Bits and Pieces

October 19th, 2007

The family is going to meet friends at the local pumpkin patch today, so I am off, frolicking, headed for Bates Nut Farm [the fam being as it is, we've called it Nates Butt Farm for decades.]

Scanning the news, I find no emergencies [although everything still feels like it, doesn't it?! It will until Dubby is retired to brush-popping in Crawford, I s'pose ... and perhaps even then.]

Anyhow, I’m posting a few snippits and reads I’ve appreciated in the last few days. MoDo and Colbert, Krugman and Conason, and last, Cenk Uygur.

Happy Punkin’s to you all, today.

Jude

First, here is a video snip that gives Rudy G. a well-deserved black eye.

and … the link to my weekly piece, We Are Strardust.

A Mock Columnist, Amok
MAUREEN DOWD
October 14, 2007

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

So why I am writing Miss Dowd’s column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.

While my hat is not presently in the ring, I should also point out that it is not on my head. So where’s that hat? (Hint: John McCain was seen passing one at a gas station to fuel up the Straight Talk Express.)

Others point to my new bestseller, “I Am America (And So Can You!)” noting that many candidates test the waters with a book first. Just look at Barack Obama, John Edwards or O. J. Simpson.

Look at the moral guidance I offer. On faith: “After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up.” On gender: “The sooner we accept the basic differences between men and women, the sooner we can stop arguing about it and start having sex.” On race: “While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad.” On the elderly: “They look like lizards.”

Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter.

I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.

Let me regurgitate: I know why you want me to run, and I hear your clamor. I share Americans’ nostalgia for an era when you not only could tell a man by the cut of his jib, but the jib industry hadn’t yet fled to Guangdong. And I don’t intend to tease you for weeks the way Newt Gingrich did, saying that if his supporters raised $30 million, he would run for president. I would run for 15 million. Cash.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.
What do I offer? Hope for the common man. Because I am not the Anointed or the Inevitable. I am just an Average Joe like you — if you have a TV show.

Death of the Machine
PAUL KRUGMAN, NYT
October 19, 2007

“There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.” So declared Mark Hanna, the great Gilded Age political boss.

Karl Rove has often described Hanna as his role model. And predictions that Mr. Rove and his disciples would succeed in creating a permanent Republican majority — I have a whole bookshelf of volumes with titles like “One Party Nation” and “Building Red America” — depended crucially on the assumption that the G.O.P. would have vastly more money than its opponents. It might even, some thought, match the 10-to-1 advantage Hanna gave William McKinley when he ran against William Jennings Bryan.

Oops. According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.

The sudden burst of corporate affection for Democrats is good news for the party’s campaign committees, but not necessarily good news for progressives. Before I get to the down side, however, let’s talk about why business seems to be giving up on the G.O.P.

To some extent it’s a matter of cold political calculation. Polls, plus a wave of G.O.P. retirements, suggest that next year the Democrats will expand their majority in the House, which is already bigger than anything the Republicans ever had during their 12-year reign. Of the 34 Senate seats up for election, 22 are held by Republicans, and major Democratic gains seem all but inevitable.

Add to this the weakness of the Republican presidential field, and it’s not surprising that lobbyists are casting in their lot with the likely winners. But that’s not the whole story.

There’s also disgust, even in the corporate world, with the corruption and incompetence of the Bush years. People on the left often describe the Bush administration as an agent of corporate America; that’s giving it too much credit.

The truth is that while the administration has lavished favors on some powerful, established corporations, the biggest scandals have involved companies that were small or didn’t exist at all until they started getting huge contracts thanks to their political connections. Thus, Blackwater USA was a tiny business until it somehow became the leading supplier of mercenaries for the War on Terror™.

And the lethal amateurishness of these loyal Bushies on the make horrifies the corporate elite almost as much as it horrifies ordinary Americans.

Last but not least, even corporations are relieved to see the end of what amounted to a protection racket.

In a classic 2003 article in The Washington Monthly, Nicholas Confessore (now at The New York Times) described the efforts of people like former Senator Rick Santorum to turn K Street into an appendage of the Republican Party — not the other way around. “The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer,” wrote Mr. Confessore, “are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the G.O.P.”

