Category: Politics

Snatching defeat from the Jaws of Victory

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Some people call the US Senate, “the World’s greatest deliberative body”. I call the US Senate, “A petri dish for narcissistic sociopaths,” thanks to the need for unanimous consent (of failing that a vote of 60 Senators) to proceed.

Theoretically, the Senate Democrats can change filibuster rules by a simple majority vote at the start of the next Congress.

Unfortunately, it appears that Harry Reid does not have the votes to make a meaningful reform:

Democrats don’t have the 51 votes they need in the Senate to change filibuster rules that could make it harder for the GOP minority to wield power in the upper chamber.

Lawmakers leading the charge acknowledge they remain short, but express optimism they’ll hit their goal.

“I haven’t counted 51 just yet, but we’re working,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a leading proponent of the so-called constitutional or “nuclear” option, in which Senate rules could be changed by a majority vote.

“We’re building the momentum right now,” Udall said. “It’s hard to say at this point, but I think it’s looking very good. The last two years have really helped coalesce people’s minds around the idea that we need to change the way we do business.”

The problem for Udall and other supporters of filibuster reform is that many veteran Democratic senators remember when the filibuster was a useful tool in their years in the minority.

In the tradition-bound Senate, these veterans aren’t thrilled with changing the upper chamber’s rules, particularly with the use of the controversial constitutional option — which has never been used to change the chamber’s rules.

It’s all well and good to respect Senate tradition, but part of that tradition was to use a bit of restraint, and using the filibuster for the little things.

It’s sh%$ like this that makes people voting for Republicans.

As repugnant as their agenda, and their values, are at least Republicans are willing to fight for them.

We Finally Find Some Vote Fraud

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And it’s a Republican:

Authorities in New Mexico are investigating an Albuquerque father who allegedly showed up at a polling place to vote on behalf of his 18-year-old son, news station KOB reported on Tuesday night.

According to Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, elections workers got suspicious when the silver-haired father showed up to vote and told them he was born in 1994. He was still allowed to cast a ballot, but the workers took down his license plate number when he left. Later, he showed up at a different location and voted under his own name, according to KOB.

………

The elder Pino later called Schwartz to tell him he had made a mistake by voting on behalf of his son, but said his son had given him permission. Both were registered as Republicans at the same Albuquerque address, according to KOB.

Seriously, how many times have I said that the ‘Phants are like the Soviets, in that you know what they are doing, because they accuse us of doing it?

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Oh to Be a Fly on the Wall

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I would love to dial into this conference call:

Karl Rove’s Crossroads outfit is holding a phone call for its big donors Thursday to sum up the race, said Stan Hubbard, a Minnesota media mogul and mega-donor. “Obviously, somebody made a mistake and didn’t do things right. There’s no question about that,” he said.

One would assume that at least a couple of these billionaires are not complete drooling morons, and they might be aware that any number of people have started to notice that Karl Rove, and the rest of the Republican “consultants” have more in common with bunko artists than they do with actual political operators.  (see here, here, and here)

I have the feeling that they will not be pleased with their return on investment.

Some Navel Gazing on My Part

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I’ve been fairly clear on this blog that I think that various actions of Obama renders him unfit to be President.*

I also understand that there are people who make arguments that could be called compelling to vote for him, most notably the Rude Pundit’s, “In the End, Vote for Obama Because F%$# Romney,”† (%$# mine)  because Mitt Romney is unfit to be President as well.

While I was in Ashland, I talked with my dad about this, and explained to him my position, and further explained that, living in Maryland, I had no moral dilemma, because my vote for President had not consequence.

He asked me what I would do if I lived in a battleground state, and I responded, “That way madness lies.”

My was flip, and it was a cop out. 

I simply don’t know what I would do if I lived in Ohio, or Virginia, or Florida,‡ or New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, or Colorado, or Iowa, and any statement that I might make would be self serving and shallow, and ultimately meaningless.

What I’m saying here is that, on this matter, if you think that I’m full of sh%$, then I’m full of shit, and if you think that I have a f%$#ing point, then I have a f%$#ing point. 

