Governor Christie — What a Guy!

December 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Don’t know if you’ve been following the saga of the George Washington Bridge lane-closure which, for one week, created a mist of automobile exhausted particulate matter all over Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Rachel Maddow, at least, has been bringing us up to date every evening.  Quite a bit in the print papers today, my favorite of which by Michael Powell in the NY Times begins thusly:

Gov. Chris Christie is a wonderfully primal New Jersey politician who embraces three truths: Transparency is for squares, bluster is your friend and fingerprints are a pain.

Richard Cohen, at WaPo unaccountably decides Christie can’t have known, much less ordered the lane closure, but has taken a body blow, nonetheless:

…the damage has been done. Christie’s all-but-declared presidential campaign has taken a hit. His Joisey bona fides — a certain swagger and cocksureness — have been highlighted. (No one would cast Jimmy Stewart for this role.) Christie is a man of rare political ability, but he has a short temper and the affect of a bully. Worse, he unaccountably lacks affection for the media and sometimes shows it. Lots of politicians play hardball. Christie plays beanball.

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Rich Buffet of Right Wing News Outlets

December 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I do not believe this can be said of vaguely liberal, much less “left” news outlets.”

Since the advent of the Internet, a diverse constellation of conservative news outlets has sprung up across the country, creating a rich buffet for GOP-loving readers-and a major logistical challenge for the advertisers hoping to reach them.

And because this is so:

Salem Communications, a public media company based in Camarillo (Ventura County) outside Los Angeles, announced this week that it is purchasing Twitchy, a blog run by conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, for an undisclosed sum.

The Twitchy acquisition adds to Salem’s growing Internet portfolio, which includes conservative opinion sites (such as Townhall.com and HotAir.com) and Christian faith sites (such as Christianity.com and Godtube.com).

SF Gate

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Did the Bush Administration Kill the GOP Seed Crop?

December 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Interesting opinion piece by Rachel Maddow in the Washington Post.

The collapse of national leadership prospects for the Republican Party is one of the greatest political failures and most important legacies of George W. Bush. Barack Obama looks less likely to repeat that fate, but it depends on a strong grove of nationally viable Democrats starting to grow now. The crescendo of attention to Elizabeth Warren is a healthy part of that process, as is the growing national interest in such diverse Democrats as Sherrod Brown, Claire McCaskill, Cory Booker, Wendy Davis, Martin O’Malley, Deval Patrick, Andrew Cuomo and Amy Klobuchar.

Inside the White House, the task of growing one’s own successors must seem like one of the less pressing items on the president’s long daily to-do list. But the previous administration’s trail of scorched earth and exiles has curtailed the prospects for the Republican Party and governing conservatism more profoundly than almost anything that administration pursued in terms of policy. It is a cautionary tale that Democrats and the Obama White House should heed sooner rather than later.

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At Last, A Republican Bill to Support

December 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Political momentum to keep a ban on cellphone calls during flights gained momentum Monday as lawmakers said it would be crazy to allow them.

Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) became the second lawmaker after Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to offer legislation to keep the ban in place.

“Let’s face it, airplane cabins are by nature noisy, crowded, and confined,” said Shuster, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “For those few hours in the air with 150 other people, it’s just common sense that we all keep our personal lives to ourselves and stay off the phone.”

The bills follow a flood of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, which announced last month that it would look into ending the ban.

… “For passengers, being able to use their phones and tablets to get online or send text messages is a useful in-flight option,” Shuster said. “But if passengers are going to be forced to listen to the gossip in the aisle seat, it’s going to make for a very long flight.”

Shuster and Alexander, who both face primary challenges in 2014, say they are responding to popular opinion.

“Stop and think about what we hear now in airport lobbies from those who wander around shouting personal details into a microphone: babbling about last night’s love life, bathroom plans, next week’s schedule, orders to an assistant, arguments with spouses,” Alexander said.