But corporations weren’t happy. According to The Politico, “many C.E.O.’s” used the term “extortion” to describe “the annual shakedowns by committee chairmen with jurisdiction over their industries.” And now that Mr. Santorum is out of office, heading the America’s Enemies program at a right-wing think tank, the faint sound you hear from K Street is that of lobbyists singing: “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

All of this greatly increases the odds that the Republicans, far from establishing a permanent majority, will be out of power for quite a while. But it also raises the question of what Democratic rule will really mean.

Right now all the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination are running on strongly progressive platforms — especially on health care. But there remain real concerns about what they would actually do in office.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing that makes you wonder: yesterday ABC News reported on its Web site that the Clinton campaign is holding a “Rural Americans for Hillary” lunch and campaign briefing — at the offices of the Troutman Sanders Public Affairs Group, which lobbies for the agribusiness and biotech giant Monsanto. You don’t have to be a Naderite to feel uncomfortable about the implied closeness.

I’d put it this way: many progressives, myself included, hope that the next president will be another F.D.R. But we worry that he or she will turn out to be another Grover Cleveland instead — better-intentioned and much more competent than the current occupant of the White House, but too dependent on lobbyists’ money to seriously confront the excesses of our new Gilded Age.

Why ‘Socialism’ Evokes No Fear
Joe Conason, TruthDig
Oct 11, 2007

Once among the most frightening epithets in American political culture, “socialized medicine” seems to have lost its juju. Today that phrase sounds awfully dated, like a song on a gramophone or a mother-in-law joke or a John Birch Society rant against fluoridated water.

Yet despite that antique quality, the old buzzwords appear regularly in columns, press releases and speeches. Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential pack run around squawking about socialism whenever anyone proposes health care reform. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak warns that the federally financed, state-run Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is essentially a socialist conspiracy. So does President Bush, who has vetoed a modest increase in that program’s funding because he doesn’t want to “federalize health care.”

Although the Red threat still triggers an autonomic reaction among GOP true believers, the rest of the country no longer twitches to that high-pitched, far-right whistle. Most polls not only show enormous majorities favoring extension of coverage to every child, but substantial support for a radical change in how we pay and administer health insurance—including the possibility of a single-payer system.

Why doesn’t the traditional propaganda work anymore? Perhaps the demise of the Soviet Union and the withering of communism in China have had a delayed effect on public attitudes here. Both the Russians and the Chinese have turned more capitalist than the West, abandoning their former systems without substituting modern protections. The ex-communists are more of a threat to the health of their own societies than to us. Most Americans may also have noticed that corporate bureaucracy and corruption, which figure largely in the present health care system, are not preferable to government bureaucracy. Doctors who used to wail about the dangers of Medicare have learned how unpleasant it is to deal with dozens of insurance companies, each creating different rules to cut costs and deny care. So have their patients.

This corporate model is more expensive and less efficient than the government plans that provide care in every other industrialized nation.

And most Americans may have learned by now that such systems prevail in Western countries that aren’t normally categorized as “socialist,” including the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Canada, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. All these nations manage to provide their citizens with high living standards, industrial and technological innovation, and broad political and economic freedom, even after 50 years of national health insurance.

Meanwhile, the credibility of conservatives has diminished steadily. These days they cannot even achieve clarity on the meaning of their favorite cliches. For instance, the president hates “federalized health care,” but sponsors a Medicare prescription drug program that wastes hundreds of billions on drug companies and private insurers. Right-wing definitions no longer seem so clear, either. When the government awards a billion dollars in sweetheart mercenary contracts to a wealthy Republican family in Michigan, that’s “private enterprise.” But when the government helps a struggling middle-class family in Maryland send its children to the doctor, that’s creeping socialism.

Conservative ideology’s declining relevance is again encouraging the politics of personal destruction. That must be why right-wing voices on the Internet, talk radio and the Fox News Channel have launched a nasty attack on the family of Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old Maryland boy who appeared in a Democratic radio commercial endorsing the SCHIP program. He and his younger sister, both victims of a terrible car accident that left the little girl with permanent brain damage, have both needed federal assistance because their parents were unable to afford private insurance. Certain conservative bloggers and pundits, seeking to prove that the Frost family is too affluent to qualify for SCHIP assistance, have harassed them, their neighbors and their co-workers. They have spread myths and lies about the family, their house and the schools that their children attend. And they have made repeated telephone calls to the Frost home, demanding answers to questions about their personal finances.

