"Sacrifice" of the Rich No Sacrifice at All

So, horror of horrors, President Obama and congressional Democrats are asking the very extremely wealthiest in this country to sacrifice to help the economy.

But exactly what kind of sacrifice are we talking about? And what kind of "help" will that sacrifice bring?

First, the help: jobs. Every penny of extra tax revenue from the obscenely, parasitically, disgustingly rich will go to create jobs for millions of Americans.

TPM:

"I asked CBO to estimate the size of the deficit if the economy were at full employment, and CBO's response confirms that our weak economy is the major contributing factor, accounting for over one third of the projected deficit for fiscal year 2012," Van Hollen said in a statement last night. "It's clear that the fastest and most effective ways to reduce the short term deficit is to put Americans back to work."

Second, the sacrifice. This one gets a little wonky, but hang in there - it's worth it.

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

Ever since Obama redoubled his push to hike taxes on the rich, conservatives have been ridiculing Obama’s invocations of fairness, insisting that the rich are already paying a rising share of the overall tax burden, and accusing him of pushing for mass wealth redistribution in the quest for equality imposed from above. He has been labeled “a staunch believer in the redistributionist state,” a believer in “government-enforced equality,” and even a “socialist.”

So let’s look at how Obama’s tax policies would really impact the wealthy if they were enacted — and how those effects would fit into the bigger picture of income disparity in America.

One way to measure the impact of tax policies is to ask what impact they would have on the after-tax income of people at all income levels. This allows us to gauge just how “redistributionist” tax policies really are.

And guess what: When you do it this way, it shows that the notion that Obama’s tax proposals are redistributive in any large or meaningful way is just comical. Indeed, the big picture is that the impact that they would have on income inequality is virtually nonexistent.

I asked the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center to analyze how Obama’s policies would impact the after tax income of people at all levels, and to compare those results to people’s after tax income under previous tax regimes.

The Tax Policy Center graciously agreed to my request, and looked at what taxes people would pay in 2013 under various tax regimes, when the Obama proposals would take effect. The Center drew up the answers in graph form (editorial conclusions are mine; the numbers are theirs). Here’s the first result:



Here’s how the chart works. In each income group in the top 20 percent — measured here by “percentile” — the blue line represents Clinton-era tax rates; the red represents Bush-era tax rates; and the green represents tax rates under Obama’s first stimulus tax cuts.

The purple and light blue represent what after-tax income would look like for each percentile if Obama’s tax policies were enacted. The blue one includes new taxes from the health reform law that are set to take hold in 2013, and the purple one doesn’t include those taxes. Throughout, I’ll be referring to the one including the health law taxes — the light blue line — because that’s the most onerous scenario.

In other words, under the Tax Policy Center’s model, the purple and blue bars give us a rough sense of the after tax income in various income categories if Obama were to realize his policy goals. The model assumes all the following Obama proposals would get passed: Letting the Bush tax cuts mostly expire for the rich, limiting the value of itemized deductions and some exclusions to 28 percent, taxing carried interest at regular rates, and eliminating tax breaks for oil and gas companies and for corporate jets.

As you can see from the above graph, the big picture is that only the very wealthiest would see anything approaching a signficant change, and in the larger scheme of things, it wouldn’t be a signficant shift at all.

I told you it was wonky.

But it's a real eye-opener, and the wonkiness makes it impossible to refute, so it's well worth your time.

Much as I hate to give WaPo a link, read the whole thing.

“The AFL-CIO Stands with Occupy Wall Street"

I remember George Meany condemning anti-Vietnam-War protesters as Dirty Fucking Hippies, thus sundering seemingly forever the near-century-old alliance of Labor and the Left.

So the vision of "hard hats and hippies together at last" warms my heart and gives me hope.

Jon Wiener at The Nation:

After decades in which “hard hats” were described as enemies of the left, and four decades after construction workers in lower Manhattan attacked anti-war demonstrators on Wall Street, the AFL-CIO on Thursday called on its members to defend Occupy Wall Street from the NYPD as the city moved to arrest and evict protestors in Zuccotti Park.

Hard hats and hippies—together at last.

And when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the NYPD backed off, the AFL-CIO rightly took some of the credit for what union leadership called “an amazing victory.”

“The AFL-CIO Stands with Occupy Wall Street,” president Rich Trumka declared as police announced plans to move in. The federation e-mailed members in the New York area on Thursday, NY1 reported, urging them to come to Zucotti Park and “stand guard” overnight to defend the encampment from the NYPD. “Support” doesn’t get more direct than that.

The unions also sponsored an online petition, and, after the mayor backed off, reported “hundreds of thousands” of signatures.

Today’s events marked the sharpest possible contrast to the day in May 1970, when students protesting the Kent State Killings gathered on Wall Street, and were attacked by two hundred construction workers carrying American flags and chanting “All, the way, USA!” and “We’re number one!” Rick Perlstein tells what happened in his book Nixonland: while police stood by, the workers beat students with lead pipes wrapped in flags, targeting those with the longest hair. A crowd of a thousand Wall Street workers cheered them on. “Thank God for the hard hats!” President Nixon declared, and invited Peter Brennan, head of the Building Trades Council of New York, to the White House.

I always wondered whether that hard hat action had been organized by the White House “dirty tricks” department—especially after a memo was leaked in which Nixon staffer Stephen Bull wrote to Chuck Colson, Nixon’s key political operative, “Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation, perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity.” But the media declared, virtually unanimously, that the white union members were pro-war Nixon supporters.

Decades of de-industrialization followed by two years of economic collapse have brought disaster to the working class—and now a new political reality. And it's not just in New York City—AFL-CIO unions across the country have endorsed Occupy Wall Street and joined actions in their communities.

Have you hugged a hard hat and a hippie today?

Bad Trade

It happens every time. Whenever President Obama does something to please the one percenters, invariably it's something that not only causes significant harm to the economy, but also discourages the 99 percenters from supporting his re-election.

Yes, bad policy is bad politics. And the closer we get to the 2012 election, the worse the policy and the politics get.

John Nichols at The Nation:

President Obama is preparing to mangle his jobs message signing free-trade agreements that are opposed by unions, by Democrats and by the “99 Percenters” who recognize that the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama approach to trade policy has harmed the interests of working people in the United States and abroad.

Why? Because, according to Congressman Mike Michaud, D-Maine, the president “is going to give in to the Washington elites, once again” because “the big companies and the big banks want” the new trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
The three agreements, all modeled on the failed North American Free Trade Agreement, passed the House and Senate Wednesday with overwhelming support from Republicans and minimal support from Democrats.

(President Obama signed all three bills this week.)

Only thirty-one House Democrats backed the agreement with Colombia, where unions note that labor organizers are regularly assassinated. Fifty-nine Democrats backed the agreement with South Korea. Sixty-six Democrats supported the Panama deal.

In the Senate, 30 Democrats opposed the Colombia deal, as did Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and two Maine Republicans: Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

The Democrats who opposed the agreements did so because these deals are wrong, economically and politically.

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, who is running for an open US Senate seat in 2012, made the economic case.

“Trade agreements should be in the best interests of our nation and its people, but sadly this has not been the case with the past free trade agreements,” Baldwin told the House. “Have some of our wealthiest corporations profited from them? Indeed. But the rest of America, especially the middle class, has struggled with job loss, closed factories, and economic and emotional anguish across the country.”

Citing a study issued by the Economic Policy Institute, which reveals that more than 680,000 US jobs have been lost or displaced due to the rise in the trade deficit with Mexico alone since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted in 1994. Baldwin explained: “I hear from Wisconsin families every day that are struggling mightily—struggling to pay the mortgage, put food on the table, and send their kids to college, especially during these uncertain economic times. The solution is to put our people back to work and preserve American jobs. When done right, trade agreements can help bolster our manufacturing and high-skilled technology industries and create jobs as they increase exports and help our economy recover. Done wrong, trade agreements send these same jobs offshore, leaving Americans out of work. Unfortunately, I believe these trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia will exacerbate the US trade deficit and further erode our manufacturing base.”

