London's Burning

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
- "London Calling" by The Clash

The boys and girls have emerged. It's insane over there right now:

The rioting and looting that convulsed poorer sections of London over the weekend spread Monday to at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area and broke out for the first time in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, in what was developing into the worst outbreak of social unrest in Britain in 25 years.

By early Tuesday, unrest was also reported by the police in two other major cities, Liverpool and Bristol, and an enormous fire was consuming a large warehouse in the Enfield section of London.

Prime Minister David Cameron, apparently caught off guard while on vacation with his family in Tuscany, reversed an earlier decision not to cut short his holiday in the face of plunging world financial markets and boarded a plane for home to lead a cabinet-level meeting on Tuesday to deal with the turmoil.

The tragedy here is to the shopowners whose businesses have been looted and torched, the workers who won't be able to go back to work in the ashen shells, the inevitable loss of life I expect we'll hear about soon. Lives ruined by asshole rioters taking advantage of a bad situation and making it worse.

On the other hand, what sparked this massive convulsion of rioting?

This started on Saturday after the protest about a police shooting of a man called Mark Duggan. People were upset with the shooting but the rioting was unneccessary but not surprising as things have been brewing for months.

The areas of the original riots are areas most affected by cuts to services. Young people have seen their benefits cut, they have seen this conservative government remove funds they need to get to school and college, they have seen a 75% cut in services which were used to find them employment and they have been treated with disregard and contempt both by government and by a media who has written most of them off. But that was three nights ago.

Since then we have had opportunists destroying the livelihoods of hard working people in the area they live. Real small businesses and peoples houses have been destroyed and those people have lost everything. The people who have done this don't care because they have nothing in their lives be it parents or authority figures who they really respect.

They cannot respect the police.

They may not follow things closely but they do know that the police had been taking money from newspapers and that the top two policemen in London have resigned. They know the police think of them as scum and they think the same of the police. This is the police who got away with killing an unarmed man in an underground station after lying about it, who have been seen on video assualting people and getting away with it and on thursday shot and killed another member of the public. They know that the IPCC (the Independent Police Complaints Committee) is a toothless useless group and the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) have been seen to be reluctant to prosecute police for their crimes. What reason would they have for respecting that?

They cannot respect the politicians.

Local MP's can try their best but the people who made the decision to cut their services, to call them layabouts, and restrict their chances to change their circumstances have no link to the community they live in. They have seen politicians sent to prison for claiming expenses. They have a conservative government and the cabinet consists mainly of millionaires who's main policy is to enrich their banker backers in the city and give tax breaks to their friends which is paid for on the backs of the poor. Why would they respect them?

Eerily reminiscent of the LA riots two decades ago. And there's unrest in Israel as well -- only it's not violent:

Add up the estimates of 300,000 in Tel Aviv and 30,000 in Jerusalem and more elsewhere and you come to this startling idea: one out of every 20 Israelis was on the streets demanding a better country Saturday night – the equivalent of three million people in France, four million in Egypt, 15 million in the United States. And those comparisons themselves shatter, because, as Ma’ariv’s NRG site reported, the police couldn’t possibly keep track of the crowd that broke down gates and overflowed into alleys and side streets. Or as a police source told the paper: “This is the biggest demonstration we’ve ever, ever faced. We’re seeing hundreds of cars that have simply been left on the Ayalon Freeway and people are walking to the demonstration.” And that’s besides the people who couldn’t get on the overpacked trains to Tel Aviv.

You know, I honestly do think something is happening here. I honestly do think that people have discovered something in themselves and in the faces next to them that they thought they’d lost, that they were sure they’d merely dreamed and gotten over in the morning while trying to get to work. I think that any reporting of what’s happening in Israel that doesn’t include the shocked reborn ebullience of the crowd has missed something. I’ve been in many angry demonstrations, more than I can count or remember. I can’t remember being in a crowd of people so happy.