“Imagine this noise while you travel, restrained by your seatbelt, unable to escape,” the senator continued. “The FCC commissioners will earn the gratitude of the two million Americans who fly each day by deciding: text messages, yes; conversations, no.”

From the Hill

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Immigration Activists End Fast

December 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Follow up on Eliseo Medina fast in Washington D.C. trying to get the Republicans to respond to the actual problems of America.

“Longtime labor leader, Eliseo Medina,  and two other advocates of an immigration overhaul ended their water-only fasts on Tuesday in a tent on the National Mall, the 22nd day of an effort to press the House to take up legislation on the issue.

Cristian Avila, 23, a student from Arizona, and Dae Joong Yoon, 43, the executive director of a Korean immigrant organization in Los Angeles, also ended their fasts. Lisa Sharon Harper of Sojourners, a religious group, ended a three-week fast in which she had been drinking juice.

In a statement, the activists said they had “succeeded in raising awareness about families being ripped apart by deportation.” But they acknowledged that the protest had not produced any action in the House. They said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio had not responded to invitations to meet with them.”

Immigration Medina

From Miriam Pawel at the SF Chronicle:

…the lessons of the farmworkers’ struggle illustrate the strategic importance of Medina’s fast.

Medina’s fast has forced the immigration debate back into the public discourse just as the issue was slipping out of sight. Over the past three weeks, political, labor and civic leaders have stopped by the tent where Medina fasts, a stone’s throw from the Capitol. On Friday, the president and Michelle Obama dropped in for a 40-minute chat.

The contrast between the sacrifice of the fasters and the intransigence of their adversaries generates outrage that helps build public support. When you sacrifice, Chavez often said, you inspire others to help

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Act. Fast.

November 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Eliseo Medina who cut his organizing teeth with Cesar Chavez’  United Farmworkers is undertaking a Gandhian like fast, in the manner of his early teacher.

Saying he will fast until his body gives out, Mr. Medina has lost 16 pounds; his face, sprouting a sparse beard, looks sunken and gray. But he perks up when he talks about the millions of immigrants — including many members of his organization, the Service Employees International Union, and a few of his own relatives — who are living in the country without legal papers.

Eliseo Medina on 11th day of fast for immigration reform.

Eliseo Medina on 11th day of fast for immigration reform.

“Whatever little sacrifice I am making doesn’t compare with the sacrifice these immigrants made when they came to this country for a better life and find themselves living in the shadows and being exploited,” Mr. Medina said, in cadences echoing Mr. Chavez. He wears a brown sweatshirt with the slogan “Act. Fast.” and spends his days in a padded lawn chair, quelling hunger by praying, napping, plotting political strategy and receiving a parade of visitors — including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday morning.

…on Friday, now 67 years old, in a white tent just below the Capitol on the National Mall in the 11th day of a water-only fast he hopes will “touch the heart” of the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, and make him act on immigration.

NY Times

Along with Medina several others are fasting:

Lisa Sharon Harper, director of mobilizing for the Christian social justice group Sojourners says,

“I don’t fast out of worry, I fast out of hope.”

Along with Harper and Medina, there are three other main fasters: Dae Joong Yoon of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, Cristian Avila of Mi Familia Vota and Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

Huffington Post

Of course Speaker Boehner has not yet revealed the presence of a heart:

When Medina asked whether Boehner could meet that day, he was met with a no.

“What about tomorrow?” he said. “Next week?”

Brittany Bramell, Boehner’s spokeswoman, said she wasn’t able to give an answer.

She simply told him: “I can take your concerns and pass them along.”

Ω

You can join the fasters at Fast4Families.org  — perhaps you will be the tipping point to a show of Boehner’s heart.

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GOP War on the Poor

October 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Rolling Stone magazine, read mostly for its coverage of music (and I don’t mean classical) keeps a good eye on American politics as well.  Matt Taibbi regularly writes, as well as John Knefel, Bill McKibben, and others.