Lori Wallach, who directs Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, made the political case.

“It is bizarre that President Barack Obama has switched from his long-awaited focus on jobs to spending effort passing three George W. Bush–signed, NAFTA-style trade deals that official government studies show will increase our trade deficit even as polls show most Americans oppose NAFTA-style trade pacts and recognize that they kill American jobs,” said Wallach. “The only way these deals will pass is if congressional GOP lawmakers expose themselves to the foreseeable election attack ads and provide President Obama almost all of the votes; most congressional Democrats will oppose these deals, which are loved by the US Chamber of Commerce and despised by the Democratic base groups. Apparently, the Obama team has a way to win re-election that does not involve Ohio or other industrial swing states. We saw with NAFTA in 1993 the dire political consequences of a Democratic president blurring distinctions between the parties on this third-rail issue of trade and jobs. And unlike NAFTA, this time, even official government studies show that these pacts will increase our trade deficit.”

Baldwin’s right.

Wallach’s right.

Obama’s wrong—very, very, very wrong.

Signing these free-trade deals will harm the economy.

And it will make it a lot harder for voters in factory towns to support his re-election.

2012 is going to come down to turnout. Period. More than the economy, more than unemployment, more than the Occupy Protests, the 2012 election is going to be won by the party that gets every one of its voters to the polls. Democrats won big in 2008 because of huge turnout, and lost huge in 2010 because Disappointed Democrats sat at home.

As I have written numerous times before, I am going to vote for President Obama, and I encourage everyone who is not Mitt Romney to do so as well. But as someone who struggles every day to help people overcome the repug-installed barriers to voting and to light fires under the non-voting asses of apathetic Democrats, I do not appreciate President Obama making that job a thousand times harder than it already is.

Are You a 99 Percenter?

If you make less than $164,000 a year you are.

Via Digby:



Or maybe you're angry about one or more things that the 99 percenters are angry about. Scroll through the dozens of charts and photos in this amazing post by Henry Blodget. Unless you're Mitt Romney, you'll find something here that hits home:

The "Occupy Wall Street" protests are gaining momentum, having spread from a small park in New York to marches to other cities across the country.

So far, the protests seem fueled by a collective sense that things in our economy are not fair or right. But the protesters have not done a good job of focusing their complaints—and thus have been skewered as malcontents who don't know what they stand for or want.

(An early list of "grievances" included some legitimate beefs, but was otherwise just a vague attack on "corporations." Given that these are the same corporations that employ more than 100 million Americans and make the products we all use every day, this broadside did not resonate with most Americans).

So, what are the protesters so upset about, really?

Do they have legitimate gripes?

To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.

And if America cannot figure out a way to address these gripes, the country will likely become increasingly "de-stabilized," as sociologists might say. And in that scenario, the current protests will likely be only the beginning.

The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation's history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.

In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between "labor" and "capital," there has rarely—if ever—been a time when "capital" was so clearly winning.

See everything you need to explain why you are a 99 percenter here.

Then get out and join your local Occupy Protest. (For some reason, this link keeps breaking. The url is http://occupytogether.org.)

Occupy Kentucky Updates

Occupy Lexington and Occupy Louisville are still going strong. Occupy Lexington planned a march last night. I will update with coverage when it appears.

Tom Eblen at the Herald:

The casually dressed Occupy Wall Street protesters in downtown Lexington last Wednesday evening looked curiously at one another when Richard Knittel approached wearing a suit and tie.

He didn't want to argue with them. He wanted to join them.

Knittel, 69, of Versailles, explained that he isn't against capitalism — among other things, he is chairman of a Canadian company that uses environmentally friendly technology to mine metals. But he agreed with the protesters that big money has too much influence in America, especially when it comes to profit-driven disregard for the environment.

"I want people to see that even people with suits on are joining this," Knittel said before picking up a spare protest sign and waving to passing motorists on Main Street.

From the Courier:

Louisville metro government will allow downtown to be occupied at least through the end of the year.

The protest group known as Occupy Louisville, an independent offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City, has received a city permit allowing protesters to spend nights in Jefferson Square Park through Dec. 31.

The Occupy movement is a protest of corporate influence in government and growing wealth disparity in America. The movement started last month in New York City and has now spread to more than 70 cities, including some in foreign countries.

The only stipulation in the permit for Occupy Louisville is that protesters are not allowed to spend the night in the park during the weekend of Light Up Louisville, Nov. 25-27. They can reoccupy the park starting Nov. 28.

The permit also asks that protesters “work to accommodate” other groups permitted to use the park, and clean up trash, litter and cigarette butts daily.

Occupy member Jason Whirlwind said the group has no problem with the stipulations because the group is all about respecting people and property.

Far be it from me to criticize Occupy Louisville - I'm not down there sleeping on the sidewalk - so I will just quote someone at Occupy Wall Street: "It's a protest, not a permitted picnic."

But the park permit allows Louisville Occupiers to maintain their tents instead of striking them every morning and moving. It also gives them access to the open-all-night restrooms across the street.

Read the whole thing, including praise from the Mayor's Office and support from Food Not Bombs.

PZ Explains Extraterrestrials

It's not a new concept; many of us have suspected for quite a while that earth is the ghetto of the galaxy; beings from other systems know all about us and want nothing to do with creatures who knowingly destroy their own planet.

But PZ Myers has a nice anti-theist twist:

The Fermi paradox is a question: if other intelligent alien life is present in the universe, why aren’t they here?*

Even if we postulate large numbers of aliens with the technology to visit Earth, we can now explain why they aren’t saying hello. We’ve been broadcasting idiocy into space.

During a recent conference that focused on the possibilities and implications of long-term space flight, a German professor made an attempt at applying Christian theology to extraterrestrial aliens, leading him to ask the question “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?”

We’ve moved so far beyond speculating about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Now we’re wondering how many Jesii exist in the galaxy.

If other life forms exist in our universe, he said, we should try to understand why Jesus chose to save those from Earth over other civilized life forms from other planets.

Did God reserve his grace solely for Earthlings and abandon the rest of the intelligent creatures in the universe? If not, how did God deal with the sin problem on multiple planets?

One possibility he mentioned is that God-incarnate visited each of the civilized planets and saved each of the races that inhabited them separately.

In order for that to be possible, however, he says multiple incarnations of God would have to exist at the same time. Assuming each incarnation took about 30 years, and based on how long civilizations are expected to survive, he estimates that there would have to be approximately 250 incarnations of God present in the universe at any given time to cover the sins of each civilization.

So picture the poor bewildered aliens parked out there in the Oort cloud, proposing to send a diplomatic mission to Earth. They aren’t worried about us as a threat — star-faring civilizations aren’t going to be intimidated by a species that has barely been able to wobble a handful of missions to their moon, and is even rethinking their space program — but they are going to be considering the other implications of contact. “The humans…next thing you know, the Seventh Day Adventists will be knocking on our doors on Saturday mornings to hand out tracts; the Catholics will be building special schools and flooding our courts with Jesuits; and the Baptists will be telling us we can’t bezorp the paramales with our deedloids or we’ll burn in Hell. And their arguments will be so stupid. Scratch the contact mission, I don’t think we can handle the exasperation!”

And so the earth orbits alone around its star, abandoned and avoided by the more sensible species of the galaxy, like the creepy born-again Jesus-freak at school with the glassy eyes who you avoid having a conversation with because all he wants to talk about is the Bible. Damn you, religion! It’s your fault we can’t commune with the great minds of the galaxy!