It doesn’t seem to occur to any of these strict Christian moralists that the Frosts have enough trouble trying to care for their disabled daughter, or that the state of Maryland, under the SCHIP regulations, has determined that the Frost children are fully eligible for the help they obviously need. Let us not hear again from these mean-spirited people about “family values” or “compassionate conservatism.”

Such is the devolution of conservatism in our time—from a philosophy concerned with overweening state authority to a movement that bullies children in the name of freedom.

Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.

The Washington Bubble
Cenk Uygur, Smirking Chimp
Oct 18 2007

George W. Bush has finally caught Richard Milhous Nixon. It was a historic race but Bush has finally caught him from behind. George Bush now stands at a 24% approval rating in the latest Zogby poll. That is the same approval rating that Richard Nixon had the day he walked out of the White House in shame.

This president is deeply, consistently and historically unpopular. Yet, we still can’t break through to the Washington bubble. The country can’t stand this president. They think he is incompetent, uncaring and dangerous. Meanwhile, Congress and the DC media elite still think the best solution is to move toward the president rather than away from him.

This boggles the imagination. How can the Senate Democrats decide today to strike a deal with the president to give the telecommunication companies retroactive immunity for the laws that they have broken? How can they possibly think that agreeing with a president at 24% approval rating is a good idea? Let alone, necessary. Necessary? Are you kidding me?

Meanwhile in the House, Democrats backed down from tougher FISA legislation because Republicans wanted to vote on an amendment saying that disagreeing with the president on this issue meant you were giving into Osama bin Laden. Literally. They wrote that into the amendment. Have you seen anything so politically craven and pathetically obvious?

And this actually worked. It stopped the Democrats in their tracks. You knuckleheads, why don’t you write an amendment back that says, “Giving away American citizens’ liberties and rights is exactly what Osama bin Laden wants most of all, so anyone who votes against our bill loves Osama!”

If they’re going to be children about this, hit them back with what I learned in third grade, “I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”

Come on, please don’t tell me that you’re still scared of these guys. The Republicans in Congress are running for the hills. They can’t leave Congress fast enough. Seventeen Republican Congressmen and Senators are hightailing out of town before they get their ass handed to them in the next election. Hastert indicated today that he doesn’t even have the stomach to stay for the rest of his term (and that’s saying a lot).

And Bush is at 24%. 24%! He is polling as the most unpopular president of all time. He’s caught Nixon as Nixon was heading out the door. They should be having hearings on how to throw the bum out of office, not on how to cave in to him. Do you have any common sense at all?

Meanwhile, David Broder and David Ignatius are still writing columns about what a great idea it would be for the Democrats to compromise with the president. The deans of the decrepit, useless DC media tell us that the best answer to the country’s great frustration is to go closer to the president, not farther away. Are they nuts?

The middle of this country does not lie between Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton. The DC establishment is obsessed with civility and neutrality to the point that they are paralyzed into subservience. And they disguise that subservience as so-called moderation.

Meeting Dick Cheney and George Bush halfway is not moderation, it is madness. It is radicalism. It is deeply unpopular. It is terrible politics and terrible policy.

You can’t argue that the halfway point between George H. W. Bush and the Democratic Congress of 1990 is the same place as the halfway point between George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress of 2006. The middle of the two parties is not always the right answer! It depends on context, it depends on the situation, it depends on where the parties lie at the time. But you need a brain to figure that out, not a slavish, thoughtless adherence to “neutrality” and “centrism.”

I am a centrist. I lie between the George H.W. Bush administration and the 1990 Congress. At this point, that place in the political spectrum is way to the left of the current Democratic party. And it’s miles away from George W. Bush. You’ve already gone so far right, you’re about to fall off the map. The American people are trying to warn you. And the Washington bubble keeps on insisting on going further right.

When is this bubble going to burst? When are the people in charge of this country going to realize they have run this ship aground and the American people are frustrated and furious? If 24% doesn’t do it, what will? Does the president have to be at 11%? 3%?

What will it take to wake up Washington? Stop following this man. Stop caving in to him. Stop listening to his silly threats. Stop moving toward him. Start moving away from him as soon as you possibly can. The American people are waiting, in the real center of the country.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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