Monthly Archives: December 2010
Accommodate This.
The Senate has finally passed, well, everything. They passed (by unanimous consent) the defense authorization bill that Republicans filibustered over the DADT repeal included therein, thereby endangering our national security and making themselves traitors. They passed by a voice vote the 9/11 First Responders Health bill that the evil Republicans also filibustered until John Stewart of all people shamed them and the media. And now, they have passed, by a 71-26 vote, the New START nuclear treaty, after Republicans had delayed it for eight months. I suppose most GOP senators just want to get the hell out of town to finish their shopping, which means of course that their so called principled objections were never principled in the first place.
Prior to that vote, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry took to the floor to lambast Satan’s minion Bug Eyes McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate. And all I have to say after watching the video, is where was this Senator Kerry in 2004?
Democrats, when in government, tend to take their responsibilities seriously. Democrats are always much better at actually governing than campaigning or communicating. And with governing responsibly comes the necessary notions of compromise, negotiations and accommodations of the other side. Republicans, on the other hand, have never shown any willingness to take their governing responsibilities seriously. They delay, obstruct, lie, and confuse everything and anything, so long as it benefits the Republican Party politically in the smallest of ways. They reject compromise at the starting gate, and if they take part in negotiations, it is only to do so in bad faith, so that they can further delay, obstruct and defeat whatever the negotiations are about. Republicans do not campaign to win elections so that they can govern. No, they campaign to win elections so that they have power. Power to enrich themselves and their supporters. And power to screw over everyone else.
And yet, no matter how many times this lack of good faith is demonstrated on the GOP’s part, Democrats in Washington continue to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. It is high time, and long past time, for all Democrats everywhere to stop presuming that any Republican anywhere acts in good faith. Indeed, the reverse assumption needs to be adopted. We, and they, must always assume that the GOP is out to fuck us over.
The words of James T. Kirk are quite applicable.
Don’t believe Republicans.
Don’t trust Republicans.
Fuck them.
Merry Christmas.
Cute Christmas Video
My cousin sent this to me. Enjoy!
Wednesday Open Thread
Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. I’m still traveling, so don’t be surprised if I’m not around. I’ve been busy being stuffed full of Southern cooking and rescuing Free Radical from “fun uncle” duty.
Christine O’Donnell may have trouble winning over the Delaware electorate, but she’s been racking up awards. So far she’s won the El Somnambulo MVP award, the most expensive campaign in Delaware history and was #1 and #9 on the most memorable quotes list. Now she’s been nominated for TPM’s Golden Dukes Award.
For Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy:
Christine O’Donnell: As TPM Reader DC put it: “A GOP candidate, witchcraft, a Satanic altar, masturbation. This was the moment when the natural world and South Park switched places.” And that’s not even to mention mice with human brains or whether the separation of church and state was really part of the constitution or not.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX): As TPM Reader FM said, “Two words: ‘terror babies.'”There’s also “tea party” and “art director” and “government shutdown.”
Tim Profitt, Head Stomper And Rand Paul Volunteer: He came, he saw, he stomped the head of a MoveOn protester, he demanded an apology from the woman he stomped and claimed he was set up. As TPM Reader EO said, “his actions were stone.cold.f——.crazy!”
Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO): In Tancredo’s world, Obama’s a bigger threat to America than al Qaeda and should be shipped back to Kenya. Granted, he’s been crazy for years, but TPM Reader DB thought his gubernatorial run highlighted one thing we’ve missed: “How can a person run for governor, claiming he can create jobs and shrink government if he’s never had private sector job?”
Ginny Thomas: Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas whose public affiliation with conservative advocacy groups gave people pause this year, made observers’ jaws drop after she called Anita Hill, who in 1991 accused now-Justice Thomas of sexual harassment, at an odd hour and requested an apology from her. TPM Reader DS added, “Ginny’s call clearly planted a turd in the punchbowl, embarrassing her husband even more.”
This looks like a tough category but I think Christine has a real shot. I’m on Team Christine for this one.
Why Fox, why? Fox couldn’t find enough dishonest hacks to talk down the START Treaty so they actually turned to Hollywood elite Jon Voight. For real. Media Matters documents the atrocities.