From the November issue here is a good piece by Elizabeth Drew: The GOP’s War on the Poor.

The GOP is pushing to decimate food-stamp programs, punishing the most vulnerable just out of sheer spite

The way the program to provide the poor with the bare minimum of daily nutrition has been handled is a metaphor for how the far right in the House is systematically trying to take down the federal government. The Tea Party radicals and those who either fear or cultivate them are now subjecting the food-stamp program to the same kind of assault they have unleashed on other settled policies and understandings that have been in place for decades. Breaking all manner of precedents on a series of highly partisan votes, with the Republicans barely prevailing, the House in September slashed the food-stamp program by a whopping $39 billion and imposed harsh new requirements for getting on, or staying on, the program. The point was to deny the benefit to millions.

And it’s not just Rolling Stone or Elizabeth Drew who think so.  Governor John Kasich (R) of Ohio has an identical warning

I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor,” Kasich told the New York Times in a story published Tuesday. “That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.” “You know what?” he added. “The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.

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Petard Hoisting in the GOP

September 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Krugman is having a morbid chuckle, as many of us are, at the Rove strategy…

…this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.

But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.

So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?

Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.

I would just say that the roots of this are deeper than the Southern Strategy of Nixon.  He and his advisers picked up and approved of behavior that was already obtuse and provocative in the same regions of the country, only then those who practiced it called themselves Democrats.  Look into the budget hostage example of Harry Byrd in the 1960s.  The Southern Strategy was simply to say, you can keep behaving the way you are, just come on over to my house.

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GOP ♥ Financial Fraud

February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

From Krugman:

… the consumer protection bureau serves a vital function. But as I said, Senate Republicans are trying to kill it.

How can they do that, when the reform is already law and Democrats hold a Senate majority? Here as elsewhere, they’re turning to extortion — threatening to filibuster theappointment of Richard Cordray, the bureau’s acting head, and thereby leave the bureau unable to function. Mr. Cordray, whose work has drawn praise even from the bankers, is clearly not the issue. Instead, it’s an open attempt to use raw obstructionism to overturn the law.

What Republicans are demanding, basically, is that the protection bureau lose its independence. They want its actions subjected to a veto by other, bank-centered financial regulators, ensuring that consumers will once again be neglected, and they also want to take away its guaranteed funding, opening it to interest-group pressure. These changes would make the agency more or less worthless — but that, of course, is the point.

How can the G.O.P. be so determined to make America safe for financial fraud, with the 2008 crisis still so fresh in our memory? In part it’s because Republicans are deep in denial about what actually happened to our financial system and economy. On the right, it’s now complete orthodoxy that do-gooder liberals, especially former Representative Barney Frank, somehow caused the financial disaster by forcing helpless bankers to lend to Those People.

In reality, this is a nonsense story that has been extensively refuted; I’ve always been struck in particular by the notion that a Congressional Democrat, holding office at a time when Republicans ruled the House with an iron first, somehow had the mystical power to distort our whole banking system. But it’s a story conservatives much prefer to the awkward reality that their faith in the perfection of free markets was proved false.

Filed under Corruption, Economy Tagged with , , ,

Virginia GOP Election Rigging Unlikely For Now

January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Rachel Maddow has been hammering for serveral days on the Virginia GOP dirty trick of re-setting the way presidential electoral votes are apportioned.  Looks like it won’t go through. Now.

Virginia is the first of several states carried in November by President Barack Obama where the Republican-controlled legislature is considering measures to replace the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes. The Virginia legislation survived a state Senate subcommittee on a 3-3 vote this week, but two Republicans on the full committee said Friday they would oppose the bill when it comes up for a committee vote next week, effectively killing it. And should it clear the legislature, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Friday he opposes it. Spokesman J. Tucker Martin said McDonnell, a Republican, “believes Virginia’s system works just fine.”

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