You think it can't happen here? With austerity on the menu in the U.S., and the inability to TAX THE RICH due to the teabagger/Norquist/Club for Growth takeover of the GOP, something's got to give. Since I'm skeptical that the Tea Party Downgrade will lead to changing any tea-brains, I expect inchoate rage to rear up before long.

Not the good kind of protest. Not now.

Not at this time of mounting global unrest.

Presenting The Tea-cession

Here's the actual passage from the S&P downgrade announcement:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said it best himself today:

"I believe this is without question the Tea Party downgrade," he said. "This is the Tea Party downgrade because a minority of people in the House of Representatives countered the will of even many of Republicans in the United States Senate who were prepared to do a bigger deal."

Kerry intimated that the "grand bargain" that President Obama initially negotiated with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), a package of larger spending cuts and revenue increases, was scuttled by a smaller group of Republicans who were unwilling to negotiate at any cost.

"There were some people in the Republican party - and Mitch McConnell even admitted this - who wanted to default," Kerry said. "He said there were people in his party who were willing to shoot the hostage. In the end they found that the hostage was worth ransoming."

The meme is spreading: It's The Tea Party Downgrade. Next comes the Tea Party Recession, hopefully not Tea Party Depression.

Thank you, Tea Party. For revealing that you're willing to send America back into a deeper recession that will likely take longer to get out of -- watch those interest rates this week -- all because of your inflexible anti-taxation ideology.

Let's see how much support they have after the pension funds get hit.

Still the Winner

According to the new NY Times/CBS News poll, the whole debt ceiling crisis, where for the first time a political party (starts with "R") used the full faith and credit of the United States of America as a bargaining chip, that same party is the l-o-s-e-r in public opinion:

More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt-ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.

Republicans in Congress shoulder more of the blame for the difficulties in reaching a debt-ceiling agreement than President Obama and the Democrats, the poll found.

The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations.

The public was more evenly divided about how Mr. Obama handled the debt ceiling negotiations: 47 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved.

The public’s opinion of the Tea Party movement has soured in the wake of the debt-ceiling debate. The Tea Party is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll. In mid-April 29 percent of those polled viewed the movement unfavorably, while 26 percent viewed it favorably. And 43 percent of Americans now think the Tea Party has too much influence on the Republican Party, up from 27 percent in mid-April.

And the public is smart enough to know that jobs, not deficits, are the problem to be solved:

But with the nation’s unemployment rate at a stubborn 9.2 percent, 62 percent of those polled said that creating jobs should be the priority.

“Cutting spending is important, but getting people back to work is more important,” said Diane Sherrell, 56, a Republican from Erwin, N.C. “If people are working, they are more productive. There is less crime, there is less depression, there is less divorce. There are less hospital and medical bills. If you put people back to work, you are cutting spending.”

Stanley Oland, 62, a Republican from Kalispell, Mont., said that the government needed new jobs to generate the economic activity and the revenue it requires.

“That revenue supports the basic foundation for the economy, creates more jobs and stimulates the economy,” he said. “Unless you have working people you don’t have revenue from taxes. If you cut spending, jobs will be eliminated and you won’t get any revenue. Every dollar spent creates jobs.”

Yep, they know that Obama's still digging out of the guano pile created by President Cheney/Bush's tax cuts, unfunded wars and mandates. There's one message that, I contend, can resonate today over all others:

Tax. The. Rich.

Back in Red

Sorry for the vacation break -- had some sign-on issues while I was away. Thanks to all regular readers who were checking, hope the lack of posts did not drive you away forever.

While the News Corp scandal is a blast and there's other interesting news, the Debt Limit Crisis is #1 with a bullet, and unfortunately that bullet is aimed at the heart of America and the global economy. If there was ever a reason to despise tax-pledge false god Grover Norquist or one-track Teabagger thinking, this is it. No matter what Reps. Bachmann or Gohmert might say or actually believe, they are wrong -- there's no way to successfully prioritize government spending under default, and no way that it won't raise interest rates through the room and further decimate the job market. Per a real economist:



As Norm Ornstein says, this group of Tea Partying freshmen Representatives have created, arguably, the Worst Congress Ever (or at least since the Civil War):

That brings us to the 112th Congress. House Republicans are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse. is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

We have seen problems emerge on more issues than the fiscal issues now before Congress. For instance, the painful effort to find broad bipartisan support for three significant trade agreements that are clearly in America's national interest, including its economic and diplomatic interest (and which first had to overcome substantial Democratic opposition), have been thwarted of late by Republicans' refusal to negotiate with the president over a much more minor issue of implementing trade adjustment assistance.