If you just finished the segment and currently find yourself wishing for those precious minutes of your life back, rest assured that we know how you feel. Being that there’s a smorgasbord of nonsense in there to choose from, we’ll just cover a few greatest hits.
STEYN: Joining me now with reaction is the sanest man in Hollywood, Jon Voight. Jon, this whole thing seems like something from another era, the idea of so much being attached to getting a treaty with Russia over a nuclear weapons. Is it even relevant to the world we are living in today?
…
After that little offering of ignorant, dismissive nonsense, the main narrative of the segment became clear: Barack Obama wants to give up U.S. nuclear might so that, as Steyn put it, “the rest of the world will love us.” If only we had Ronald Reagan to protect us! From Hannity:
VOIGHT: And now I hear Obama trying to convince the American people that if we give up our nuclear weapons, this will set a fine example and all other countries will follow suit. What a dangerous and naive notion that is. If President Reagan wasn’t such a powerful force of strength, it — we never would have seen Premier Gorbachev take down the Berlin Wall.
Renown expert on nuclear issues Jon Voight says that Reagan wouldn’t have done that except, of course, Reagan signed the first START Treaty. What a hippie!
9/11 Is A Joke in GOP Town
Yesterday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Jon Stewart and his political clout in regards to the 9/11 First Responders bill that’s being stopped by the Republican Party. Gibbs said:
I think if there’s the ability for that to sort of break through in our political environment, I think there’s a good chance that he can help do that. I think he has put the awareness around this legislation — he’s put that awareness into what you guys cover each day, and I think that’s good.
I hope he can convince two Republicans to support taking care of those that took care of so many on that awful day in our history. It seems at the end of a long year, around the holiday season, a pretty awful thing to play politics about. But that’s a decision that 42 Republican senators are going to have to make.
If you haven’t seen the videos from The Daily Show, it’s definitely worth your time to watch.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Worst Responders | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| 9/11 First Responders React to the Senate Filibuster | ||||
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Celebrating Repeal of DADT – Updated
Barney Frank explains it all.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0h5Vtke3OA&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
How Obama Ate Republicans’ Lunch On START
Lindsey Graham is rapidly becoming the go-to Republican for whiny quotes. He is upset with the productivity of the lame duck session (ignoring that all this was pushed to the lame duck because of Republican obstruction). He said this about the collapse of the unified GOP blockade:
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is not happy about the recent productivity of the lame duck Congress, and blamed the GOP for allowing it to happen. “When it’s all going to be said and done,” he said on Fox News Radio today, “Harry Reid has eaten our lunch. This has been a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions of policies that wouldn’t have passed in the new Congress.”
“I stand here very disappointed in the fact that our lead negotiator on the Republican side … basically is going to have his work product ignored and the treaty jammed through in the lame duck. How as Republicans we justify that I do not know,” Graham said. “To Senator Kyl, I want to apologize to you for the way you’ve been treated by your colleagues.”
Yes, the Senate should apologize to Jon Kyl for ignoring his dishonest actions about what is and isn’t in the START Treaty. Perhaps Senators are listening to every living Secretay of State and military leaders instead?
Slate explains how Republicans picked a fight on START and why they lost.
There were two kinds of opponents in this debate. The first had concerns that President Barack Obama would use the treaty as an excuse to ease up on missile defense and the programs to maintain the nuclear arsenal. In recent weeks, Obama and his team did as much to allay these concerns as any hawk could have hoped—and more than many doves preferred.
AdvertisementSo that left the second kind of opponent: those who simply wanted to deny Obama any kind of victory. The latter motive was clearly dominant in this debate.
To get the treaty ratified, it needed 67 votes in the Senate, so that means 9 Republicans had to vote for it. Republicans kept using the rhetoric they’ve used for almost all the good bills they have been blocking – “ramming it down our throat,” “haven’t had enough time,” “Senate procedure,” etc. to run out the clock. Nevermind that the treaty was signed in April and is all of 17 pages long (plus many, many hearings). The Negotiating team simply went around the self-appointed lead negotiator – what else can you do when he is a dishonest hack?
For reasons that nobody can quite explain, Kyl had managed in the past few years to cut a profile as the “go-to” Republican on all matters nuclear. The conventional wisdom was that if Kyl endorsed the treaty, it would pass; if he didn’t, it wouldn’t.