*It’s not really a paradox. It’s an observation that can be explained by the idea that technological intelligence is very rare, and so widely dispersed that communication, let alone travel, between them is unlikely.

Indy Press Wins One

This is important for not just members of the independent press. This is a warning to every local police department that thinks the power of violence and arrest gives it the right to abuse and mistreat law-abiding citizens.

From Brad Friedman:

The St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments, along with the U.S. Secret Service, have agreed to pay $100,000 in compensation as part of a settlement in a federal lawsuit filed after the inappropriate arrests and detentions of journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! and two of her producers at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The settlement also includes an agreement that the St. Paul police department will "implement a training program aimed at educating officers regarding the First Amendment rights of the press and public."

As we originally reported in September of 2008, the three journalists were arrested (along with other members of the media) while covering protests and mass arrests outside the GOP convention, despite clearly identifying themselves to the police as members of the media.

In addition to the mass arrests of active protesters, footage later emerged showing an absolutely bizarre, and seemingly indiscriminate, police crackdown on peaceful citizens otherwise having gathered in a nearby city park (See video below.)
Democracy Now! producer Nicole Salazar was even roughed up by police in the course of her apprehension. Goodman, who had rushed out from the convention floor after hearing of the arrests of her producers, was cuffed and taken in despite any hint of inappropriate behavior, as seen in the two short video clips below...

Just 20 days later, to no one's surprise, the charges were completely dropped. But a lawsuit was filed nonetheless and this week Goodman announced details of the settlement...

A final settlement has been reached in a federal lawsuit challenging the police crackdown on journalists reporting on the 2008 Republican National Convention and protests in St. Paul, Minnesota. Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman, along with former producers Nicole Salazar and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, filed the lawsuit last year against the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments, the Ramsey County Sheriff and United States Secret Service personnel. The lawsuit challenged the policies and conduct of law enforcement during the 2008 RNC that resulted in their arrests. They were among dozens of journalists arrested that week in St. Paul. The settlement includes $100,000 in compensation paid by the St. Paul and Minneapolis police departments and the Secret Service. The settlement also includes an agreement by the St. Paul police department to implement a training program aimed at educating officers regarding the First Amendment rights of the press and public with respect to police operations, including proper procedures for dealing with the press covering demonstrations.

As we reported on the day charges were initially dropped against the Democracy Now! journalists several weeks after their arrest, footage of police in riot gear making massive, and seemingly inappropriate, arrests of peaceful citizens at a nearby city park was initially withheld from public release out of fear of police intimidation...

New footage was released late last week (said by the videographers to have been "buried" until now to avoid confiscation) of a bizarre mass arrest by St. Paul police. Scores of seemingly peaceful folks just sitting in a park are seeing being seized by riot squads. "LisaG," posting at Firedoglake, notes:

My personal favorite moment in the tape is an off-camera exchange. Police in riot gear have surrounded loungers in a waterfront park. They announce, "Ladies and Gentlemen, You're Under Arrest" and you hear one young woman say incredulously "Are you serious?"

Yep, I'm afraid they are.

Today, I saw a local Frankfort Police cruiser make at least four slow passes around a "Jobs Not Cuts - Rebuild the Dream" demonstration at the Old State Capitol. There were about 50 people there, and a more unthreatening bunch would be hard to find. Those cruiser passes were pure intimidation and completely beneath contempt. Shame on you, Frankfort Police.

How to Make An Old Hippie Cry

They love the new verse. They know the words and tune of the chorus - written before their parents were born - well enough to sing it a capella.

The kids are all right.

"When You Vote, You Change Things"

Zandar on the good guys winning one:

I talked about Raleigh NC and Wake County back in January after the school board there introduced a plan to end busing and desegregation.

Wake County, home of the capital of the state I grew up in a Southern state no less, is telling children and parents that diversity is no longer a proper or necessary goal for public schools.

Before the Tea Party took control of the GOP, Wake County was a held up as a model school district. It dropped racial integration for economic integration ten years ago and since then is one of the better ranked large school districts in not just the state, but the entire country.

Well, voters in Wake County had their say yesterday, and they threw the Tea Party out on their ignorant asses.

The big win for Democrats and desegregation represents a big loss for conservative benefactor Art Pope, who served as the architect of the 2009 school board election that saw an anti-diversity Republican majority win control of the officially nonpartisan body, and who along with his political network backed yesterday's losing candidates. Pope is one of the most influential money men in North Carolina politics and is a close national ally of the billionaire Koch brothers through his role as a national director of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which backs school privatization and whose North Carolina chapter helped Republicans in the 2009 school board race.

With five of the board's nine seats up for grabs yesterday, Democrats won four races outright and ousted board chair Ron Margiotta, a particularly divisive figure who also serves as a trustee for a private school run by Bob Luddy, a close associate of Pope and the Koch brothers and another major funder of this year's anti-diversity-policy candidates. Margiotta lost to political newcomer Susan Evans by 52% to 48% in Southwest Wake's District 8, considered the most strongly Republican of the board's nine districts.

The fifth race looks to be headed to a runoff, but the Tea Party's pointman in NC, Art Pope, took it in the shorts back in my home state. The difference was turnout, where election officials were expecting around a 10% turnout for the special election, the actual number was much higher driven by absentee/early voting and the controversy surrounding the school board. It was 9-0 Republicans in 2009. Four of them have been tossed, and Democrats can take a majority depending on the runoff results.

When you vote, you can change things, folks. Remember that.

"Made in America"

Those "trade agreements" are NAFTA-on-steroids job-killers, Mr. President, and don't think we don't know it.



Full transcript here.

Gun Nuts Getting Nuttier

Maybe it takes a southern liberal to see this, but isn't it obvious that the reason all the conservatards are crazier than ever is because there's a ni**er in the White House!?

It's especially obvious on guns, as a keystone of Jim Crow was that whites had guns and blacks didn't. It's no coincidence that gun nuttery rose at the same time as civil rights. The more power blacks have, the more guns the racist motherfuckers need. With a ni**er in the White House, the racist motherfuckers' need for guns is infinite.

Kevin Drum:

But here's what I don't understand. As near as I can tell, the gun community has won an all but total victory over the past couple of decades. Democrats have almost universally given up on gun control as a losing issue, there's been no serious action on the federal front for years, and the Supreme Court in 2008 handed down the holy grail of gun rights, ruling in Heller that the Second Amendment guarantees a personal right to bear arms and then ruling a couple of years later in McDonald that this guarantee applies to states and local communities as well as the federal government.

So what's been the reaction? Well Heller and McDonald have spurred a rash of lawsuits as gun groups try to force communities to allow possession of handguns. That's entirely understandable, since this is their core issue. Beyond that, though, instead of basically taking a victory lap, gun groups have gotten ever more bellicose. Wayne LaPierre sounds like an utter lunatic with his talk of secret plans from the White House to take away everyone's guns. Alleged UN plots to ban handguns are on every gun owner's lips. And the latest front is for gun enthusiasts to swagger around with guns on their hips when they go to McDonald's to order an iced latte.
Hell, the leading edge of this movement is demanding the right to take their guns everywhere: bars, schools, courtrooms, you name it. Not because there's any serious danger in any of those places, but just to show they can.

I dunno. Maybe this is just human nature. Maybe victory always makes people eager for more more more. But why don't they just accept their victory and bask in it instead? Get Heller and McDonald enforced around the country and call it a day. None of them cared about carrying guns around in public twenty years ago, after all. And if there's any way to get a sympathetic public to turn against them, demanding the right to have armed posses of obsessive gun enthusiasts marching around in supermarkets and bars and school corridors sure seems like a good way to do it.