Political tactics to provoke confrontation, during a time when the permanent campaign reigns supreme and the competition for majorities in both houses is fierce, have combined with the rise of partisan media, one with far more reach and immediacy than the partisan press that thrived in the 19th century. When a phalanx of conservative media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to talk radio and blogs, chimes in that breaching America's debt limit would at worst be benign and at best could actually do the country some good, and are joined by presidential candidates like Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty in those messages, it encourages the confrontationalists to ignore the reality that damaging the full faith and credit of the United States will cause long-lasting economic turmoil at home and abroad.

Know Nothingism lives.

Weakening Tea

The Tea Party may never have been the political force the Faux media built it up to be and the mainstream media swallowed, but now they seem to be diminishing in activism:



This is coming at the same time that Republican overreach in Wisconsin and other states, and especially with the Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) Reverse-Robin-Hood Budget ending Medicare, is causing them to take unexpected heat:

It's August, 2009 again. Except this time the disgruntled town meeting attendees aren't teabaggers, they're everybody. And the targets are now Republicans. Here's Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA), at a town hall meeting facing constituents over a broken campaign promise to not privatize Medicare. An angry constituent confronts him: "If you voted to abolish Medicare, how would you explain that to people in their 50′s out of a job?!"

There are more examples in the link above. Could this be the turning point that wins the 2012 election for Obama -- and maybe weakens the GOP hold on the House, if not outright flipping it again?

Check out the new ad:



And since, hey, 70% of self-identified Tea Partiers oppose cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, one has to wonder...what is the GOP leadership thinking today?

Why I'm Against the Tea Party

Now We Know

Tea Party raises money off Gifford assassination attempt six collateral deaths.

Now we know.

We also now know that Tom Delay is guilty.

A Rolling Tragedy

Does anyone believe that the political violence in Arizona this weekend that seriously wounded a Congresswoman, killed a U.S. District Judge, a 9-year old girl, a 30-year old community activist, a 76-year old pastor and two other septuagenarians along with wounding another 14 people, is going to be the end of it?

Does anyone believe that any of the violent rhetoricians, from Beck to Palin, are going to take even a modicum of responsibility for shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater?

I think we're about to see the shunning of Sarah Palin, especially by the GOP elite. You can't propagate something like this:



..and try to justify it by saying that it's "It was simply crosshairs like you'd see on maps," as Palin's spokeswoman, Rebecca Mansour, has laughably tried to ass-cover with on TV, post-shootings. This is just too yucky, too ugly, and since everybody knows that Palin is essentially a grifter with no cause other than herself, and no policy intelligence beyond mean and pandering to the lowest resentful denominator, she'll be on the downward slope. Watch to see if they start cutting her time on Fox.

As for Arizona, it's the new Florida, the new South Carolina, the new Texas:

But after the fatal shooting of six that left Representative Gabrielle Giffords critically injured, Arizona has shifted from a place on the political fringe to symbol of a nation whose political discourse has lost its way.

The moment was crystallized by Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff, who, in a remarkable news conference on Saturday after the shooting, called his state “the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

...

While many states have nonrestrictive gun laws, Arizona’s zeal for weapons has often made headlines. It recently became one of just a few states with a law that allows people to carry concealed guns without a permit. Last summer, Ms. Giffords’s Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, had a campaign event in which voters were invited to “shoot a fully automatic M-16” with him to symbolize his assault on her campaign.

The state also allows for weapons in bars, which is unusual. Last year, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, Pamela Gorman, ran on a pro-fun platform; a campaign video depicted her firing off rounds several times.

