The Production of Victimhood

As Anne Laurie notes, Pete Hoekstra’s video (tagged “yellowgirl” on his site) is raising outrage at its overt racism. Judging from Hoekstra’s latest fundraising letter, he got exactly what he wanted:

Here we go again. We dared to take on Debbie Stabenow and China, and the liberals are doing what they always do—crying racism.

If there’s any question whether Hoekstra knew what he was doing, here’s a comment from a Republican strategist who gets whats going on:

Liberals are without doubt hyperventilating over the racist implications of Pete Hoekstra’s political ad against Debbie Stabenow. But believe me, that’s not a very effective way of attacking Hoekstra. Most of his potential voter base (including socially conservative industrial union members in Michigan) simply won’t care, and he will in any case spin it that he is being persecuted by the politically-correct thought police.

The more interesting angle is one of hypocrisy. Hoekstra voted for permanent MFN for China in 1999, and China’s creditor status vis-à-vis the U.S. simply reflects all those good-paying union jobs Hoekstra shipped there (yes, I know international economics is more complicated than that, but would certainly put Hoekstra on the defensive.)

This guy says “liberals are hyperventilating” because for him “liberals” and “media” are one group. Of course that’s wrong—in the case of the Hoekstra video, the outrage was pushed forward by traditional media who smell transgression from the norm, along with liberals on the Internet who see the obvious racism of the spot when the video goes viral (including me). But the rest of what he says is spot on, especially when he observes that you should push back with something more than “Hoekstra’s a racist”.

In other words, the racism shouldn’t be ignored, but don’t focus on the racism to the point that you miss the weakness of the rest of the message. It’s a lot more powerful to say “I see what you’re trying to do, but I’m not going to fall for it” than to just call someone like Hoekstra a racist and make him the victim.

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Chart Of Darkness

The problem with this Zero Hedge “implied unemployment rate” chart that the wingers are screaming about as proof of a massive “Democrat Party scam” is the fact that Tyler Durden ran the numbers back for 30 years and it exists all the way back to the Reagan era, and it shows that the “real” unemployment rate under President Bill Clinton was actually under two percent by the time he left office. Slick Willie was such a monster that he lowballed his numbers every month for both of his two terms and spotted himself a higher 4.0% plus unemployment rate instead, and then George W. Bush came along and quadrupled it from 2 percent to 8 percent.  (Why Bush the Elder didn’t learn from his boss, I dunno.)

Not only that, but the implied rate under St. Ronaldus (nearly 14%) was far worse than anything currently under the Obama administration (falling from 12%), meaning that if we’re measuring who the worst President in history is by the implied unemployment rate and by how far the numbers are “lying” then that particular crown goes to Jellybean. His guys basically shaved 3.5 points off the unemployment rate for the entirety of his first term and still got him re-elected overwhelmingly in 1984 as a result.  Of course, since that’s the benchmark, it doesn’t count.   President Obama took a far worse collapse and is handling far better than Reagan did with his recession, so of course everyone has to ignore 95% of the chart.

You know, because President Obama is judged by a different standard for reasons that nobody on the right can seem to articulate…

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Charity, chastity, prudence, and hope

Heh:

I’m told that 22 Dem Senators have signed on to a toughly worded letter urging Komen to reverse its decision…

You know what, it’s too late. Fuck ‘em, I don’t like alarms. Gin and Tacos (h/t to many commenters and to real life friend J for telling me how good G&T is):

[P]lease consult Lea Goldman’s outstanding, well-researched article “The Big Business of Breast Cancer”, which represents what may be the one and only outgoing link to Marie Claire magazine I will ever offer. It details the proliferation of scams in the charity industry (a fitting, if oxymoronic, term) that has sprouted up around breast cancer. There are many organizations that use the funds they raise primarily to raise more funds and pay handsome salaries to the administrators and their talentless family members.

[....]

