and programs unless he gets support in the form of non-stop massive pressure from the left.

If we don't get the liberal legislation we want, it's OUR FAULT for not screaming bloody fucking murder every time Obama gives the repugs and Blue Dogs the time of day.

That means not only calling and writing the White House and signing petitions, but also calling and writing our own representatives and Senators, especially the Blue Dogs and repugs.

No, it might not change their vote, but it'll prevent them from truthfully claiming they didn't hear from their constituents.

Don't let any of them get away with saying: gee, if I'd known you felt that strongly about it ....

Between a ROCK and a license plate

The state budget crisis that has been growing steadily for the last two years has had one salutary effect: it has dropped to the bottom of legislators' priority list the unconstitutional proposal for "In God We Trust" license plates.

Now a religious group has sued Kentucky to demand not only that the state produce the god-walloping plates, but that it also pay profits from the plate to said freakazoids.

A Kentucky anti-pornography group has sued the state Transportation Cabinet and two legislators for turning down its application to sponsor a specialty license plate with the motto “In God We Trust.”

The Louisville-based Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana claims in a lawsuit filed in Franklin Circuit Court that the Transportation Cabinet erred in 2008 when it denied its application for the license plate.

In its application, ROCK said it would use money from sales of the plate to raise awareness about harm caused by pornography and the sex industry and to help people hurt or victimized by porn, sexual predators and the sex business.

If approved, the plate would cost $34, but buyers could volunteer to add $10 that would go to ROCK.

In the cabinet’s response, attorney Allan Weiss of Louisville asked the court to dismiss the complaint because ROCK promotes religion, making the organization ineligible to sponsor a specialty license plate under state law.

Read the whole thing.

My last-word rant on freakazoid license plates from last summer is here. It's ironic but predictable that the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet will go to court to prevent a religious group from sponsoring such plates, but has no problem with the state itself profiting from promoting religion.

It doesn't matter who sponsors or even who profits from the plates. What matters is the unconstitutional injection of a religious message into a basic government service that non-freakazoid citizens cannot escape.

And no, "In God We Trust" is not the "national motto." IGWT was stamped on coins as a Civil War-era sop thrown to slave owners, and hypocritically promoted by McCarthyites to intimidate freethinkers.

The national motto is E pluribus unum, "out of many, one." Put that on the license plates.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

How Abstinence-Only Leads to Crime

OK, I get that their purity pledges didn't cover orgasms, but is there in Connecticut no porn?

A group of teenagers misunderstood a woman's screams during sex and, thinking they were stopping an assault, beat a 25-year-old man in her bedroom, police said.

As PZ writes:

Multiple tragedies here: not only was an innocent man beat up, but now everyone at school is so going to know those teenagers are like total virgins.

"We Pledge Our Lives"

Signed in Philadelphia July 2, 1776, adopted by Congress July 4, 1776.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Many Americans still felt a kinship with the people of Great Britain, and had appealed in vain to the prominent among them, as well as to Parliament, to convince the King to relax his more objectionable policies toward the colonies. The next section represents disappointment that these attempts had been unsuccessful.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Something to Remember on the Fourth of July

We interrupt your ongoing Sanford sex coverage for this public service announcement:

The American officials who, in the name of our precious Constitution, justified, approved and committed torture against human beings continue to roam free, desecrating our claim to civilization and democracy with every unprosecuted breath they take.

The interrogation and detention regime implemented by the U.S. resulted in the deaths of over 100 detainees in U.S. custody -- at least. While some of those deaths were the result of "rogue" interrogators and agents, many were caused by the methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including extreme stress positions, hypothermia, sleep deprivation and others. Aside from the fact that they cause immense pain, that's one reason we've always considered those tactics to be "torture" when used by others -- because they inflict serious harm, and can even kill people. Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we Look to the Future, not the Past -- are thus literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished. Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently put it:

We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that "approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death."

Read the whole thing.

It's Not the Hypocrisy, It's the Sex

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: repugs don't respond to accusations of hypocrisy because the freakazoids don't consider hypocrisy a sin. In fact, there's nothing they love better than a contrite sinner. The more outrageous the sin, the more forgiveness and acceptance the sinner receives.

Paul Krugman nailed it, in a blog post perfectly titled "Sex and the Married Politician."