This is the state that made ethnic profiling a police responsibility. Add to it this piece of Arizona Tea Party electioneering:



I don't see Arizona tightening up their guns laws anytime soon, not with a non-leader like hack Governor Jan Brewer, not with such hatred for "the other" in their legislative body. America has long had a love affair with guns and if Columbine didn't end it, high school students for heaven's sake, than why should this?

The nation will be keeping an eye on how our leaders -- particularly those on the Right -- respond to this event over the next few days and weeks ahead.

Truth Will Out

So much for Tea Party principles. Rand Paul has flipped his flop for earmarks, as any politician interested in re-election will do from the day they're sworn in:

One Tea Party hero, Senator-elect Rand Paul (R-KY), jumped on the anti-earmark bandwagon early, making “a ban on wasteful earmark spending in Washington D.C. one of the key points of his campaign” in March. Lambasting lawmakers who opt for “photo-ops with oversized fake cardboard checks,” Paul vowed to “dismantle the culture of professional politicians” even if he “ruffled a lot of establishment feathers” while doing it.

But after joining the GOP flock on Election Day, Paul is singing a different tune. In a Wall Street Journal profile this weekend, Paul signaled an about-face on his earmark position, committing to “fight for Kentucky’s share of earmarks and federal pork.”

Truth will out: Texas conservatives suck at governing, and their state is about to feel massive, massive pain:

Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.

Texas' GOP leaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.

The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.

Maybe if Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) can somehow (as he's asking) succeed his state from Social Security and Medicare, he can finish turning it into a Third World state. The potential upside: illegal immigrants fleeing across the border back into Mexico. With plenty of Texans following.

The best thing may have happened -- best for President Obama and the future Democratic Majority. Now he can even get tough on Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal.

Now with an opposition force screwing up in the House daily, he's got everything he needs to run against in 2012.

VOTE

I won't be surprised if the election turns into a rout of the Dems, possibly worse than predicted by Gallup, with even the Senate flipping Republican. We had whipsaw elections throughout the late 19th Century, so there is precedent. If the Dems lose the House but manage to hold onto the Senate, President Obama may end up with the best possible result for his re-election. The GOP has no new ideas, so he'll be seen as the defender of Social Security, Medicare, the Department of Education, sanity and, best of all, our hard-won rights under healthcare reform.

For the Tea Partiers who have provided the GOP with a fig leaf of populism, I think Frank Rich has it right:

Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.

...

For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.

...

But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

Hopefully the Dems will have replaced Chairman Tim Kaine with someone more in the Howard Dean mode, who actually knows how to strategize, fight and think on his feet, and who isn't afraid to run on his record. Skip the usual post-election circular firing squad -- that's all you need to know on how the Dems will have botched this one.

And re-elect the one sane, smart man standing astride this berserkoid nation of ours.

GOTP Fascism Continued

So if know-nothings like Sarah Palin and Nevada GOP Tea Party Senate candidate Sharron Angle can't talk to the real (i.e. non-Faux News) press because they will be exposed for the dangerous losers that they are, do they still get to ban the press from talking to them as they walk away?

Witness Angle, who is running ahead of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the polls, running away from answering substantive questions. (Embed issues -- click link for video.)

It's criminals that run from the press when leaving court. Not politicians running for office. At least not in a real democracy. And now her campaign has banned the free press from covering them. You know, another step towards a fascist state, if these 'baggers get their wins.

Meanwhile, corporate fascists in the McDonalds world are telling their workers how to vote -- or else:

The owner of a franchise in Canton, Ohio enclosed a handbill in employees' paychecks that threatened lower wages and benefits if Republicans don't win on Tuesday.

And the fascist jackboot intimidations keep on coming.

Remember.



Meanwhile, President Obama actually keeps America safe.

Fascist State Ahead?

Here's an essential read by Sara Robinson on where the Tea Party may be taking us, "Fascist America: Is This Election The Next Turn?" A taste:

Paxton defined fascism as:

...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Paxton laid out the five basic lifecycle stages of successful fascist movements. In the first stage, a mature industrial state facing some kind of crisis breeds a new, rural movement that's based on nationalist renewal...

