Monthly Archives: February 2010

Thursday Open Thread

As of writing this, I’m still waiting for this latest snowstorm, the “snowicane” to start. It sure was nice of the snowstorm to hold off until everyone gets to work to start! Today’s open thread is a “governors behaving badly” version of your open thread. Let’s roll!

It looks like the Gov. David Paterson bombshell is starting to drop now. The first article was about Paterson’s driver who had a history of violence against women. This next article details how Paterson may have intervened in his driver’s domestic violence case:

Last fall, a woman went to court in the Bronx to testify that she had been violently assaulted by a top aide to Gov. David A. Paterson, and to seek a protective order against the man.

In the ensuing months, she returned to court twice to press her case, complaining that the State Police had been harassing her to drop it. The State Police, which had no jurisdiction in the matter, confirmed that the woman was visited by a member of the governor’s personal security detail.

Then early this month, days before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

Paterson has asked the NYAG to investigate (his political rival). Nevada governor Jim Gibbons sure is lucky some other governor is overshadowing his antics!

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons has acknowledged that a woman to whom he sent hundreds of text messages several years ago accompanied him on his recent trip to Washington, D.C., where he attended the National Governors Association conference over the weekend.

…

On Tuesday, the governor issued a statement to the station, saying Karrasch traveled with him to the nation’s capital but the state did not pay for her expenses.

…

Gibbons told reporters he had paid for Karrasch’s trip, keeping a promise he made to take her to the conference, according to the Las Vegas Sun. He said he and Karrasch live near each other and she was given a ride home as a courtesy.

Gibbons, who is divorcing first lady Dawn Gibbons, acknowledged in 2008 that he sent 867 text-messages to Karrasch over a six-week period the previous year. The governor reimbursed the state $130 for the text messages and issued a publicly apology. He denied the messages were “love notes.”

I guess Gibbons keeps some his promises, except “love, honor and cherish until death do part.”

Rasmussen Polls Delaware

Rasmussen is a Republican outfit that skews both its sampling and its questions towards Republicans. They have just released a new Delaware poll, conducted on Monday with a sampling size of 500 (which is probably average for Delaware) but the margin of error is high (4.5%) with this poll. No other internals are available at this time for review (as to partisan or ideological breakdowns), which is a red flag in the polling world.

So with those boulders of salt, here are their results for the First State.

* President Obama has a 51% approval rating, versus a 48% disapproval rating.

* Governor Markell has a 61% approval rating, versus a 37% disapproval rating.

* Castle leads Coons 53% to 32%. 8% prefer some other candidate (O’Donnell?? Anti-Coons or Pro-Biden sentiment?) and 8% are unsure.

This feels about right to me, in that I feel the Castle-Coons race is a 50-40 race at the moment, with Castle as the favorite. I really want to see the partisan breakdown here, though.

* Coons has a 43% favorability rating, versus a 35% unfavorability rating. 22% don’t know who he is or are not sure.

* Castle has a 65% favorability rating, versus a 30% unfavorability rating. 4% live in caves.

* Here is an interesting nugget about the economy and Delawarean’s personal finances: 82% rate their personal or family finances either fair, good or excellent. Only 16% rate them as poor. And 2% live in caves. Yet, 51% feel their finances have gotten worse over the past year. How is that possible? 18% feel they have gotten better, and 28% say they are the same, and 2% live in caves. I think media perception drives views on the economy. Do you ever notice commercials on TV and radio that continue to say “In tough times as these….” We are officially in a recovery, the recession is over, the economy is growing and the unemployment rate is finally falling again, and yet the President from 24 on the Allstate commercial thinks we haven’t bottomed out yet.

Fiscal Conservatives Don’t Want To Cut Spending

Conservatives do a lot of posturing about the deficit, which they only discovered the existence of on January 20, 2009. I remember the good ol’ days of the early Bush presidency when the problem was the surplus. Well, conservatives are apparently extremely upset with the deficit now, but taxes are still bad (in fact we should cut more!). They believe the solution to the deficit problem is to cut spending. So, one polling organization, the American National Election Study asked conservatives what they wanted to cut (via Salon). Unsurprisingly, almost nothing:

Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

Everyone wants to cut “waste, fraud and abuse.” The problem is, no one can ever name what specific waste, fraud or abuse there is, unless it’s someone else’s program. Perhaps if they were serious about budget cutting they have to use the trick you use with kids (one cuts, the other picks), Democrats will agree to a program cut like Republicans claim to want as long as they get to pick it. Sounds fair to me.