Bottom line: you won. Nobody can take your guns away anymore, and once the Heller/McDonald rulings have been fully adjudicated, you'll have broader rights about the kinds of guns you can own than the kind of car you can drive. Enjoy it.

"People Are Just Fed Up"

Via Blue Texan at Firedoglake:



Full transcript here. (Scroll down to end.)

The People United Will Never Be Defeated

It's not the war, nor the battle, hardly a skirmish. But worthy of celebration.



Local Occupy News from Barefoot and Progressive:

On Saturday, 951 cities in 82 countries are taking to the streets. Lexington’s not listed in the current directory… but luckily for you, there’s a bunch of your fellow city-folk already on the streets. So join them.

Lexington’s hanging tough. Our hometown heroes — THIRD OLDEST OCCUPATION IN THE NATION — are still rockin’ Main Street. Drive by and give them a honk, stop by and bring them some coffee, or just head on down and join the party — even if it’s just half an hour on your way to Midnight Madness or to your night of tinkling pianos at Trust. Whatever your plans, join ‘em, support ‘em, love ‘em.

Occupy Louisville is here.

It's gonna be sunny and mild in Kentucky tomorrow - Join the Resistance!

Protesting Is Our Job

Back on October 3, Kevin Drum wrote this about the Awlaki assassination:

As it happens, I don't think the Awlaki precedent means that President Obama is going to go hog wild and start mowing down Americans overseas. I don't think that President Rick Perry would, either. But there are good and sound reasons that presidents are constrained in their ability to unilaterally kill U.S. citizens, regardless of where they live, and we allow these bright lines to be dimmed at our peril. Unfortunately, the war on terror has made poltroons out of every branch of government. The president hides behind the post-9/11 AUMF, using it as a shield to justify any action as long as it's plausibly targeted at al-Qaeda or something al-Qaeda-ish. Congress, which ought to pass a law that specifically spells out due process in cases like this, cowers in its chambers and declines to assert itself.
And the courts, as usual, throw up their hands whenever they hear the talismanic word "war" and declare themselves to have no responsibility.

If the president wants the power to kill U.S. citizens who aren't part of a recognized foreign army and haven't received a trial, he should propose a law that spells out when and how he can do it. Congress should debate it, and the courts should rule on its constitutionality. That's the rule of law. And regardless of whether I liked the law, I'd accept it if Congress passed it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court declared it constitutional.

However, none of that has happened. The president's power in this sphere is, in practical terms, whatever he says it is. Nobody, not liberals or conservatives, not hawks or doves, should be happy with that state of affairs.

The history of American presidents and war powers is one long dirge of unconstitutional overstepping, from John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts through Teddy Roosevelt's seizure of the Phillipines, FDR interring innocent Japanese-Americans, LBJ lying about the Tonkin Gulf, Reagan and Bush I on Iran-Contra, Smirky and Iraq right up to Obama and the warren terra.

Because it is, of course, far worse than we thought.

Digby:

I haven't written anything about Charlie Savage's explosive revelation of an odious Obama Justice Department memo justifying the president's contention that he has the right to order the assassination of American citizens without even a nod to due process or congressional authority because it's just too much. It's particularly upsetting news that the memo was written by Marty Lederman, one of George W. Bush's harshest critics --- for doing exactly what he then did. For any of you who followed the details of the Yoo and Bybee memos of yore, this is profoundly depressing. I guess it takes on to know one.

You can get the whole sordid story from Greenwald. Oy.

We liberals let down our guard. Smirky/Darth were so mold-breakingly horrific that even the Wall-Street-worshipping repug-lite Obama was a relief.

We forgot that no one can be trusted with the power of that office. It is our job to supervise closely, to trust but verify, to challenge and protest and dissent.

Because in the end, the ones who take the oath to defend, preserve and protect the Constitution are not the ones who actually have to do the defending, preserving and protecting of the Constitution against the oath-takers.

That's our job.

Guthrie, Davis, Rogers, Whitfield Vote to Let Hospitals Kill Pregnant Women

Rep. John "Congressman Awesome" Yarmuth voted against the monstrosity, as, surprisingly, did Ben "Wire Hangar" Chandler. Did Benny Boy misunderstand the vote?

Steve Benen:

House Republicans aren’t at all interested in working on jobs bills. They do, however, have plenty of time for anti-abortion legislation that has no chance of becoming law.

…Republicans can’t let social conservatives feel overlooked by the focus on the tea party’s spending concerns — so they’re about to make sure those critical GOP voters know that they haven’t forgotten about their campaign pledge to block federal funding of abortions.

The House is set to vote Thursday on the Protect Life Act, legislation that would ban women from using the health reform law’s tax subsidies to purchase health plans that cover abortions.

This is, of course, part of a larger pattern reflecting GOP priorities in this Congress. Voters who backed Republicans in 2010, hoping to see a focus on economic growth, may not have realized they were actually voting for a renewed culture war.
Just on the issue of reproductive rights, today’s vote on the Protect Life Act comes in the midst of the Republican crusade against Planned Parenthood and the odious “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” And that’s just in Washington — restrictions pushed by the GOP at the state level are even more daunting.

As for the specific bill that’s likely to reach the House floor today, let’s first note some context. Under existing law, American hospitals have to treat everyone — or at a minimum, stabilize them — regardless of their ability to pay. If the facility can’t provide treatment, it must transfer a patient to a hospital that can, and then that hospital is required to provide care.

The sponsors of the Protect Life Act have a question few ever ask: what happens when a patient requires an emergency abortion to save her life? Proponents want to empower hospitals to simply let the woman die.

The bill … is an amendment to the 2010 health care reform law that would modify the way Obamacare deals with abortion coverage…. [C]ritics say a new section of the bill inserted into the language just this week would go far beyond Stupak, allowing hospitals that receive federal funds but are opposed to abortions to turn away women in need of emergency pregnancy termination to save their lives. […]

[Rep. Joe Pitts’ (R-Pa.)] bill would free hospitals from any abortion requirement under EMTALA, meaning that medical providers who aren’t willing in terminating pregnancies wouldn’t have to — nor would they have to facilitate a transfer.

The hospital could literally do nothing at all, pro-choice critics of Pitts’ bill say.

Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood executive vice president for policy, advocacy and communications, said yesterday that “any politician who votes for this bill is literally putting politics before women’s health.”

It’s expected to pass the House anyway — thank again, midterm voters — but will probably never even see the light of day in the Senate. Just in case, however, the White House issued a statement of administration policy yesterday afternoon, letting Congress know President Obama would definitely veto this bill, if it were to reach his desk.

Maybe some enterprising campaign reporters can ask the Republican presidential candidates whether they’d sign this bill in 2013 — and whether they think this is the best use of Congress’ time right now.

How many jobs are created by forcing pregnant women to die?

Visions of Torches and Pitchforks

If the rich, the financiers, the obscenely wealthy parasites are shitting their pants in fear, they are still not terrified enough.

Paul Krugman:

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Join the Occupation near you.

"Paid Detail"

When I called the New York City cops and Boston cops who beat unarmed protesters "paid-for thugs of the plutocrats" I meant it literally.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

I wrote last week about the multi-million dollar contribution to the NYPD from JPChase, but it turns out the corporate influence goes much deeper than that. Pam Martens, an activist who successfully sued the NYPD after her arrest for handing out leaflets about corruption at Citibank, tells us a lot of things we didn't know about the relationship between the NYPD and Wall Street, and it's jawdropping information:

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

Apparently the city doesn't bother to insure the NYPD for liability, saying it's cheaper to shell out for settlements. (Here's a guy who was strong-armed by those private detail cops for daring to attempt to use the bathroom during a 9/11 tribute at a Yankees game. Wonder how much that cost the city? In the past decade, the NYPD has paid almost a billion dollars in legal settlements.)