...In the second stage, the movement takes root, turns into a real political party, and seizes a seat at the table. Success at this stage, Paxton writes, "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner..."

...In the face of this deadlock, the corporate elites forge an alliance with rural nationalists, creating an unholy marriage that, if it continues, will soon breed a fascist state. And, of course, this is precisely what's happening now between the Koch Brothers, the oil companies, Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party.

Robinson goes on to lay out possible outcomes. Meanwhile, Harold Meyerson does the best job I've yet seen explaining why the Tea Partiers are exactly 180% wrong on the cause of our current problems and how to "get back" to the 1950's America they seem to idolize:

In the worldview of the American right -- and the polling shows conclusively that that's who the Tea Party is -- the nation, misled by President Obama, has gone down the path to socialism. In fact, far from venturing down that road, we've been stuck on the road to hyper-capitalism for three decades now. The Tea Partyers are right to be wary of income redistribution, but if they had even the slightest openness to empiricism, they'd see that the redistribution of the past 30 years has all been upward -- radically upward. From 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent of Americans -- effectively, all but the rich -- increased from 64 percent to 65 percent, according to an analysis of tax data by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Because the nation's economy was growing handsomely, that means that the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent was growing, too -- from $17,719 in 1950 to $30,941 in 1980 -- a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

Since 1980, it's been a very different story. The economy has continued to grow handsomely, but for the bottom 90 percent of Americans, it's been a time of stagnation and loss. Since 1980, the share of all income in America going to the bottom 90 percent has declined from 65 percent to 52 percent. In actual dollars, the average income of Americans in the bottom 90 percent flat-lined -- going from the $30,941 of 1980 to $31,244 in 2008.

In short, the economic life and prospects for Americans since the Reagan Revolution have grown dim, while the lives of the rich -- the super-rich in particular -- have never been brighter. The share of income accruing to America's wealthiest 1 percent rose from 9 percent in 1974 to a tidy 23.5 percent in 2007.

Try telling the Tea Party ideologues that it was the New Deal that created the mid-century prosperity they crave, while it was Reaganomics that took it away. But we've all known people in our lives who were passionately committed to the wrong information.

Too bad when that ardor means they may win control of our U.S. Congress.

Clutch Time

Okay, so if you're anywhere left of center -- or, with this year's batch to GOTP (Grand Old Tea Party), left of crazy -- you owe it to your nation to get out and vote. Here's the facts: nobody knows who's going to win this election. But we do know that:

Political Wire caught Mitch McConnell saying this to the National Review:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

Catch that? Not, the single most important thing we want to achieve is to lower unemployment. Not, keep people in their homes. Not even, lower the deficit.

It's all politics to them. And their lies must be counteracted, per Dave Johnson, paraphrased by Electoral-Vote:

Obama tripled the deficit (No: it is lower than in Bush's last budget)



Obama raised taxes (No: the "stimulus" contained a big tax cut)



Obama bailed out the banks (No: the bailout happened before Obama took office)



The "stimulus" failed (No: the CBO estimates it created 1-3 million jobs)



Businesses will hire if they get tax cuts (No: They will hire when they sell more products)



Health-insurance reform will cost $1 trillion (No: the CBO says it will save $138 billion)



Social security is a Ponzi scheme (No: it will continue to be solvent for 25 years)



Government spending takes money out of the economy (No: government buys stuff and hires people)

What's interesting is that, now that he's getting out there, President Obama's approval rating is rising. He's pounding on the GOTP, as is former President Bill Clinton, whom the Republicans don't dare criticize when he comes to town:

Mr. Clinton is now perhaps his party’s most sought-after campaigner, going to parts of the country where Mr. Obama does not venture these days, including Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi and, on Monday, in his 105th event of the year, Texas.

Fifty-five percent of Americans viewed Mr. Clinton positively in a poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal last month, eight percentage points above Mr. Obama and the highest of 14 listed politicians or institutions.