And so, the White House and the Pentagon sent high-level emissaries to Kyl’s lair during the Senate’s recess to negotiate a deal, offering, among other enticements, an extra $4 billion, on top of the $80 billion already committed over the next decade, to “modernize” the nuclear-weapons infrastructure.
Kyl took the goodies but came out against the treaty anyway. So Obama and his aides did something no legislative powerhouse should ever let happen—they went around him, treating him as just another senator, and they won.
Kyl limps away from this face-off gravely wounded—a leader unable to deliver either on his promises or on his threats.
McConnell also comes out of this looking pretty ineffective. The narrative in the Washington media has already changed to how effective Obama is at passing legislation. I hope this is a preview of the fights to come. I imagine that the so-called moderates were worried about commercials in their home districts about how they valued party over country. Kyl’s problem was that this was good and important legislation and that blocking it would have very bad consequences. There may be more battles like this to come – there will be a lot of high-stakes brinksmanship in the next Congress and we’ll find out whether Republicans are more scared of teabaggers or everyone else.
Buckle Up As We’re In For a Bumpy Ride
Fissures between the teacher unions (or “associations”) and Delaware school districts are beginning has show up in Christina over the Race to the Top plans for the Glasgow High School and Stubbs Elementary. Plans (Glasgow pdf, Stubbs pdf) are to be submitted today by the Christina School District to the state, but the Christina Education Association refused to sign on stating that “the district has involved us in a process that, while cordial, was not a true partnership.” The district disagrees. I’m guessing here, but it all comes down to the wording on a chart the union finds the wording “offensive and inflammatory”.
-Diversity and cultural competency among staff is lacking
-Belief that all students can succeed is inconsistent or sometimes absent altogether
-Prior student histories impact placement and student expectations
Are more disagreements like this in the cards for the future? Do you know what plans your school district has in regards to Race to the Top?
The Top 10 Political Scandals of 2010
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington released their top 10 political scandals of 2010 (web, pdf). The list ranges from Representative Eric Massa’s (D-NY) penchant for tickling to three-time failed Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell (Tea Party) who “treated her campaign like a personal piggy bank.” Also on the list were Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) who had an aide on staff accused of assaulting his girlfriend, the hit piece on Shirley Sherrod, the cozy relationship between BP and the government agency that was suppose to regulate it, and so on and so on.
A spokesman of the million-dollar trust fund of Christine O’Donnell said: “It’s a frivolous court action by an ultra-liberal, George Soros-financed, former [Joe] Biden-staffer run organization with their own agenda.” Geez, and I thought they were called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Happy Winter Solstice, Christine O’Donnell
Serious Presidential Contender Haley Barbour
Haley Barbour is one of those politicians who is inexplicably popular with press. Despite his many years as a DC lobbyist, his 2 terms as governor of the state of Mississippi make him an automatic GOP contender. He really stepped in it this weekend when he did an interview with the Weekly Standard and said segregation wasn’t that bad and praised the Citizen’s Council as helping with integration.
Here’s some of the remarks that got him so much attention:
Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.
“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”
In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
Many people have already taken apart this nonsense. The Citizen’s Councils were just the kinder, gentler versions of the KKK. See this reference and this reference (warning PDF) tell more about the history of the Citizen’s Councils.
The most brain dead defense of Barbour award goes to Jim Gerghaty of the National Review who tells us that pointing out racism is the real problem.
Working against Barbour is that he is a distinctly Southern in his drawl and mannerisms, and Southern politicians have a higher bar to clear when it comes to accusations of racism. Because of the experience of slavery and segregation, the South is associated with racism in the minds of a significant chunk of the electorate. The perception may be outdated, false, unfair, and hypocritical, but it is out there. Still, we’ve hit a new low when an interview in which the subject recalls attending a Martin Luther King Jr. speech is the trigger for the accusation of racial animosity.
I’m still not quite sure how the argument against Barbour gets summarized quickly; I think it will be something like, “he fondly remembers the racist Citizens Councils” or something. Of course, all Barbour said was that the Citizens Councils kept the Klan out of the town, and that the business community didn’t want to see violence in response to the integration of schools. Members of the Citizens Councils undoubtedly held reprehensible views, but is anything Barbour said untrue? Is Haley Barbour to be smeared as a racist, once the single most damaging accusation in our society, over this? This comment outweighs everything else he’s done with his life?