Liberals know that public servants work for the public, not the plutocracy.

repugs to Firefighters: Child Molesters Can Do Your Job for Free

Seems a decade of congressional repugs shitting on formerly untouchable groups like military troops and 9/11 first responders has emboldened state-level repugs to shit on their own respected public servants.

Marie Diamond at Think Progress:

Forcing prison inmates to work as unpaid laborers is not a new practice, but GOP-controlled states are increasing taking the idea to extremes as they face budget shortfalls and refuse to raise taxes. Under Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) anti-collective bargaining law, at least one Wisconsin county replaced some union workers with prison labor. Inmates are not paid for their work, but may receive time off of their sentences.

Now Camden County in Georgia is considering tasking prisoners to take on one of the most dangerous jobs there is: fighting fires. Using prisoners as firefighters is a cost-cutting measure that’s expected to save the county a bundle:

A select group of inmates may be exchanging their prison jumpsuits for firefighting gear in Camden County.

The inmates-to-firefighters program is one of several money-saving options the Board of County Commissioners is looking into to stop residents’ fire insurance costs from more than doubling. [...] The inmate firefighter program would be the most cost-effective choice, saving the county more than $500,000 a year by some estimates. But that option is already controversial, drawing criticism from the firefighters who would have to work alongside – and supervise – the prisoners.

The Camden program would put two inmates in each of three existing firehouses, and they would respond to all emergencies – including residential – alongside traditional firefighters. The inmates would have no guard, but would be monitored by a surveillance system and by the traditional firefighters, who would undergo training to guard the inmates.

The inmates would not be paid for their work, but upon release they would be eligible to work as firefighters five years after their conviction dates instead of the normal 10.

Naturally, many are questioning the wisdom of asking prisoners to put their own lives at risk in a dangerous job they don’t necessarily want to do. Not only would the program jeopardize inmates’ safety, but their potential lack of enthusiasm and training could jeopardize the lives of fire victims they are supposed to be saving. Firefighter Stuart Sullivan told the Florida Times-Union that firefighters choose the profession because they have a passion for serving the public and helping people, while the inmates would only be there as an alternate way to serve their sentences.

Many firefighters are speaking out against the idea, and don’t relish the additional responsibility of having to guard and worry about inmates as they are trying to put out fires and save lives. This distraction could be another life-threatening consequence of the measure. The program also runs the risk of inmates escaping — all in all a very dangerous proposition for public safety just to save money.

Yet more proof that repugs have no respect for even the most essential public servants, and no idea what actual public servants like firefighters actually do in their jobs.

But the real genius here is that the plan does not just eliminate good government jobs for firefighters, it greatly increases the chance that firefighters who still have jobs will die on the job.

Why just eliminate jobs for public employees when you can eliminate the public employees themselves?

Snappy Answers to Stupid Anti-Occupy Remarks

So now it's a race to see if Occupy protests can grow in number and location faster than the panicked 1 percent can throw lies and insults at them.

From Truthout:

Lame, pat, pre-packaged putdowns of Occupy Wall Street: We all deal with ‘em, whether we’re arguing with a neighbor, appearing on Fox, or answering the jeers of relatives who’ve just received a chain email that “really puts the protesters in their place.”

Here are a few easy comebacks for your next argument. They cover everything from the supposed “hypocrisy” of demonstrators who buy cardboard (really!) to snarky comments about scruffy-looking anticapitalists with beards.

1. They say “Oh, look. The demonstrators buy stuff from corporations!” You say “Whaddya expect? Corporate lackeys in government have forced everybody else out of business!”

SNIP

2. They say “They hate businesses!” You say “No, they hate parasitical businesses.”

Want to know something ironic? If the demonstrators had their way, most businesses in this country would actually do better. Why? Because the banks aren’t lending to anybody but the mega-corporations who are already sitting on a ton of cash.

If the system was reformed, banks would lend to those smaller and medium-sized businesses that actually hire people. What’s more, debt relief for the American consumer would unleash a buying wave that would spur widespread economic growth.

These “anti-business” protesters would be great for businesses - all, that is, except for the dishonest and socially useless ones. You know, like the ones that underwrite politicians, think tanks, and television networks - who then proceed to make fun of demonstrations, as they’re paid to do.

Read the whole thing.

Yes, You Can Help the Poor by Hurting the Rich

In fact, that's the only way you can help them. Reichwing motherfucking liars notwithstanding.

scarce at Crooks and Liars:

In this brief clip from CNN, supposed GOP front-runner assails the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as a waste of time, and a front for the Democratic party and Barack Obama's re-election hopes. What caught my ear, however, was the line he uses and attributes to Abraham Lincoln:

You don't help the poor by hurting the rich.

Republicans have been using it for decades, most famously by Ronald Reagan at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when he said in his speech:

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we?" And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves."

None of which Abraham Lincoln ever said.

Those axioms were from one Rev. William John Henry Boetcker, a now obscure historical figure but in 1916 the director of Citizens' Industrial Alliance, which later became the Citizens' Alliance, a pro-employer organization notable for its strike breaking, anti-union efforts in the early part of the twentieth century.

Snopes details this authoritatively here.

I suppose none of this should come as a shock from any Republican, and especially not from a potential Republican nominee who takes his inspiration from children's cartoons, a man who until recently seemed more interested in selling his book than actually winning the nomination. And indeed this clip, and his later interview with Lawrence O'Donnell for MSNBC were done in a bookstore, Cain hawking his book and campaigning at the same time.

Republicans have been fabulously successful at creating and marketing their own mythology for at least the last forty years, unsurprisingly coincident with the decline of the middle class and ever greater wealth in the hands of the few. It's no wonder someone like Herman Cain doesn't understand the Occupy Wall Street movement or the real resentment out there just beginning to surface.

Avoid confusion and frustration by just remembering this rule: every word out of a repug mouth is either a lie or projection.

John Adams Would Not Defend These Fuckers

jesusfuckingchocolatecoveredechristonapogostick, just how stick-your-wet-finger-in-a-light-socket STOOPIT are Boston cops?

Brad Johnson at Think Progress:

In one of the largest mass arrests in recent Boston history, the Boston Police Department cleared a park of over 100 activists with the 99 Percent Movement in the early hours of Tuesday morning, dismantling and destroying tents that had been set up on Monday. Startling footage shot by an onlooker shows members of Veterans for Peace, an organization of U.S. military veterans who oppose war, being arrested by members of the Boston Police Department, their flags — including the American flag — being thrown to the ground:

Before the arrests and clearing of the park, the police surrounded it, lining up over a dozen paddy wagons along one side. They told members of the media to leave and not to film proceedings. After a five-minute warning to disperse, police moved in, first arresting the peacefully protesting veterans — who included a female veteran of the Iraq War, according to the Boston Phoenix — and then other Occupy Boston activists. According to Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, about 100 arrests were made.

The police then tore down the protesters’ encampment. Live feeds from onlookers showed Boston Police dumping dismantled tents, signs, and chairs into waiting garbage trucks, destroying the protesters’ property.

Tuesday morning’s mass arrest marks the first significant confrontation between police and Occupy Boston. Activists in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street began an occupation of Dewey Square Park, a small park in the heart of Boston’s financial district on Friday, September 30, without conflict. The number of participants in Occupy Boston outgrew the space over the week. On Monday morning, dozens of protesters set up a new occupation on the Rose Kennedy Greenway between Pearl and Congress Streets, one block northeast of Dewey Square. Over the course of the day, the Boston Police Department issued warnings to the occupiers of the new encampment that they were at risk of arrest because of potential damage to the greenway.