What's interesting is that the Blue Dog Democrats, those conserva-Dems who gave progressives so much trouble with health and finance reform, are hurting the most. This mean more party-purging, not as brutal on the Left as on the Right, but likely to give us starker electoral choices in the future.

As for now, here's what the GOTP bring to America:



Nice job, Rand Paul supporters. "Curbing" is always in fashion for homegrown fascists ginned up by Beck and Tea. Step one in fascism is empowering the thug class.

And that's what we need you to vote against.

Tea Party Fascism

It appears that Grand Old Tea Party candidate for Senate in Alaska, Joe Miller, has a rather entitled private security detail:

The editor of the Alaska Dispatch website was arrested by U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller's private security guards Sunday as the editor attempted to interview Miller on camera at the end of a public event in an Anchorage school.

Tony Hopfinger was handcuffed by the guards and detained in a hallway at Central Middle School until Anchorage police came and told the guards to release him.

...

Hopfinger, who was holding a small video camera, said he was attempting to get Miller to answer questions about why he was disciplined when he worked as a part-time attorney at the Fairbanks North Star Borough. He said he pushed the man away after he was surrounded by Miller supporters and security guards and felt threatened.

Miller is refusing to answer any questions about his past and now appears to be using force to avoid accountability. So much for any Conservative notions of personal responsibility.

Elect Miller and bring on the jackboots.

Sometimes the hypocrisy, whether ill-informed or intentional, of these self-proclaimed heirs to Sam Adams and his fellow anti-colonialists is enough to make me sick.

How I'd like for the Left to take back this traditionally Progressive ground.

GoOfy P!

Christine O'Donnell is Alicia Silverstone in Clueless:



She also claimed in the same debate that we didn't "finish the job" when we fought the Russians in Afghanistan (hey wha? Maybe if she means funding the Mujahideen and empowering Bin Laden, then sorta) but you get the sense she might be confused with finishing the job in Iraq. Or something.

Another wacky GOP Senate nominee, John Raese in Virginia, has pegged the number of space lasers we need to defend America at 1,000. I don't know about you, but I prefer one thousand death lasers to be aimed away from me.

And poor wackbagger Carl Paladino, running for NYS Governor, can't catch a break. Yesterday he apologized for some of (and certainly not all) of his anti-gay speech to the ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Brooklyn, so today the Rabbi of that group, Yehuda Levin, withdrew his endorsement:

The rabbi, Yehuda Levin, who helped write those remarks, said Mr. Paladino “folded like a cheap camera” because of the uproar they had set off. And the rabbi said he could no longer support Mr. Paladino’s candidacy for governor of New York.

“Which part of the speech that you gave in Brooklyn to the Orthodox Jewish community are you apologizing for?” Rabbi Levin asked at a news conference in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. “Will we see you next year with your daughter at that gay pride march?”

Well, that would be a happy outcome. But the Rabbi showed how small his world really is:

Rabbi Levin said Wednesday that Mr. Paladino probably did not write his apology either. He suggested that “militant gays” wrote it and handed it to a naïve Mr. Paladino.

Because that's what they do, right, Rebbe?

GOTP Hate Speech

The Grand Old Tea Party candidate for Governor of New York State, Carl Paladino, met with Orthodox Jewish supporters in Brooklyn today and gave a gay-bashing speech:

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address, according to a video of the event.

And then, to applause at Congregation Shaarei Chaim, he said: “I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.” Newsday.com reported that Mr. Paladino’s prepared text had included the sentence: “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” But Mr. Paladino omitted the sentence in his speech.

Awesome timing, Carl, given the recent suicide of a gay Princeton freshman when his roommate broadcast his intimate moments on the Web. While the audience he met with may have approved (and I'd bet any closeted homosexuals in the audience were clapping the loudest), this isn't a message likely to resonate well with NYS voters, and I'm looking forward to seeing the next poll numbers.