There are any number of times where I make an argument that is fact based, and I try my best to supply links to those facts, but this is not one of those times.

I think that I’m right, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

*Normalizing torture by refusing to prosecute, his war on whistle-blowing, his steadfast refusal to prosecute the malefactors of wealth, his assertions of a executive authority that makes Dick Cheney look mild, etc.
†H/t Cthulhu for the catch.
‡OK, I know what I would do if I lived in Florida, I would kill myself.

Krugman is On Fire

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His referring to the Republican Party as The Blackmail Caucus is prize:

But are we ready to become a country in which “Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” becomes a winning political argument? I hope not. By all means, vote for Mr. Romney if you think he offers the better policies. But arguing for Mr. Romney on the grounds that he could get things done veers dangerously close to accepting protection-racket politics, which have no place in American life.

I prefer to think of them as hostage-taking terrorists, but Krugman is eloquent and to the point.

Go Read.

And This is Why Targeted Wildcat Strikes are Necessary

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Because just about every official institution at every level is virulently anti-union. Case in point, the World Bank:

The World Bank has taken the extremely dubious science of deregulation one step further by creating a guide, known as the Doing Business report, that quantifies the regulatory “burden” that investors may face in various countries. The 2013 report was released this week.

Echoing the corporate “job creator” mythology of the Washington consensus, Doing Business encourages financiers and governments to erode public-interest protections, including safeguards for unions and workers. Labor groups say the publication’s warped views on regulation and worker protections effectively gives a statistical justification for leveraging economic aid or investment to pressure countries to privatize, deregulate and undermine unions.

Labor advocates are particularly critical of the section of the report that crystallizes these views, the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) which purports to measure labor policy “as it affects the hiring and redundancy of workers and the rigidity of working hours.” Despite the World Bank’s past assurances that its analysis of labor regulations won’t factor into the main rankings on business friendliness, critics fear that these data nonetheless filter into the report’s evaluations, and in turn imply labor laws essentially impede development.

This is not just the “technocrats” who have this opinion. It’s the overwhelming majority on the so-called “center-left”.

Whenever you hear a Democrat talking about “training” so that workers are ready for “the new economy”, they are saying that they think that labor unions are an anachronism, and they won’t do anything to support them.

We need a real Labo(u)r party in the United States, because the political establishment is hostile to unions.

I Bet Those Log Cabin Republicans Feel Stupid Now

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Yesterday, I said that the Log Cabin Republicans were idiots for believing that Mitt Rmoney would sign ENDA, which would outlaw workplace discrimination against gays.

Well if you are a gay Republican and think that Romney is going to protect your job from bigots, the news that he actively prevented sane sex parents from being listed on their children’s birth certificates:

It seemed like a minor adjustment. To comply with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in 2003, the state Registry of Vital Records and Statistics said it needed to revise its birth certificate forms for babies born to same-sex couples. The box for “father” would be relabeled “father or second parent,” reflecting the new law.

 But to then-Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed child-rearing by gay couples, the proposal symbolized unacceptable changes in traditional family structures.

 He rejected the Registry of Vital Records plan and insisted that his top legal staff individually review the circumstances of every birth to same-sex parents. Only after winning approval from Romney’s lawyers could hospital officials and town clerks across the state be permitted to cross out by hand the word “father” on individual birth certificates, and then write in “second parent,” in ink.

 ………

 Romney expressed similar beliefs during a speech in 2005 to socially conservative voters in South Carolina, as he was beginning to be viewed as a serious candidate for president.

 “Some gays are actually having children born to them,” he declared.”It’s not right on paper. It’s not right in fact. Every child has a right to a mother and father.”

Why on earth do gay Republicans think that Rmoney will protect them in the workplace if he wants to deny them basic rights as parents?

Seriously, Mitt Romney just sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.