The Susan G. Komen Foundationtm has been on my personal shitlist for many years (this post is from 2008). If this is what it takes to get you on the heretofore lonely Screw Komen bandwagon, so be it. But you should not have a low opinion of Komentm because of their announcement on Wednesday. You should have a low opinion of them because they’re a fake charity run like any other company with a product to sell. In this case the product is a combination of guilt, pity, and hope dissolved in a weak acid and dyed a nauseating pink.

[...]

Komen’s founder and CEO, Nancy Brinker, is a big money Republican with ties to the past three Republican administration who received a political appointment from George W. Bush as a reward for her fundraising largesse. She draws a salary of $459,000 annually, money well spent compared to the 39% of its budget the foundation spends on “public health education” (i.e., marketing itself). Not to mention that they also spend a million bucks per year in legal fees to threaten other non-profit groups who use the phrase For the Cure, to which Komentm claims to have intellectual property rights.

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Simp Phony For The Devil

Having taken over Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he’s badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far.  He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network’s racial dog-whistle language?  Williams states:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words.  I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them.  But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives.

Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine.  With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he’s pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich’s ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away.  I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but the plan seems pretty obvious.

Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with.  Williams knows damn well what he’s doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people.  Weep not for Juan.

Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp’s symphony.

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Fire Walker Chronicles: Don’t Take The Money And Run

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker sure is endearing himself to voters this week as the recall effort has obtained nearly twice the signatures it needed to trigger an election.  His latest antics?  Becoming the latest GOP governor to turn down a federal grant to create a state health insurance exchange, all but assuring that the feds will have to step in and do it in 2014…if Walker’s still in office, that is.

Wisconsin will turn down $37 million from the federal government that had been awarded to help implement health care exchanges under President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, Gov. Scott Walker said Wednesday.

Walker announced in December that Wisconsin would not pursue implementing the exchange until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the law.

But he did not say whether the state would take the money. On Wednesday Walker said he was notifying the federal government that Wisconsin was turning down the Early Innovator Grant, saying it didn’t make sense to commit to reforms that could have a devastating economic impact.

“Stopping the encroachment of ObamaCare in our state, which has the potential to have a devastating impact on Wisconsin’s economy, is a top priority. Wisconsin has been a leader and innovator in health care reform for two decades, and we have achieved a high level of health insuranEce coverage without federal mandates,” Walker said in a statement.

The American Cancer Society called the Republican governor’s action a move backward.

“A robust, consumer-friendly health exchange designed specifically for Wisconsin would greatly expand access to care to those who need it most, while preserving what already works. It’s unfortunate the (Walker) administration is deciding to ignore this reality,” said Allison Miller, Wisconsin government relations director for the American Cancer Society.

Walker and his Koch Brothers masters don’t want to expand access to care to Wisconsin’s poor.  There’s no massive profit in keeping poor people alive through health care, you know.  The funny part is while Walker is screaming about a GUBMINT TAKEOVER, that’s effectively what will happen if the exchange isn’t created:  federal law means that Washington will step in and create and run the state exchanges if the states refuse to do it.  I guess Walker is counting on Republicans taking complete control in 2012 and repealing everything back to 1867, or at the very least defunding the PPACA along with most of the rest of the federal government.

Wisconsin would join Kansas and Oklahoma in that respect if Walker goes through with it.  Somehow I’m thinking he won’t be around too much longer to make decisions like these.

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A Funny Thing Happened On The Way Out Of Des Moines

It turns out Mitt Romney may not have won in Iowa after all.

Mitt Romney received 20 fewer votes than are reported from a Moulton precinct in numbers posted by the Republican Party of Iowa, the Appanoose County GOP chairman said today.

The final vote between Iowa caucuses winner Mitt Romney was eight ahead of Rick Santorum.

“We stand by the figures that were presented by the Moulton precinct caucus,” said Lyle Brinegar, chairman of the Appanoose County GOP.

Matt Strawn, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, continued to express confidence Friday that the order of finish will not change. He said the party would make no further comment until its two-week vote certification process is complete.