NPR Destroys Republican Talking Point

The media coverage of the health care reform debate has been quite frustrating because the coverage has not covered the substance of the debate. It’s been the typical “on one hand, on the other hand” type of coverage which has allowed Republicans to get away with telling outrageous lies about health care reform (death panels!!!!). I’ve always wondered why “Republicans are lying to you” is not a media story.

The poor media coverage of the hcr debate is one reason I was so shocked this morning when listening to NPR. They were actually informing people about the reconciliation process and how it has been used in the past. They started the story with what Republicans have been saying about reconciliation:

Not surprisingly, that has Republicans crying foul. Budget reconciliation, Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) told reporters Tuesday, “was never designed for a large, comprehensive piece of legislation such as health care, as you all know. It’s a budget exercise, and that’s why some refer to it as the ‘nuclear option.'”

“The use of expedited reconciliation process to push through more dramatic changes to a health care bill of such size, scope and magnitude is unprecedented,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote in a letter to President Obama on Monday, urging him to renounce the possibility of trying to pass a bill using the procedure.

BTW, I love that wording “some refer to it as the nuclear option.” Actually, Republicans coined the term the “nuclear option” to describe abolition of the filibuster. Anyway, Republicans count on you and the media to have short memories and not to call them on what they said and did just a few years ago. So, is the use of reconciliation unprecedented?

But health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. “In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process,” says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

NPR then turns the screws a little tighter (referring to COBRA):

“The correct name is continuation benefits. And the only reason it’s called COBRA is because it was contained in the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985; and that is how we came up with the name COBRA,” she says.

The NPR lists other important health care legislation passed by like Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), CHIP and changes to Medicare (such as adding a hospice benefit).

Markos at dkos also reminds us that the Republican-led Congress under George Bush passed big legislation using reconciliation:

Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (first Bush tax cuts)
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (second Bush tax cuts)
Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, assistance for needy families)
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005 (tax cuts)
College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 (student aid, loan forgiveness)

Wednesday Open Thread

Are we getting another mini-snowpocalypse? Who angered the weather goddess again? While we wait for more snow to come, let’s open this thread.

Ooooh, delicious – rightwing slap fight:

Wow. So, Glenn Beck’s CPAC keynote speech on Friday was apparently so powerful it united Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin…against him. I’m not sure what that says about Beck except that he really has managed to carve out a place all his own in the media landscape these last few months and he maybe is making some people nervous. Well not Jon Stewart per se (‘gold mine’ might be a better description), but it’s certainly interesting to hear Rush Limbaugh (ever so gently) push back at Beck. Sign of things to come? Is Beck on his way to becoming the Frankenstein of the right? The tone of both Levin and Limbaugh suggest they were less than thrilled at Beck’s conservative bashing/reality check (videos of all three below).

Said Rush:

I would not have said that the only people who can stop Obama should be excoriated for being just as bad…It would never occur to me to say that. I don’t know what the objective would be.

Levin’s tone was equally low key though his criticism had a sharper edge to it. He advised Beck to stop acting like a clown and to “be careful playing footsie with the mainstream media…they will promote so they can destroy you.” Levin also pushed back at Beck’s criticism of the right: “Stop dividing us…Republicans deserve reinforcements.”

Harry Reid seems to have found the vestiges of a spine:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has heard quite a few cries of late from Republicans about how truly awful it is to vote on legislation by majority rule. I get the feeling he’s tired of it.

Reid said reconciliation had been used 21 times since 1981, mostly by Republicans when they were in control of the Senate for the passage of items like the Bush tax cuts. Under reconciliation, Democrats would need a simple majority in the Senate to pass legislation, as opposed to the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.

“They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it’s never been done before,” Reid said.

Following Senate Democrats’ weekly luncheon, Reid said “nothing is off the table” but that “realistically, they should stop crying about this. It’s been done 21 times before.”

Virtual March for Real Health Care Reform

If you are part of MoveOn.org, you may already know about this. Today starts a Virtual March to pressure Congress to enact real health care reform. It is a quick and easy process:

  1. Go to the MoveOn March Page
  2. Fill out the info to send Faxes to your Congressional Delegation (this is free and they’ll do it)
  3. Then CALL Ted Kaufmann (202) 224-5042 and Tom Carper (202) 224-2441 to tell them to Pass the HCR Bill. (Balloon Juice has a primer on how to do it here.)

