Last night Ed Schultz hosted his show in front of a huge live crowd in Wisconsin, the site of today’s recall election. The raucous crowd actually added a very enjoyable element to Schultz’s proceedings, as they loudly cheered and booed various statements made by Schultz and his guests throughout the show. MORE...Howie P.S.: John Nichols visits with ED in Madison, WI.
Exposing Rob McKenna's conservative record in Washington.H/t to Darryl.
(Click on image enlarge) That's sweat, not tears, coming off Boehner's face.That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.
That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.
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Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.
These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending — and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.
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Current House leaders, mindful that their ’95 counterparts’ bravado backfired, constantly reiterate that they are “not looking for a government shutdown,” as Paul Ryan puts it. They seem to believe that if they repeat this locution often enough it will inoculate them from blame should a shutdown happen anyway — when, presumably, they are not looking.
Maybe, but no less an authority than Dick Armey, these days a leading Tea Party operative, thinks otherwise. Back in ’95, as a Gingrich deputy, he had been more bellicose than most in threatening a shutdown, as Bill Clinton recounts in his memoirs. But in 2006, Armey told a different story when reminiscing to an interviewer, Ryan Sager: “Newt’s position was, presidents get blamed for shutdowns, and he cited Ronald Reagan. My position was, Republicans get blamed for shutdowns. I argued that it is counterintuitive to the average American to think that the Democrat wants to shut down the government. They’re the advocates of the government. It is perfectly logical to them that Republicans would shut it down, because we’re seen as antithetical to government.”
Armey’s logic is perfect indeed, but logic is not the rage among his ideological compatriots this year. Otherwise, the Tea Party radicals might have figured out the single biggest difference between 1995 and 2011 — the state of the economy. Last time around, America was more or less humming along with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent. This time we are still digging out of the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression, with an unemployment rate of 9 percent and oil prices on the rise. To even toy with shutting down the government in this uncertain climate is to risk destabilizing the nascent recovery, with those in need of the government safety net (including 43 million Americans on food stamps) doing most of the suffering. MORE...
The media are full of commentary on President Obama's "failure of leadership." There is some truth to the critique but not in the way the charge is typically made.Howie P.S.: I think it's a mistake to say the Tea Party is "winning." They are just the willing pawns (mouthpieces, if you prefer) for the extremely wealthy and powerful interests who are behind them.Obama is not at fault for his budget proposals. But any fair examination of the news suggests that he is in danger of losing control of the national narrative again, just as he did during the stimulus and health-care battles.
In his State of the Union address, Obama made a good case that budget cutting is too small an agenda and that this is also a time for more government - yes, more government - in areas that would expand opportunities and strengthen the economy. That argument has been entirely drowned out. If politics is reduced to a crabbed and crabby accountants' war, Obama loses. The country will, too.MORE...
Former Vermont Governor, presidential candidate, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington, DC, Jan. 5. Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean discussed President Obama's choice for his new chief of staff, the Tea Party's likely impact in the 2012 presidential election, and his current role in the Democratic party at a Jan. 5 Monitor breakfast. MORE...
“I think in addition to a bad economy, the Tea Party arose out of a discomfort with the demographic shift going on in this country,” Dean said.
According the Dean, the country is shifting to a group of ethnic and social minorities, and this bothers members of the Tea Party, which he says consists mostly of white people 55 years and older.
“Obama was elected overwhelmingly by voters under 35 years of age,” Dean said. “Obama has not lost any voters to the Tea Party.”
The advantage that President Obama and Democrats have in general, according to Dean, is a younger generation with views more in line with the Democratic Party.
“The problem with Republicans in general is that they offend the younger generation with their attacks on gays and immigrants,” Dean said. “I don’t have much advice for Republican (presidential contenders) other than to abandon their right-wing social agenda.”
Dean also offered his opinions of Sarah Palin and her potential candidacy in 2012.
“Sarah Palin stands for the middle class of the 1950s, when things were much more black and white,” Dean said. “It is interesting that she is a turn off to most women but attractive to older Republican men.”
Despite this, Dean said he cautions most Democrats who write Palin off as a weak contender.
“If she can win a major party’s nomination, she could win the race,” Dean said. MORE...
Denver Nicks (The Daily Beast):How did you feel on November 3, 2010?
I thought it was really telling that the day after the election the Republicans started talking about repealing the Volcker rule, which was the thing that got passed over the summer that banned proprietary trading by the banks. That perfectly encapsulated everything the Tea Party was about. The Tea Party was all this political energy that was directed at the bailouts. It was a lot of people that were angry about government spending. The Volcker Rule was specifically designed to prevent bailouts. The whole idea is to prevent federally insured banks from engaging in risky gambling behavior. So the day after all this anti-bailout fervor wins an election, the first thing they do is give this big favor to Wall Street, or at least they tried to. I think that summed up perfectly what the Tea Party was all about. They captured the anger, but they’re going to use it for the opposite of what these people think they’re getting.
So are they just getting the wool pulled over their eyes? Are these people stupid? What’s going on here?