Of course, Haley Barbour is not just a one time offender. He recently expressed that he didn’t understand the big deal with celebrating the Confederacy – it didn’t amount to diddly. He also said that one of his aides would be punished by turning into a watermelon.
Of course that doesn’t mean that Haley hasn’t learned to be sensitive about questions of race. Ben Smith noted Barbour’s sensitivity to race in item about an old campaign of the Nit Diddler from years ago:
But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be ‘’coons’’ at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.
Then as now, the real crime was that a reporter heard the remark.
Net Neutrality at Death’s Door?
As the FCC regulations are put into effect that bring net neutrality to its knees, I point to FoxNews to get all Shakespearean about it:
President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fittingly chosen the darkest day in 372 years to impose potentially devastating regulations on the up-to-now free market Internet.
As the moon was eclipsed earlier today, Congress and the American people will be eclipsed by this regulatory coup d’état — orchestrated by the White House — that will substitute the judgment of three Democrats at the FCC for the legitimate democratic process.
Starting today, the Internet will be regulated, despite the fact that network neutrality regulations have almost no support in Congress, where Rep. Ed Markey’s legislation, which aimed to do by legitimate means what the FCC is now doing surreptitiously, has just 27 co-sponsors.
Senator Al Franken summed up the problem so that any Democrat could understand it:
“Maybe you like Google Maps. Well, tough. If the F.C.C. passes this weak rule, Verizon will be able to cut off access to the Google Maps app on your phone and force you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it is not as good. And even if they charge money, when Google Maps is free. If corporations are allowed to prioritize content on the Internet, or they are allowed to block applications you access on your iPhone, there is nothing to prevent those same corporations from censoring political speech.”
Tuesday Open Thread
Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Yes, that means that the days will start to get longer! The bad news – it will still be winter for a while. How many of you stayed up to watch the eclipse? I tried but it was completely cloudy here. I couldn’t even see the full moon.
It is now looking like there are enough votes in the Senate to approve the new START Treaty with Russia. If you remember, several Senators threatened to kill the treaty because they were mad about the DADT repeal. Yes, they are that immature.
The Senate moved closer on Monday to approving a new arms control treaty with Russia over the opposition of Republican leaders as lawmakers worked on a side deal to assure skeptics that the arms pact would not inhibit American plans to build missile defense systems.
A Republican senator announced that he would vote for the treaty and two others said they were leaning toward it after a closed-door session on classified aspects of the pact. At the same time, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, produced separate legislation that could reassure fellow Republicans worried about the treaty’s impact on missile defense.
By the end of another tumultuous day, treaty backers said they could count more than the two-thirds majority required for approval in votes that could begin as early as Tuesday.
We won’t really know until all the votes are in but this looks like another win for Obama and the mighty duck Congress.
60 Minutes ran a one-sided fluff piece about Chris Christie on Sunday, representing him as a principled budget hawk and state workers as the bad guys.
In 2,600 words about state deficits, you won’t find the phrase “tax cuts.” Instead, CBS adopts the Republican framing that deficits are all about spending — frequently with loaded phrasing like “gold-plated retirement and health care packages.” And throughout the report, CBS allows Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, to launch attacks on unions and make unsupported claims about budget problems, all without ever challenging his assertions and without including substantive disagreement from Christie critics.
CBS quotes Christie declaring: “We have a benefit problem. … It’s not an income problem from the state. It’s a benefit problem. And so we gotta change those benefits.” No contrary view is included.
…
You’d never know from CBS’ report that a big part of the reason that “Christie and his predecessors” failed to make required contributions to the pension fund is that they decided to use the money for tax cuts instead. (Like I said, the CBS report takes the GOP-friendly stance that deficits are all about spending, not revenue.)
Christie has stopped a tunnel project that would have provided jobs to New Jerseyans as well as helped with massive traffic backups. He’s just like previous governors, stealing from pensions to pay for tax cuts for his buddies. I really don’t get the Chris Christie love at all. He puts up You Tube clips of himself bullying constituents and Republicans love it. I guess they love it when the powerful stick it to the powerless.