Over Twitter, a department spokesperson warned activists the police wanted to “curtail additional damage to newly developed green space” because “the Greenway Conservancy recently invested over $150,000 in new plantings for all to enjoy.” The Greenway Conservancy is a private non-profit organization that raises funds for the public park. Its board is comprised of several of Boston’s wealthiest financiers.

Before the mass arrest and destruction of the second Occupy Boston encampment, police media relations issued a statement that “the Boston Police Department respects your right to protest peacefully.”

Assaulting elderly veterans.

Throwing the American flag to the ground.

Destroying private property.

Wasting thousands of taxpayer dollars to arrest 129 people only to release them 12 hours later.

Holding the City of Boston and Boston's Finest up for the world to mock and despise.

Fucking. Genius.

The One Suggesting Dynamite Is the Fed

Occupy Together is officially a threat to the powers-that-be: they're sending in moles and provocateurs.

Zandar:

And speaking of Occupy Together protests in other cities besides the Big Apple, it seems at least one conservative magazine editor has admitted to joining Occupy DC as a mole with the intent of causing problems...and was at the incident where protesters were pepper-sprayed at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.

An assistant editor with a right-wing magazine admitted in a column Saturday evening to posing as part of the 99 Percent Movement in D.C. “in order to mock and undermine” it. Patrick Howley, an assistant editorfor the American Spectator, was committed enough to his deception to be at the vanguard of a demonstration that saw police firing pepper spray and closing a downtown Washington museum.

In his column, Howley says he took part in the demonstration Saturday at the Smithsonian Institute’s Air and Space Museum reportedly directed at an exhibit about the unmanned drone aircraft used by the U.S. and others for spying and, increasingly, targeted killings in far-flung hotspots.

As between 100 and 200 anti-war demonstrators arrived at the steps of the museum — some of them affiliated with a group organizing the “Occupy DC” spinoff of the Wall Street protests — a few intrepid protesters made a rush for the door despite apparent warnings from security guards. One of them was Howley, who recounts that “as far as I could tell I was the only one who got inside the museum.”

Howley's own words are revealing:

[A]s far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story. Under a cloud of pepper spray I forced myself into the doors and sprinted blindly across the floor of the Air and Space Museum…

And of course, he got his story. Maybe he got swept up in the moment, maybe he actually learned something about the Occupy Together protests, maybe he's an adrenaline junkie, maybe he's just an inveterate liar of the first order. He admits to joining the protest at the Air and Space Museum under false pretenses and cops to being in the thick of things when the pepper spray started to fly.

So yes, no matter what motive you assign to Howley's actions, the establishment is taking the various Occupy Together protests very, very seriously. If you're headed out there this week (Occupy Cincy ended up in downtown right on Fountain Square this weekend with peaceful demonstrations) be aware, and be careful.

Careful indeed. The danger to the Occupy movement is less co-optation by either the reichwing or the institutional left and much more the classic and effective techniques plutocrats and bureaucrats have used for more than a century.

spocko at Firedoglake discusses that danger with a Retired Military Officer Friend (RMOF):

RMOF: Trouble” will start with a shooting or looting. “Someone” will shoot a ‘banker’ or ‘broker,’ but sadly it will end up being some expendable minor functionary like a secretary or clerk who has no idea the guys in the $25,000.00 suits have decided to make a martyr.

Spocko: Sadly, I agree RMOF. I’m curious how this kind of stuff actually gets done.

RMOF: It isn’t hard. Find a die hard Tea Partier or die-hard left wing Anarchist for that matter. Convince them that “the Man” has to be taught a lesson. They don’t even have to shoot anyone. Just fire some shots in the air and run like hell. There would be a good chance some scared 20 year old cop would shoot someone, or (even worse for the movement), the crowd would become convinced the cops are shooting. All it takes is a brick to the head and you have “the cop killing rioters.”

Second way: Find a security company that specializes in less savory side of the business. Make sure only a few people are involved. Plant your people and go; let them encourage anger, violence, etc. as “the only way to win!”

Find your local Occupation, and be careful out there.

The Occupy Effect

Just as a reminder, and not to put too fine a point on it, Paul Krugman has been dead-on-perfect-right about Everything Economic for the past ten-and-a-half years. So when he weighs in on the Occupy protests - which are at bottom about economics - we should all drop what we're doing and pay attention.

Krugman in the New York Times:

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.

Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.

A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But we shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.

Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment — not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.

And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans, who instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, for example — who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class Americans — was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare.”

But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.

And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.

I think Occupy has already succeeded in at minimum changing the conversation and putting the burden of proof back on the rich parasites.

For the moment at least, Occupy has also done what liberals have been trying and failing to do for the past 30 years: yank the Overton Window at least a few inches back from the reichwing extreme.

Brett Guthrie is a Lying Moron, Part 4

Shame on Rep. Guthrie, corporate knob-gobbler of the Second District of Kentucky. And shame on the Bowling Green "Home of Aynrandy Paul" Daily News for publishing his lies unrefuted.

If a farmer walks into U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie’s office, he or she typically isn’t there to talk about the harvest or the crop, according to Guthrie. Instead, area farmers often want to talk about what they consider overreach from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Name three of these imaginary farmers, motherfucker. I'll bet ten bucks to a nickel you can't tell soybeans from winter wheat.

Guthrie has plenty of anecdotal evidence from stops around Kentucky’s 2nd Congressional District. Business owners, community banks, farmers and manufacturers all have something to say about the over-regulation they claim they feel from Washington, D.C., according to the Bowling Green Republican.

Here's what Kentucky farmers are worried about:

• progressively deteriorating climate causing extreme weather that either drowns their crops in floods or fries them through drought

• anti-immigrant crackdowns that leave them without workers to harvest the crops that survive

• recession and high unemployment that leaves them without customers to buy their crops

• commodity speculation by Wall Street that distorts the markets in favor of bankers and hurts producers like farmers

• rapacious developers gobbling up farmland and sending agricultural property taxes soaring beyond farmers' ability to pay

Some relief could be down the road - three bills moving through Washington are trying to weaken the regulations affecting business owners, farmers and manufacturers, according to Guthrie, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"Weaken" is the right word - all three repug bills would eliminate essential protections of the clean water and air, safe workers and strong infrastructure that farmers and other Kentucky businesses need to survive.

The bills are yet more proof if anyone needed it that repugs like Guthrie care only about make obscenely wealthy bankers and financial speculators even richer.

If Kentucky farmers and small businesses suffer as a consequence, well, thems the break in the lords-and-serfs economy repugs like Guthrie are working so hard to create.

Guthrie said he hoped that when Obama addressed a joint session of Congress last month, he would have put a moratorium on new regulations until after the 2012 election.

“I think people would benefit and the economy would benefit,” Guthrie said. “But (what the president did) is satisfying the people in Beverly Hills, Chicago and Boston, and that’s not going to grow jobs in Kentucky, and that’s my concern.”

The only concern of every single congressional repug is destroying the economy in order to prevent President Obama's re-election.

It's actually easy to figure out what laws, regulations and policies will help the economy and Kentuckians the most: it's the opposite of what repugs like Brett Guthrie propose.

Small Government at Work

Kudos to the Topeka, Kansas city council for boldly showing the rest of the country how repug/teabagger small government really works.

Think Progress:

Faced with their worst budget crises since the Great Depression, states and cities have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to cut costs. State and local governments have laid off teachers, slashed Medicaid funding, and even started unpaving roads and turning off streetlights.

But perhaps the most shocking idea to save money is being debated right now by the City Council of Topeka, Kansas. The city could repeal an ordinance banning domestic violence because some say the cost of prosecuting those cases is just too high.

This. Is. Fucking. Genius.

Nobel Peace Prize Winners Who Actually Achieved Peace

These three women have earned the Nobel Peace Prize the hard way: by working for it in the most hostile of environments. In any year, any one of them would blow other contenders of any sex out of the water.