BTW, as a note, Murray Waas wrote this, and I’ve always been impressed by his journalism, and he got this story despite attempts to cover this up:

In a preliminary response this month, the Department of Public Health withheld most of the documents because they reflected conversations between lawyers working for the state and “are therefore exempt from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege.” The Globe subsequently obtained many of the documents from a source who requested anonymity.

Here’s a piece of advice if Murray comes calling about a story, tell him the truth, because he’ll get it anyway.

Murray Waas is now officially on my list of “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off”.

So Glad that I LIve in Maryland, Part LXIX

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Despicable beyond belief

How do you justify justify the targeting and killing of an American citizen for whom there have been no allegations of terrorism? Why You blame his father, of course:

How does Team Obama justify killing him?

 The answer Gibbs gave is chilling:

ADAMSON: …It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process, without trial. And, he’s underage. He’s a minor.

 GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.


 Again, note that this kid wasn’t killed in the same drone strike as his father. He was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks. Gibbs nevertheless defends the strike, not by arguing that the kid was a threat, or that killing him was an accident, but by saying that his late father irresponsibly joined al Qaeda terrorists. Killing an American citizen without due process on that logic ought to be grounds for impeachment. Is that the real answer? Or would the Obama Administration like to clarify its reasoning? Any Congress that respected its oversight responsibilities would get to the bottom of this.

I’m so glad that the Electoral College means that my vote does not count.

My only question is who I write in.

It’s Called Projection………………

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The reason that Republicans are pushing voter ID is straightforward, they don’t want n*****s to vote. The descendants of “Bull”Connor run the party now.

But there is another element to this, that of projection: The Republicans believe that Democrats engage in vote fraud, because they themselves routinely engage in vote fraud, largely through the absentee ballot process.

In Michigan, we have Thaddeus McCotter’s staffers charged with voter fraud over his crudely forged reelection petitions. And some context:

This incident perfectly highlights the dirty little secret about election fraud. Election fraud overwhelmingly happens on the campaign side, not the voter side. It’s far easier – and more rewarding – to cheat while working from within the system than it is to commit in-person voter fraud. The GOP is legislating against cases of voter fraud in which a person would have to give someone else’s name at the correct polling place in order to falsely vote once; meanwhile a Republican Congressman and his staff fabricated 1,756 signatures so that he could run illegally.

And this is the truth about so many Republican policies: rules and regulations are put in place to scapegoat people who aren’t causing problems. In Florida, drug testing welfare recipients showed that less than 3% of those receiving welfare were using drugs illegally, while that discriminatory testing cost the state nearly $120,000. Mitt Romney has evoked the “47% of people [who] pay no income tax,” conveniently ignoring that collecting income tax from all of those households would bring in less than than the president’s Buffett Rule which would slightly raise taxes for the country’s wealthiest. Reagan’s racist welfare queen myth still looms large in the conservative narrative, despite the fact that the Bush-era bailout for corrupt and irresponsible banks cost far more than years of welfare programs.

And then we have Western Massachusetts, the Republican part of the state, not so far where I went to college, where voter fraud in East Longmeadow is so blatant that the state was compelled to take over the election:

There’s just one Republican primary in East Longmeadow next month.

Marie Angelides and Jack Villamaino are vying for a Massachusetts State Representative seat.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin says his office will be running the election. That’s because fraud has found way into the race.

Experts say in a State Representative race, there’s often 30-45 absentee ballots that are filed. This summer, there’s been more than 400.

Galvin confirms that hundreds of the applications were never filled out by voters; somebody forged the applications and even changed the political parties of Democrats to Republican so they would receive an absentee ballot in the mail. The Boston Globe reports it’s widely believed the Villamaino’s campaign and an East Longmeadow clerk’s office employee are behind the scheme.

“I have had a substantial amount of experience in running elections. I cannot recall a single instance where i saw such a brazen effort to steal the rights or identities of voters, to change their party enrollments and in effect to steal their ballots,” Galvin said.

“I’m disheartened to see that in the political process,” former State Representative and District Court Judge Robert Howarth said.

You notice just how much easier it is to commit voter fraud with absentee ballots?