As you do these steps, MoveOn is keeping a count of the number of contacts made by Virtual Marchers today, which is really interesting. Since I sent my Fax and called this AM and now, they’ve added almost 100K new contacts and this is within 45 minutes or so.

So join in and get this done. I’m especially looking for our lurkers to jump in and make the calls and have MoveOn send a Fax for you.  Call or email your friends and family and ask them to do this too.  Tell us what your experience was calling their offices today.

This comes by way of Andrew Sullivan, who admires this work from Jake Lewis, who writes here, and who has other work up on his flickr stream here.

Cheney Lied About CIA Torture Effectiveness

In Cheney’s mind, he’s a courageous patriot who’s not afraid to get things done. Cheney thinks that terrorists will be scared of the U.S. if only we’d torture more and the only way to get info is to throw accused terrorists (some of whom may be actually innocent) into Guantanamo (which has special terrorist repellant powers) and torture them for information. In his mind, interrogation techniques that have worked for centuries actually don’t work and reading Miranda rights to terrorists puts our country in danger. In Cheney’s world, the Constitution is inconvenient.

Cheney was very confident in his assertions that torture worked and he had a classified memo to prove it. The memo has been declassified and it doesn’t support Cheney’s assertions. In fact, it appears that timelines were altered to make Cheney’s case:

But a just released report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the lawyers who approved the CIA’s interrogation program could prove awkward for Cheney and his supporters. The report provides new information about the contents of one of the never released agency memos, concluding that it significantly misstated the timing of the capture of one Al Qaeda suspect in order to make a claim that seems to have been patently false.

…

The CIA memo, called the Effectiveness Memo, was especially important because it was relied on by Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department’s acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to write memos in 2005 and 2007 giving the agency additional legal approvals to continue its program of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” The memo reviewed the results of the use of EITs – which included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity – mainly against two suspects” Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the report states. One key claim in the agency memo was that the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogations of Zubaydah led to the capture of suspected “dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla. “Abu Zubaydah provided significant information on two operatives, Jose Padilla and Binyam Mohammed, who planned to build and detonate a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Washington DC area,” the CIA memo stated, according to the OPR report. “Zubaydah’s reporting led to the arrest of Padilla on his arrival in Chicago in May 2003 [sic].”

But as the Justice report points out, this was wrong. “In fact, Padilla was arrested in May 2002, not 2003 … The information ‘[leading] to the arrest of Padilla’ could not have been obtained through the authorized use of EITs.” (The use of enhanced interrogations was not authorized until Aug. 1, 2002 and Zubaydah was not waterboarded until later that month.) “ Yet Bradbury relied upon this plainly inaccurate information” in two OLC memos that contained direct citations from the CIA Effectiveness Memo about the interrogations of Zubaydah, the Justice report states.

The report also left out that much false information had been gathered through torture. But the main bit of evidence that Cheney offered to prove his case is absolutely wrong. Padilla was captured from information obtained by conventional interrogation techniques. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has captured more Taliban leaders in 1 month than Bush/Cheney captured in 6 years.

Impressions on Coons

Our illustrious founder, Jason330, was at the meet and greet with Chris Coons last night, and he passes on his impressions:

Well I don’t know if Coons can beat Mike Castle, but listening to him candidly lay out his campaign’s strengths and weakness on his way to winning over an audience of Delaware4Obama grassroots activists, I
know he can give him a hell of a scare.

Here were the take aways for me:

1) This will be a tough fought campaign that will not descend into New Jersey style attack ads calling out Castle directly on his advanced age or other possible “low road” bullet points. Rather, Coons plans
to consistently point out that Mike Castle is a Republican. For Democrats that have crossed party lines to vote for Castle in the past, the message seem to be that it is okay to have voted for Mike
Castle. Mike Castle is a nice guy. But the Republican party has forced him into more and more Conservative votes. He is a nice guy, but he does not seem to have the courage to stand up to Mitch
McConnell and the horrible Republican party. Mike Castle’s recent record is clear. He works for the Republican Party in DC now – not for Delaware.

2) There is going to be a lot of help from the White House. Coons spoke with the President yesterday in the Oval office. The President and David Plouffe are very interested in this race and they think Chris Coons can win it. They do not intend to repeat the mistakes of Massachusetts and stay on the sidelines. Having the President or First Lady in Delaware will be huge.