So the Nobel fucking Prize Committee can just shove its dick back in its pants and stop condescending to human beings who outclass them by a mile.

The New York "Treating Women Like Retarded Children for 153 Years" Times:

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 was awarded on Friday to three campaigning women from Africa and the Arab world in acknowledgment of their nonviolent role in promoting peace, democracy and gender equality. The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa’s first elected female president — her compatriot, peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner.

They were the first women to win the prize since Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, who died last month, was named as the laureate in 2004.

Most of the recipients in the award’s 110-year history have been men and Friday’s decision seemed designed to give impetus to the cause for women’s rights around the world.

“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” said the citation read by Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister who heads the Oslo-based Nobel committee that chooses the winner of the $1.5 million prize.

In a subsequent interview, he described the prize as “a very important signal to women all over the world.”

That signal reads: No matter what you accomplish, if you are a woman your achievements will always be labeled "symbolic" and secondary to the "real" achievements of men.

Click here to see pictures and read the accomplishments of these amazing women.

Philly Shows How to Handle Protesters

Hey NYC, Sacramento and other cities harassing Occupy protesters: are you gonna let Philly make you look stupid?

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

So far, the City of Philadelphia is supportive of the protesters. (Mayor Nutter has informed them that tonight he will host a showing of Game 5 tonight of the Phillies-Cards series.) I even talked to a cop who shrugged and said, "These people are no threat to anyone. They have a point of view and they're expressing it." (He said he was more worried about the crowd they might get if the Phillies win tonight.)

Police Chief Charles Ramsey is having the First Amendment read regularly over the police radio, and reminds his officers that citizens have the right to record or take pictures of police activity.

And the city even blocks traffic for them and lets them march around City Hall during rush hour. So far, so good. We'll see.

***

Cleveland Johnson, 64, ("Cleveland, like the city") lives in Pennsauken NJ but grew up in Philadelphia. He said in the Sixties, he walked picket lines in Philadelphia for the integration of Girard College. "I was here when Rev. Martin Luther King came through," he said.

Then he pointed to the diverse group of young people.

"That was our time, and this is their time. They're standing up for what's right."

Whether the goal is maintaining order or deflating the publicity balloon, smart mayors and smart police officials know that cooperation works better than confrontation.

Here's to the Crazy Ones

Here's to the Crazy Ones

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. - Apple's 1984 commercial "Think Different"

Still think Occupy is dumb, embarassing and/or and counter-productive? Go down to one and see for yourself. Might surprise you.

That's what this former Obama campaign consultant did:

My first reaction to Occupy Wall Street was a sigh. Is the left in this country so anemic, I thought to myself, that we need a Canadian magazine to tell us to protest? It bothered me that the usual suspects—the dreadlocked, bandannaed bongo drummers—were the ones who answered the call and set up first camp in Zuccotti Park. Why couldn't some clean-cut, American-flag wavers—folks who wouldn't immediately, viscerally alienate mainstream America—be the ones who occupied Wall Street? Why did it have to be those people? I was angry at them; I was actually rooting for them to pack up and go home. I thought they would embarrass the left and further alienate the mainstream from the cause pragmatic progressives like me care about: getting money out of our politics and creating a more equitable society.

And then, like many pragmatic progressives, I watched them persist, I saw the unions join them, I saw nondreaded folks—and even some folks in suits—march along side them, and my attitude changed. Yesterday, I decided to attend the march from New York's City Hall to Wall Street.

I intended to be more of an observer than joiner, but on the train ride, it was hard to keep my reporter's hat on. I saw a group of older women, professors at the City University of New York, who were talking about the march, and I asked one of them if they were heading to Wall Street.

"We are! What about you?" she excitedly replied.

"That's where I'm heading too."

She turned to her colleagues and said, "Look at this guy: He looks like he works on Wall Street [I was coming from a meeting and wearing a blue blazer], but he's coming to the march too!"

A guy with a black hoodie and a chain wallet who looked like he might be an anarchist got on at the next stop; the woman ask him if he was heading to the march, and when he replied affirmatively, she pointed at me and said, "He's going to Wall Street too!" The guy must have thought I was going to work, because he glowered at me and said, "I hate people who work on Wall Street." The woman replied, "No, he's with us!" and I felt an undeniable surge of solidarity.

But the crowd disappoints him. It's full of nuts and freaks and one-issue cranks - everybody that the "respectable left" blames for the rise of the reichwing.

When I got home, I heard that Steve Jobs passed away. I was much more upset about his death than I expected to be. I'm not sure why but I immediately went on YouTube and looked up the "Think Different" commercial. My younger, more radical self hated the ad for exploiting Martin Luther King Jr. to sell computers, but I was moved this time around. "Here's to the crazy ones," the narrator reads, "…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

I thought about the drugged-out dude with the banjo: one of the crazy ones. And the dude with the upside-down flag and the one with the severed head and the anti-fracking obsessive and the people jonesing for a confrontation with the cops: all crazy ones. Crazy ones who sparked the first mass outpouring of left-wing activism in years, who have finally provided a visible counter to the free-market fanaticism of the tea party. Crazy ones who have reignited a conversation about class in America.

The pragmatic progressives like me didn't start this movement. We thought about the long-term impact for the left and the short-term electoral optics for Democrats. When the economy collapsed, we were quiet, the tea party spoke up, and the rage the country felt was directed toward government, not Wall Street. In short, we were afraid.

Thankfully, the crazy ones weren't.

And in spite of all I saw that I didn't like, there were clear signs that the movement is maturing, getting more organized, coalescing around a message: "We Are the 99 Percent." Like the protesters in Tahrir, there are clean-up crews keeping Zuccotti as spiffy as possible. Organizers are even enforcing message discipline by urging supporters on Twitter to shorten protest-related hashtags from #OccupyWallSt to #OWS.

Perhaps it's a natural evolution, but it also seems likely that the movement is changing because the seasoned organizers and pragmatists are working alongside the radical idealists who were there from the start.

The only reason those pragmatists are there is because the crazy ones took the first steps.

Find your nearest Occupy protest here. Go down there, talk to the crazies and make up your own mind. Bet you'll end up thanking them, if not joining them.

It's 13 months to Election Day - Do You Know What Your Secretary of State Is Up To?

Is she working hard to register as many people - including minority, elderly, handicapped and homeless people - to vote as possible? Is she extending early voting days and hours, opening new poll stations in under-served precincts?

Or is she rejecting long-time voters for infinitesimal failures to provide irrelevant documentation, cancelling early voting, charging registration-drive workers with crimes, making voting as difficult as possible for Democratic voters?

Does your state encourage everyone to vote, or stack obstacles as high as possible in front of Democratic constituencies?

In Ohio, it looked for a while like the latter, but the people - the 99-percenters - are changing it back to the former.

Brad Friedman:

Now THIS is what democracy looks like. Some really great news via Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress...

Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a sweeping bill intended to make it harder to vote in his states’ elections. Kasich’s anti-voter law drastically cuts back on early voting and erects new barriers for absentee and even for election day voters. Today, however, opponents of Kasich’s war on voting will submit over 300,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office — well over the 231,000 signatures necessary to suspend the law until it can be challenged in a referendum in November of 2012. If enough of the signatures are deemed valid, the practical effect of this petition will be that Kasich’s law will not be in effect during the 2012 presidential elections when Republicans hoped the law would weaken President Obama’s efforts to turn out early voters who support his reelection.

Ohio's new law would have overturned many of the improvements instituted in the Buckeye State by former Sec. of State Jennifer Brunner (D) after she took over from the corrupt J. Kenneth Blackwell (R) and his abhorrent, um, administration of the 2004 Presidential election there.

ThinkProgress' Tanya Somanader summarizes some of the new law's appalling restrictions on voting like this...