If Villamaino’s had been a bit less greedy, no one might have noticed.

And then again, there is Palm Beach, Florida, the home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and the epicenter of Republican vote fraud, where Virginia based Strategic Allied Consultants, one of Nathan Sproul’s network of voting fraud shops:

The Republican Party of Florida is dumping a firm it paid more than $1.3 million to register new voters, after Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher flagged 106 “questionable” registration applications turned in by the contractor this month.

Bucher asked the state attorney’s office to review the applications “in an abundance of caution” because she said her staff had questions about similar-looking signatures, missing information and wrong addresses on the forms.

The state GOP hired Strategic Allied Consultants of Glen Allen, Va., for “voter registration services” and get-out-the-vote activities. The firm got identical payments of $667,598 in July and August.

“When we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County, we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida,” said RPOF Executive Director Mike Grissom late Tuesday.

An employee of the company said no one was available to comment Tuesday evening.

Bucher said some of the applications she questioned were for new voter registrations while others were for address or party affiliation changes or requests for new voter cards, Bucher said.

Seriously, if the DoJ seriously went after real voter fraud, half the Republican consultants in the nation would be under indictment.

It’s like the old days of the cold war:  You knew what the USSR was doing, because they would accuse us of doing it.

Do Your F%$#ing Job

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Yet another reason not to link to the AP, they have decided that if you lie enough, they won’t cover it, because it’s too much work:

An editor for the Associated Press said in a panel discussion on Wednesday that during coverage of the Republican primaries, fact-checkers for the organization would have to limit themselves to a “quota” of misstatements by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) during debates.

According to the Washington Post, the AP’s Jim Drinkard confessed that the sheer volume of factually inaccurate assertions, dubious claims and stretchings of the truth threatened to “overload” the stories of the debates.

“We had to have a self-imposed Michele Bachmann quota in some of those debates,” Drinkard told the audience at the National Press Club on Wednesday. Otherwise, Bachmann would have become the story. Of all the Republican candidates who ran, said Drinkard, “Often she was just more prone to statements that just didn’t add up.

It’s called doing your f%$#ing job. When a politician lies, or a politician is so f%$#ing delusional that they cannot separate fact from fiction, this is news.

If you don’t want to cover the news, go and work at your parents’ dry cleaning shop.

If You F%$# Your Base Long and Hard Enough, They Won’t Be Your Base Anymore

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Attempts by mainstream Democrats to turn education into another private sector profit center from which they can extract campaign donations is starting to piss off teachers:

The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers’ unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Over the past few years, even as Republicans have led efforts to thwart unions, lawmakers previously considered solid supporters of teachers’ unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.

As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers’ unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.

In Illinois, the top two recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association through June 30 were Republicans, including a State House candidate who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.

………

“The notion that just because you’re a Democrat” you can take the teachers’ unions for granted has changed, said Jim Reed, director of government relations for the Illinois Education Association.

As teachers grapple with a reform agenda backed by hedge funds and large philanthropic donors and championed by the Obama administration as well as some conservative Republicans, the unions are navigating a delicate political landscape where they increasingly pursue friends in unlikely places.

There are way too many Democrats, including Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who think that handing our schools off to hedge funds is a good thing.

It’s not.

The creation of the educational-industrial complex, much like the creation of the prison-industrial complex, and their granddaddy, the military-industrial complex, are a disaster for our society.

Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle Is Worse Than I Thought

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Due diligence, what due diligence?

I’ve always thought of her as a partisan hack, but it turns out that it’s worse than that. She is yet another bit of Koch brothers bought and paid for AstroTurf:

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/ The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

There is a line between being a hack, and being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.

If you hire someone while they are paid agents of an entity that they cover, you are making the integrity of your news organization a joke.

I have made the same argument about NPR’s religion reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, who interestingly enough is the sister of the multi-millionaire owner of MCardle’s employer The Atlantic, David Bradley. (The world is weird that way)

There are some good people at The Atlantic, but even before these revelations, it was clear that giving McArdle a megaphone was a blight on the magazine.