Moulton resident Edward True has signed an affidavit saying that he helped count the vote at the Garrett Memorial Library in Moulton and that the precinct had two votes for Romney, not 22, as reported online by the state GOP.

But here’s the kicker: the article goes on to say that even if Santorum did win that it doesn’t really change anything, we’re told.  Rick’s Slick is still going to lose in every other state.

Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford said the results – even if the certification reveals a different answer – will change little other than bragging rights.

Santorum, who for months remained in the single digits in polls, wildly beat expectations, and that is the real story, Goldford said. The caucuses don’t result in an actual election, so there’s no additional harm done in terms of having to eject a candidate from a position, Goldford noted.

Now that’s odd.  Republicans keep screaming how the voting process is inherently corrupt if it ever produces a Democrat as the winner because they always steal elections, therefore we must have strict voting laws in every state for every election that makes it as difficult as possible for people to vote in order to protect the integrity of the election system.  We have to pass laws to immediately protect the sacred process from the evils of those people who may try to vote 4812 times.  It’s the only way one of them could end up President you know, and if you don’t agree you’re evil vote-stealing scum anyway.

But that election system apparently doesn’t matter when it comes to the coronation of Mitt Romney as nominee as fast as possible.  Strange how that works.  Democrats aren’t even American as far as most Republicans are concerned, but it’s all good if Republicans fiddle with the election system.  It’s just a caucus, right?  Besides, ACORN ACORN ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY BLAH CHICAGO WAY.

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Fire Walker Chronicles: The GOP’s Signature Move

The massive political game of chicken that is the recall effort against Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker (working title? Recall: The Electoral Opera)  entered a new phase as former GOP State Senator and Republican-friendly judge J. Mac Davis ruled in favor of the Governor as expected, saying now that the burden of vetting the recall petition signatures now falls on the state’s election officials and not Walker.

The ruling by Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis came in a case filed Dec. 15 by Walker’s campaign committee and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, asking Davis to order the accountability board to seek out and eliminate duplicate and fictitious signatures and illegible addresses in recall petitions.

Davis, who refused to enter injunctions in the case, based his decision on his interpretation of state law, more than on equal protection arguments brought up by the Republicans. He also said that the board must take “reasonable” efforts to eliminate such signatures.

Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel of the board, said after the hearing that his organization would have to discuss the decision to see what it needed to change in procedures already in place.

In court, Kennedy testified that entering signatures into a database to look for duplicates could take eight extra weeks for his staff, and could cost $94,000 for software and outside help.

Steven M. Biskupic, attorney for the Republicans, argued that not catching invalid signatures violated the constitutional rights to equal protection of people who chose not to sign recall petitions.

The second-best part is now that Democrats will be blamed for the bill after the Republicans sued in a heavily Republican county in front of a judge that was a former Republican state senator.  The best part is that if the board manages to get all the signatures processed and certifies them, it will be a massive Obama/ACORN conspiracy because the signatures weren’t vetted by Walker’s people.

Win-win for the Kochs, frankly.

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Fire Walker Chronicles: Home Field Shutout

Looks like not only will Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker get his day in court to argue that the state’s recall process is unconstitutional, but that Democrats will be locked out of the case, unable to present arguments to defend the recall.

A judge in Wisconsin has ruled that Democratic recall organizers cannot challenge a lawsuit brought by the state GOP against election officials — a suit that claims Gov. Scott Walker’s constitutional rights are being violated by the state’s petition review process.

This means that barring a hypothetical appeal, any continuing litigation in this matter will be conducted exclusively between the state GOP and the election board’s attorney, without the Dems themselves being able to participate and present legal arguments.

“I was a little surprised,” said Jeremy Levinson, the attorney for the recall committee, in an interview with TPM. “It’s the first time I can recall — let me rephrase — it’s the first time I’m aware of a recall-related lawsuit where only the official who is being targeted for recall gets to be a party, and the folks who are working to recall that official are shut out of the process.”