From their point of view the cause, the need to police what people do in bed, is, by definition, right, because it’s literally God-given. So the fact that some of those trying to police what other people do in bed are themselves doing nasty things does not reflect on the cause itself — on the contrary, it shows just how necessary more bed-snooping is.

It’s also notable that conservatives are, in practice, more forgiving of their politicians’ sins than liberals. John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer ended their political careers; Ensign and Vitter are still in the Senate, and Newt Gingrich is out there on the Sunday shows, speaking for the GOP. Why? Because where liberals see gross hypocrisy, conservatives see men doing the Lord’s work — which partially excuses their own failings. Liberals think that a man who has an affair is worse if he preaches moral values; conservatives think he’s better. You might say that as they see it, if he interferes with what enough other people do in bed, it doesn’t matter what he does himself.

Read the whole thing.

Heart of a Clown

Resident Senate Idiot James Inhofe today called Senator Al Franken (D-MN) a "clown."

Here's how that "clown" displayed grace, humility and nobility beyond the ken of subhumans like Inhofe.

Sen.-elect Al Franken (D-MN) just held a victory rally at the Minnesota state Capitol in St. Paul, celebrating his hard-fought and heavily-litigated victory that finally came true yesterday. In some of the most heartfelt terms possible, he thanked his staff, all of his supporters and volunteers, and especially his family -- and paid tribute to a departed friend, the late Sen. Paul Wellstone.

"Well, it was close," he began his remarks, to the laughter of the crowd, alluding to his final certified victory margin of 312 votes out of about 2.9 million. "But we won." And the crowd applauded.

"And when you win an election by this close a margin, you know that not one bit of effort went to waste," he later added. "And so I want to thank every single person who knocked on a door, marched in a parade, made a phone call, gave money, gave time, gave energy, gave of themselves to this effort. Thank all of you, thank you, thank you, thank you."

The longer his speech went on, Franken became more emotional, clearly touched in a very deep way at the amazing victory he has won, and all the effort that other people put into it on his behalf.

"I want to thank our beautiful kids, Joe and Thomasin, who helped out so much and put up with even more during this long campaign. But most of all, most of all, I want to thank their mom," he said. "You know, this September 19th will be the 40th anniversary that Franni and I met at a freshman college mixer. We've been partners ever since, and when we decided to make this effort, I called our friends and said, 'Franni and I are running for the Senate, and if we win, I get to be the Senator.' Well honey, I get to be the Senator. (They hug, as the audience cheers.) I get to be the Senator because of you. This was a historically close race, but it wouldn't have been if it weren't for Franni. I would have lost, by kind of a lot."

Read the whole thing - Eric Kleefield, who has been covering the Minnesota Senate race like a blanket for more than eight solid months, deserves your page views.

Keep Ben Chandler on a Roll

Whether you agree with Media Czech that Ben Chandler had a change of heart on cap-and-trade, or with me that industry pork got to him, Ben voted with the good guys.

He has another chance to prove he's not a Blue Dog Bayh-partisan on the upcoming ENDA vote. Hilzoy explains.

A few days ago, Barney Frank introduced HR 2981, a new version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which bans employment discrimination against anyone on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Unlike last time, this bill includes protections for transmen and transwomen. That's the good news.

The bad news is that, according to drjillygirl at Pam's House Blend, not enough Democrats are on board to pass the bill. As of two days ago, 48 Democrats are undecided on ENDA.

Ben Chandler is one of them. Email him here.

This should not be a hard bill to pass. The idea that people should not be able to lose their jobs because they are gay or transgender should not be controversial. For some reason that I do not understand, however, it seems to be.

And it's really, really important. This might be our best shot at getting protection from employment discrimination for a lot of people who need it. It might also be our best shot at getting a bill passed that includes protection for transmen and transwomen. This really matters: my best stab at explaining why is here. Altogether too often, the burden of educating people about trans issues, and advocating for their rights, falls on trans people themselves. As I try to explain in that post, this is not fair. And now is a good time for those of us who are not trans to step up to the plate and explain to our representatives why this matters to us.

It's not 1966 anymore. There is no excuse for the fact that it is still legal to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. If your Representative is still on the fence, let him or her know how you feel.