The American Prospect has a very interesting interview with Simon Rosenberg of the progressive NDN think tank where he states:

You've got trend lines where one party is dropping and one party is gaining -- it's indisputable at this point. If you're a Republican right now, and you look at this environment, the party that's dropping a month out usually loses. If you're a candidate or a political party in a close election and you're dropping a month out, and the other guy's rising, you usually lose, because those dynamics are very hard to adjust.

Rosenberg's reasoning is that the GOP have shown themselves unready to lead, with their "Pledge" DOA and too many fringe candidates -- like Paladino. But he also speaks directly to the Democratic failure of message and moment:

Part of what went wrong with the Democrats in the last two years is that too many Democrats have political Stockholm syndrome. Many Democrats grew up in an era with a conservative politics that was ascendant and center-left politics was in decline. What happened in 2008 was the conservative jailers left, and were defeated, the door to the ideological jail opened up, the sun was shining, the Democrats could leave, and they didn't leave.

Amen, brother. Which is why we need to elect Dems like Alexi Giannoulias, running for President Obama's old Senate seat in Illinois. He shut down opponent Republican Mark Kirk in 55 seconds -- Kirk still hasn't answered Giannoulias' question face-to-face on Meet the Press Sunday morning:

So Congressman, saying you're a fiscal hawk doesn't necessarily make it true, and your voting record proves that it's not true.

The question is – for the congressman – the $700 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans – we don't have $700 billion – so my question for the congressman is which country do you plan on borrowing $700 billion from? The Saudis? China?

Because there is no answer.

The Narcissism of the Baggers

Matt Taibbi has another blistering story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, this one about his adventures at Tea Party rallies and explaining how they were fueled to prominence and whatever cohesion they have by corporate interests and Republican insiders. By far the most compelling stuff is his take on the partiers themselves:

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about..

He goes into the funding behind the Tea Party, etc., some of which you may have read before, and then digs into the race angle:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

Taibbi describes the scene in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is the #1 Tea Party idol, even though he's lived off government largesse via Medicare payments that he hypocritically does not want to see cut to doctors, all the time getting more and more cozy with and castrated by the Republican Party establishment that he ran against in the primary:

With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.

Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views — particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.

I've long thought Rand Paul a lightweight/milquetoast, especially compared to his very honest and mostly consistent father, Ron. Rand looks so weak next to his Democratic opponent for Senate, Jack Conway, Kentucky Attorney General and a guy who has the bearing of a sheriff:

If Rand were a Dem he's be laughed out of Kentucky -- too weak-looking for that state or many others -- but it's a crazy year and the South is crazy Republican right now.

Y'know, the worst thing that could happen to the Tea Party isn't necessarily that all their candidates lose. It's that enough of them win to take the bloom off the rose by the next General Election.

Too bad it'll be hell on America.

Burn Her?

There's an old saying in politics that when you smear an opponent with a lie, they have to waste time and oxygen defending against it, pulling themselves off message.

But how about when a politician (or an endlessly aspiring one) does it to herself? Like Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell who, years ago on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, talked about dabbling in witchcraft even more years ago. And how she (and her campaign) perceives so much real danger that maybe she'll lose her core (nutbag) supporters that she opens her campaign ad by denying that she's a witch:



I'm wondering if the ad might have the opposite effect and, instead of neutralizing the witch-fear, actually stoke it. After all, it's all too pat how she denies her witchhood, then switches the subject to make it seem that she's "just like you." Hell, I'm not a witch!

And I don't have secret information that I can't reveal about China taking over the U.S., either.

Beverly Hills Tea Party

Pat Boone is leading the "citizen's revolt" in Beverly Hills. That's funny on the face of it!

But even better is this clip of Pat vs. Jamie Court of Consumer Watchdog, who is smart and plain-speaking enough to completely dismantle and counter Pat's no-nothing presumptions that the Tea Party is (a) anything close to the majority will of the people (that was the last Presidential Election, actually, when Obama won a clearer mandate than Bush Jr. or Clinton ever did) and (b) that their anger is properly directed, as well as (c) that it's all a spontaneous citizen's revolt rather than something heavily influenced on the idea and financing level by big oil companies:



Pat keeps looking off camera left whenever Court nails him with the truth (often), which I expect is to a buddy he's with who shares his reactionary views. It's such a smug expression every time, like "get a load of this guy," the kind of avoidance look that seeks reinforcement of his pre-existing views rather than fair and open consideration of the other man's argument.