A lot of people that I’ve talked to in the Tea Party, their experience with government regulation is something like: they own a hardware store and they have to deal with a building inspector, or a tax collector, or an EPA inspector or something like that. It’s some minor financial nuisance, and that’s what their idea of regulation is, and they see it as just something taking money out of the pockets of ordinary people. So they conflate that with the idea of policing Wall Street. They just think that it’s the same thing, and they’re completely different universes. I just don’t think they understand it, because the one thing that’s easy to understand is that it’s incredibly hard to understand. MORE...
Yale Daily News:While Dean said he respects and trusts President Obama’s intellect, he said he is disappointed with how Obama and his staff have handled important political issues, particularly health care reform and the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”
He said he thinks the health care measures were not radical enough, and were very similar to a plan moderate Republican Governor Mitt Romney implemented in Massachusetts in 2006.
“So what people call ‘Obama care’ really should be ‘Romney care’,” he said.
Dean said that he thinks Obama’s attempt to reach an accord with Congress over “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is doomed, especially now that the Republicans have taken the House of Representatives in the recent election. Using Lyndon Johnson’s legislative achievements as examples, Dean argued that the president needs to ignore or bypass Congress sometimes. MORE...
A Tea Party Patriot tries to explain how our freedoms are in jeopardy.H/t to Billy Bragg.
With just over two weeks to go until Election Day, the biggest issue to emerge this election cycle is the potential impact that the rowdy and radical-right national movement that calls itself "The Tea Party" will have on the November 2, 2010 mid-term elections: win, lose or draw. That will be the big story this Election Day.
In truth, it is remarkable that this grassroots populist uprising is viewed as a new phenomenon, when these types of movements occur regularly in our system, on both the left and the right. It is equally noteworthy that anyone should either worry or believe -- depending on whether they agree or disagree with the Tea Party movement's agenda -- that this populist insurgency will, in the long run, make any real difference in Washington. It will not.
While I have no skills for prognostication, I can read history. And I understand how Washington works. Regardless of whether it is good or bad, the fact is that modern populist outrages follow a pattern, and all suffer similar fates. It will be the same for the Tea Party Movement -- just wait a few years. MORE...
David Lightman (McClatchy Newspapers) with video (03:07):Half a billion dollars from independent groups with strong but unofficial connections to Republicans and Democrats is flooding into congressional campaigns across the country this year, according to a study released Monday.
The Center for Public Integrity found that Republican-allied groups are likely to outspend their Democratic-oriented rivals by 3 to 2, and maybe even by 2 to 1. The center is a respected nonprofit, nonpartisan source of investigative journalism devoted to making institutional power transparent and accountable.
While big money in politics is hardly new, there never have been sums of this magnitude in midterm elections. The Center for Responsive Politics, another independent research group, estimates that in 2006, the last nonpresidential federal election year, independent interests spent about $300 million.
Further, never have so many donors been unidentified before elections; so far only about one-third of donors have been identified, the Center for Public Integrity study says. MORE...
AMERICAblog: Frank Rich has an interesting column that draws a nice line between the idiocy of Christine O'Donnell (our friend the Handmaiden) to the mega-billionaires who fund it, to what he calls a "coup" ... in print.Howie P.S.: Here's a taste from Rich's column...
The column is excellent, a nice walk through the garden of logic that gets him from A to B to C. Do check it out. MORE...
Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.
Matt Taibbi:How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster---"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it. MORE...
"In every sense the Tea Party is able to get away with things that no group of color could ever possibly do," says Tim Wise, author of the new book Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity. While the Tea Party wails about socialism, Wise notes, they want to cut social services that they perceive as benefits for people of color--and the Obama administration's "race-neutral" politics aren't helping anyone.
Wise joins Laura in studio for a special interview about his new book, and how racial bias infects every level of people's lives, from infant mortality rates to unemployment, college admissions and graduation rates to treatment in hospitals. MORE...
"The Tea Party is a media spectacle to make working people believe they have power," Joe Bageant said during an interview on RT, a global television network based in Moscow, Russia.
On The Alyona Show, host Alyona Minkovski starts the interview by pointing out that 43 million Americans live below the poverty line. "For some reason," she says, "in this country, there's always been an assumption that the poor, or the underclass, are the non-white people that live in this country, and the fact that there has always been a white underclass has become taboo."
The Rude One, with audio (12:52):This week, the Rude Pundit and Stephanie Miller had much unchaste fun with Delaware's Christine O'Donnell.Howie P.S.: And the chance that "moderate Republicans" will push back on the Republican tea-baggers.
Hidden at the root of the Tea Party movement are the issues of sex and race, especially interracial sex and the resulting “pollution” of the white “stock.” The movement has sought to keep conventional “culture wars” issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research at an arms-length’s-distance from its organizing efforts. Knowing full well that the majority of Americans reject conservative Christian values, the Tea Party has campaigned on fighting personal taxes, the federal debt and the “tyranny” of Washington.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party’s appeal to traditional Christian values, its unstated secret agenda, was publicly exposed by the O'Donnell and Paladino revelations. At the heart of this unstated agenda are white Christian America’s deep-seated fears of sex, race and interracial "pollution." MORE...