It does seem rather pointedly ridiculous that Walker’s argument is that the burden of challenging recall signatures is “unconstitutional” abridgement of his rights, but being able to challenge that very argument in court is apparently completely unnecessary, and that the rights of the people of Wisconsin to exercise their free speech in a state-mandated recall process doesn’t actually matter so much compared to being Governor.

No wonder that the GOP filed the lawsuit in their home turf of Waukesha County to get a friendly judge, in this case a former GOP State Senator.  The case will proceed forward next week with that same judge hearing Walker’s arguments and the motion to dismiss the case on January 5th.  Meanwhile Walker and his allies are pushing to win the battle of public opinion, having already spent over a million bucks in ads fighting the recall petition in just the last six weeks.

We’ll see how that goes.

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But you never see the lies that you believe

Esquire (via):

There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here’s one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.

Meanwhile, the Times reports:

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Go figure.

A huge part of the conservative/establishment media project will be devoted to explaining the collapse of the middle-class is a good thing—it’s the Bell Curve-style IQ stratification that maximizes efficiency, all the awesome modern conveniences like Facebook an flatscreens make up for it, etc.

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Back To The Middle And Around Again

As the Occupy movement struggles to stay in place with winter and multiple pepper spray fronts lashing the countryside, the Right screams that the dirty, criminal hippies deserve to be kicked out of “private property” unlike the law-abiding owners of Zuccotti Park.  Oh wait.

It turns out that the owners of Zuccotti Park — the historic site of Occupy Wall Street — have been engaged in some of the very same tax-dodging that many of the protesters were enraged about. The “city Finance Department says park owner Brookfield Properties and its parent company, Brookfield US Corp., currently owe the city more than $139,000 in unpaid business taxes from 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.”

Never you mind that unpaid tax bill thing and dating the Mayor.  Them hippies need a-punchin’, so a-punchin’s gonna git done.

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Class Inaction

An enterprising law firm saw a payday in Ticketmaster’s long-time policy of tacking on extra fees to tickets, so they came up with a convoluted class-action settlement that gives everyone who bought a ticket in the last 12 years a $1.50 credit on a new ticket. Along with probably millions of others, I got an email notification of this settlement yesterday. Reader Daniel was, rightly, incensed by this puny action, and he sent links to a Facebook group that opposes the settlement, as well as a objection filed by an attorney that contains this:

13) Under the proposed Settlement, Lead Class Counsel will be eligible to request and receive fees of up to fifteen million dollars ($15,000,000) in consideration for eight years of purported service toward negotiating a Settlement under which each Class member would receive an “award” which not only has no cash value, but is otherwise virtually useless to anyone but Defendant.

This is the key point in these do-nothing class actions. Some enterprising group of attorneys sees a nickel-and-dime corporate screw job. They construct a class action lawsuit to address it. Then they entice the corporation to accept a settlement by constructing a toothless remedy that can be represented as potential big payday. Once their settlement is accepted by the court, they collect millions of dollars.

In this case, the only way to collect on my Ticketmaster settlement is to buy another ticket. I’ll get $1.50 off of that ticket if I go through whatever baroque procedure will be required to collect my settlement. Ticketmaster still gets to sell me another ticket and collect its still hefty and profitable fee. Considering the few people who will actually bother to go through the nuisance required to get the $1.50, the only winners here are Ticketmaster, who immunized themselves, and the law firm of Alvarado Smith who dreamed up this whole scam.

A real remedy would have Ticketmaster cutting checks and sending them to everyone who bought a ticket. They do have all of our addresses, after all. But that would require actual litigation and risk on the part of Alvarado Smith, which might cut into their $15 million payday, and it might actually affect Ticketmaster’s bottom line. And Bieber knows we can’t accept potential damages to a free market engine of wealth creation like Tickemaster.