Doing his part in the GOP’s voter suppression campaign, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) signed a sweeping elections reform bill into law on July 1. Along with allowing poll workers to refuse telling voters where they can vote, the new law shortens the state’s early voting period, bans in-person early voting on Sundays, and prohibits boards of election from mailing absentee ballot requests to voters. These regressive restrictions mean that four in 10 voters in Columbus, Ohio alone will have to find a new the time, place, or way to cast their ballots. In fact, according to the Columbus Dispatch, the ballots that nearly a quarter million Columbus voters cast in 2008 would be banned under the new law

Thankfully, if the 300,000 signatures hold up as expected, none of those restrictions will affect the 2012 election in Ohio! The GOP will just have to come up with another way to keep voters from exercising their democratic franchise. And they will. Don't worry.

It should be noted here, however, that Kasich's voter suppression law could have been even worse, had it not been for the new Republican Sec. of State John Husted helping to buck his party's national trend, by advocating against a polling place Photo ID restriction that Ohio's GOP legislators had hoped, at one point, to institute as well.

Said Husted over the summer, after learning of the GOP's scheme to include a Photo ID restriction on voters [emphasis added]:

"I want to be perfectly clear, when I began working with the General Assembly to improve Ohio’s elections system it was never my intent to reject valid votes. I would rather have no bill than one with a rigid photo identification provision that does little to protect against fraud and excludes legally registered voters' ballots from counting."

We'll see what Husted does between here and November 2012. But for the moment, at least, he's earned much respect from The BRAD BLOG for the above.

The 300,000 voters who signed the petition to put Kasich's blatant voter suppression bill on the ballot, and those who organized the campaign, have earned our greatest respect as well. Thanks for standing up for American values, and not letting the bad guys push you around, Ohio!

Zandar:

But that's only one state. The efforts to reduce turnout are national, well-funded, and well-coordinated. Ohio proved that efforts to fight these restriction can work, but the bottom line is turnout and GOTV efforts in 2011 and especially 2012 are vital to preventing a complete Republican takeover. It's past time to examine what you can do where you live to help locally with these efforts. No matter what the GOP does, we have to get people out there to vote, period.

It's astonishing to think that in 2011, a major US political party is running on a platform to limit voting as much as possible. So far they haven't paid a political price for doing so.

That needs to change.

Frou-Frou Faitheists Just As Bad As Freakazoids

We atheists sometimes find it difficult to refute the "nice xians." You know, the ones with liberal politics, who don't demand women wear burkas, schools teach the bible or government force religion down people's throats.

But they are just as dangerous.

PZ Myers shows the way:

Alan Lightman is an excellent writer — I’ve enjoyed his fiction, like Einstein’s Dreams and his nonfiction, like Great Ideas in Physics. I’m afraid my interest has waned a bit with his recent offerings, though, because although beautifully written, they’ve become increasingly soft-focused and fuzzy and gentle, too absorbed in trying to be very delicately lyrical and thereby losing a lot of their edge. Lightman is openly atheist himself, but he’s wafting wispily into faitheism. If you haven’t read him, here’s a short sample: he has a new piece in Salon titled Does God exist?, and it’s a fine example of the faitheist oeuvre, simultaneously insisting that science and religion need to be reconciled and rebuking that philistine, Dawkins.

SNIP

So this is the best Lightman can do: noise and fluff and unevidenced assertions and wishful thinking. He’s simply endorsing a vacuous version of religion that is practiced by a few intellectuals, and ignoring religion as it is actually practiced.

Now here I could easily trot out a thousand examples of atrocities and horrors committed in the name of god, all guaranteed to make the participants in his little salon back away and shake their heads and insist that no, no, that’s not their religion…which is my point entirely. Religion is a fantasy, but their version is a spun-sugar fantasy of a fantasy, even more distantly removed from reality.

So let me show you a subtler example. This is something my wife and I spotted on the drive home today: it’s a grove of crosses erected on a low hill near Sauk Center, titled “Cemetery of the Holy Innocents”, where “each cross represents 40 babies whose lives are ended by abortion each day in the US”. It’s a religious hallucination, that somehow fetuses are equivalent to babies (like the ones pictured on the billboard), and that ending abortion will motivate a god to bless our country.

This is bad reasoning. It doesn’t matter whether you’re for or against abortion, this is religion poisoning people’s minds and driving them to stupidity and extremism: this is the thinking that leads people to scream and wave posters of bloody fetuses at women trying to get into women’s health clinics, that leads them to murder abortion doctors, that impels them to vote against their own economic interests in the name of “saving babies”.

This is religion as it is practiced in the real world, outside of the merlot-sipping world of academe. The New Atheism is not a reaction against that attenuated faith of the professor who goes to church on Sundays (although we do think that is goofy and nonsensical), but against the religion that gets women mistreated and gays strung up on barbed wire and schools filled with creationist lies and pushes incompetents like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann and George W. Bush to the pinnacle of the electoral struggle every four years. It’s the religion that says we need to defend a myth of a sacred holy kingdom of Israel rather than a secular nation of human beings; that worships an apocalyptic end to all things; that fills children with a fear of hell. It’s religion, the goddamned LIE, not religion the frilly poem some intellectual likes to ponder over brie and crackers.

But Lightman ignores the real conflict to complain about those New Atheists.
In my opinion, Dawkins has a narrow view of faith. I would be the first to challenge any belief that contradicts the findings of science. But, as I have said earlier, there are things we believe in that do not submit to the methods and reductions of science. Furthermore, faith, and the passion for the transcendent that often goes with it, have been the impulse for so many exquisite creations of humankind.

Consider the verses of the Gitanjali, the Messiah, the mosque of the Alhambra, the paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Should we take to task Tagore and Handel and Sultan Yusuf and Michelangelo for not thinking? Faith, in its broadest sense, is about far more than belief in the existence of God or the disregard of scientific evidence. Faith is the willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand. Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves. Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this strange and shimmering world.

And what about truth? Did Allah build the Alhambra, did Jesus paint the Sistine Chapel? Does Richard Dawkins, or any atheist, deny the existence of poetry or music or paintings or sculpture or dance? Faith, as portrayed here, is the lie that says human accomplishment, our love of beauty, the awesomeness of the universe, are somehow to be credited to phantasms and illusions — that they can’t be appreciated as the work of people or our understanding of reality, but that their profundity is to be found in our ignorance.

I so despise that attitude. It enables a greedy, rapacious religiosity that devours everything the human mind produces and claims religion as the source; it takes the hand and eye of Michaelangelo, the skill of his art and the labor of hard-earned practice, and grants all its profit to god…a god who was not there, did nothing, deserves nothing, and does not even bother to exist to enjoy the art.

Lightman the atheist even surrenders his personal experience to the defense of religion — he enrolls his world to serve in the legions of the church.

Then, one August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within 20 feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away.
But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I cannot explain what happened in that half-second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

How nice. How poetic.

But notice: every event was natural. The ospreys, the flight, the look — the perceptions were a product of his mind. The wonder he felt was real, as was the flight of the ospreys, and he felt a moment of real awe…and nowhere was a god made manifest, no miracle was invoked, no magic required. Why make it numinous and spiritual when reality provided all the power? Why throw the beauty of this moment into god’s imaginary corner when it belongs to physics and chemistry and biology and psychology?

Why betray the truth with delusions?

I don’t think Dawkins has too narrow a view of religion at all, but Lightman has too wide a view: he glibly sacrifices reality, even a lovely reality, on the altar of faith. I would not surrender one glorious moment of life to the pretense of religion, and I honestly do not understand why any scientist would.

Attributing all that is beautiful and good in the world to an invisible sky wizard is no more realistic or true than attributing it to the Easter Bunny.