We've seen this smug smile before, on the face of El Presidente Bush back when he was in the White House. This goes to how Conservatives and Tea Partiers hold their assumptions and communicate in shorthand to each other their innate "rightness" when faced with real questions or counterarguments in the real world outside their Fox hollow.

It's the type of assumptiveness regarding, say, their self-serving interpretation of the Constitution that goes back to the Confederacy, when the nation faced the exact same kind of rightwing (and regional) obstruction that we are saddled with now by self-proclaimed Chancellors like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who has "a standing hold" on all Senate business unless he sees fit to let it come to a vote.

There's another word for what Sen. DeMint is practicing. It starts with "F."

Obama vs. The Tea Cowards

Why won't the Tea Party candidates -- Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Sharon Angle -- appear on mainstream news shows? Why are they following Sarah Palin's advice to "speak through Fox News," which is about as bald-faced an admission that it is simply a propaganda machine, nothing like news in the real world -- before Fox News boss Roger Ailes' former employer, Ronald Reagan, had the Fairness Doctrine conveniently repealed (1949-1987 -- a parting gift of the Reagan Administration and their FCC to the moneyed rightwing interests in America and, with Rupert Murdoch, Australia.

Coincidence? Fox News would have been illegal in 1986. Why the hell do you think they revoked the rule?

So when say President Obama is "The Other" and smear him without either listening to what he says or snipping and twisting his meanings for their own political or emotional satisfaction, I hope non-Beckified Americans turn it around and ask who these Teapublicans really are, beyond their most recent stint as a Faux commentator or self-certified dentist or hypocrite living off her husband's federal pension.

Thank goodness we're seeing the President everywhere now, after a summer of well-timed underexposure, battling it out in the marketplace of actual ideas, explaining his Party's accomplishments over the past eighteen months and taking on self-aggrieved Wall Street greedmeisters like this one:



Does this particular hedge fund manager have any social conscience? A friend of mine in a similar position told me, prior to Obama's election, that he knew his taxes would go up, but it had to be Obama. We needed a smart, determined, persistent adult at the top of the nation. I haven't polled him recently, but after what could have been, Wall Street should be thanking Obama -- maybe earning less millions and even billions, but not suffering like an unemployed auto worker with a re-fi and a family in Detroit.

And, thank you, here's Obama calling out the Teapublicans as all thinking Americans should in the very same CNBC town hall:

"The problem that I've seen in the debate that's been taking place and in some of these Tea Party events is, I think they're misidentifying sort of who the culprits are here," said Obama. "As I said before, we had to take some emergency steps last year. But the majority of economists will tell you that the emergency steps we take are not the problem long-term. The problems long-term are the problems that I talked about earlier. We had two tax cuts that weren't paid for, two wars that weren't paid for. We've got a population that's getting older. We're all demanding services, but our taxes have actually substantially gone down."

"So the challenge, I think, for the Tea Party movement is to identify, specifically, what would you do?" he added. "It's not enough just to say get control of spending. I think it's important for you to say, I'm willing to cut veterans' benefits or I'm willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits or I'm willing to see these taxes go up. What you can't do, which is what I've been hearing a lot from the other side, is we're going to control government spending, we're going to propose $4 trillion of additional tax cuts, and that magically somehow things are going to work. Now, some of these are very difficult choices."

But we know their platform. Dismantle the government. No social safety net. The establishment GOP has only one platform: less taxes and less regulation = prosperity, no matter the evidence to the contrary. The Tea Party is even more extreme. And in the end it would just provide huge openings for the type of exploitation by private interests that would hearken back to the 1890's, the Robber Baron era, the forces of which which all of the progressive legislation of the 20th century was designed to blunt.

I'm looking forward to the repeal of child labor laws.