3) Coons, while probably outspent by Castle, thinks that he can out grass roots organize the incumbent by tapping into Obama and Markell activist who are spoiling for a fight. There are a large number of Delawareans who were passionate about getting Obama elected. They are equally passionate about seeing that the President is successful. They view it as their duty to see that Delaware’s seat stays in
Democratic hands.

4) I was a little surprised by this one: Coons’ campaign manager thinks that Christine O’Donnell will ramp up her primary campaign since Biden has dropped out. The campaign is pretty sure that O’Donnell will try to tap into simmering teabag anger and will be a factor bleeding off (possibly) 10% of Castle’s support. I don’t see any signs that O’Donnell has a campaign, so I’m not optimistic about that. Besides, O’Donnell telling everyone that Castle is a liberal doesn’t really help Coons with his message that Castle is a Party Line
republican.

That’s my take on the meeting.

The Slavery Apology

Some new pretty big developments:

Gov. Jack Markell on Tuesday embraced a call for the Delaware General Assembly to apologize for the state’s role in slavery. […] “The governor … would certainly be inclined to sign it if the Legislature moved forward on it and puts it on his desk,” said Brian Selander, a Markell spokesman.

Well, let me stop right there. “Embracing a call” is not “yeah, he will sign it if it just so happens to get to his desk.” I blame the News Journal for a little overindulgence there. Markell did not personally hold a news conference calling on the General Assembly to pass the measure. Brian Selander just said the Governor would sign it. Big difference there. Ok, digression over…

But in Legislative Hall, a majority of lawmakers interviewed were reluctant to take a stand. Dover City Council, heeding a call from its Human Relations Commission, voted 5-3 Monday to urge the state Legislature to apologize for “the state’s practice of slavery and for the historic wrongs committed against all persons who suffered discrimination and injustice under this dehumanizing system.”

Senate Majority Leader Patricia Blevins, D-Elsmere, said she would gladly entertain a debate on the floor of the Senate. “I can’t imagine who would vote against something like that,” Blevins said. “I guess the question is if people want to take time to debate it.”

Well, I can imagine some teabagger conservatives who long for the good ole days of slavery, or at the very least the Jim Crow era, would vote against it. And their opposition almost makes me ardently support an apology, for I hate it when racists win anything. And then there is this sentiment….

Rep. Donald A. Blakey, R-Woodside, who is black, noted that slavery was in the country’s distant past but recognized that “what took place in those days has an effect on what goes on today.”

Well, yes, what happened before does have an affect on what is now. We fought a civil war to end slavery and hundreds of thousands died in that effort. The civil rights movement 100 years later ended overt state discrimination and began the process of ending discrimination in our hearts and minds. And 60 years after that we have elected ourselves our first black President. That is progress. Sure, racism and discrimination still exist and where we find it we should and must end it, but I tend to think righting the wrong is an inherent apology in and of itself. Further, I am a progressive, so I tend to look forward in working to make the country better, rather than backward to what we were before. So that makes me naturally against pursuing something that reopens old wounds, especially when it is clear and obvious to all but the teabagging racists that slavery is and was wrong, and especially when there is just so much other work to do, not only in this state but in this country, and not a lot of time to do it in. An Apology to me is a unnecessary distraction.

I expect this to be a minority opinion on Delaware Liberal, so feel free to lambast me.

That’s Our Castle

Flip Flopperman Mike Castle says that if he were a Senator now, he would have joined Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in voting to end debate on a 15 billion-dollar jobs bill. But when Mike Castle had the chance to vote yes on the House’s job creation measure last December, he decided that Republican obstructionism was the way to go, Delawareans be damned.

And now Mike Castle has flipped flopped on Republican obstructionism too. Now he says he is not a fan of the Senate filibuster anyway. That is a shocking announcement. I now expect Mike Castle to condemn his fellow Republicans in the Senate, who he hopes to join next year, for their unprecedented record breaking abuse of the filibuster. I expect Mike Castle, should be be horribly unfortunate enough to suffer through his election in November, to never filibuster any piece of legislation ever. I expect him, given his statement, to immediately call on Mitch McConnell and the other Republican obstructionists in the Senate, ordering them to lay down their arms immediately on all of the President’s nominees, and on all legislation.

A leader would do that. A leader would stand up for his principles. And apparently, opposition to the filibuster is now one of Mike Castle’s principles.

And of course we know Mike Castle will do nothing of the kind, for he is not a leader, and he has not principles. Indeed, the flip flop on that statement is coming within the hour.