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The Independent Investigation Dodge

Apparently the new way for institutions to weasel out of responsibility is to investigate yourself. For example, Syracuse University is getting heat for its decision to have its lawyers rather than police investigate in 2005 when one of its coaches was accused of child rape. The release of a taped phone call that the alleged victim made in 2003, where the coach’s wife corroborates his story, makes that investigation look like a feeble whitewash.

Even Carrier IQ, the cellphone spyware maker, is getting in on this con. Yesterday, a reporter from the Verge committed some journalism by visiting their offices and refusing to go away. He got their PR guy to say that Carrier IQ will come clean about a video showing their software logging every keystroke on a smartphone “soon — after it has external security companies conduct independent validation of the privacy implications in that same video.”

Carrier IQ is saying that it can’t tell us what the software it sells does until the investigators it pays tells them how their own software works. This makes me wonder how Carrier IQ’s software came to be.

Apparently, CEO Larry Lenhart’s mom sent him to the store one day to buy dinner for the family. On the way, he met a man who offered to sell him three magic beans and some software. Instead of buying dinner, Larry gave the man his money and took home the beans and the code. His mother, enraged, threw the beans out the window. Larry went to bed without any dinner. The next morning, ran the software on his computer and found that it could magically track cellphones. Larry founded Carrier IQ and lived happily every after. The End.

There’s a whole crew of PR people who spend their time trying to polish turds. “Independent Investigation” is just a new brand of turd polish, and the sooner reporters stop passing on that kind of PR-bullshit without comment, the better.

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From the ground up

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. As usual, voters are way ahead of professional national opinion leaders. To borrow a phrase used in the article, the Tea Party is now “less an abstraction” to the people who actually live in Tea Party districts, as opposed to the national narrative creators who don’t live in these districts.

Support for the Tea Party — and with it, the Republican Party — has fallen sharply even in places considered Tea Party strongholds, according to an analysis of new polls.

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the movement has risen significantly since it powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections; almost as many people disagree with it as agree with it, according to the analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The analysis suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago. Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made it less an abstraction than it was a year ago. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe people watching the insane debt limit fight from out here in the cheap seats thought it was stupid and counterproductive and reckless, rather than principled and worthwhile? Maybe they’re noticing that Tea Party House members never actually get any work done?

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Fuck you, that’s my message to you

I love this stuff, but I wonder about this guy’s countertops:

At a Natural Resources Committee hearing Friday on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) mistakenly addressed the professor as “Dr. Rice” while calling his testimony “garbage.”

Brinkley interrupted, saying: “It’s Dr. Brinkley, Rice is a university,” and “I know you went to Yuba [Community College in California] and couldn’t graduate —”

Then it was Young’s turn to interrupt. “I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair,” he told the witness. “You just be quiet.”

Brinkley countered: “You don’t own me. I pay your salary. I work for the private sector and you work for the taxpayer.”

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How low will he go?

Mitch Daniels is the far-Right Governor who created the template for Walker in Wisconsin and Kasich in Ohio. I know the myth goes that the Tea Party took over the formerly moderate GOP in 2010 and that’s where the coordinated conservative multi-state strategy came from, but the truth is there’s no daylight between Walker and Kasich and Daniels and Daniels has been in office since 2005. The Tea Party Theory never really made any sense.

Daniels has been putting in place the identical conservative policies and practices that Walker and Kasich espouse, and he’s been doing that unimpeded since 2005. I look to Indiana to see what’s up next on the multi-state, anti-worker agenda.

Daniels ended public employee unions by executive order shortly after he was elected and he’s conducted a careful, low-key campaign to destroy unions in Indiana since that time.

Gov. Mitch Daniels says Indiana could see an economic boost from a contentious “right-to-work” proposal, but stopped short of saying he wants state legislators to approve it.
A legislative study committee voted 5-4 along party lines last week to support a proposal that would prohibit workers from being required to pay union representation fees. A bill on the issue sparked this year’s five-week walkout by House Democrats
The Republican governor told the Kokomo Tribune’s editorial board on Thursday that a “right-to-work” law would make the state more competitive.
“We know there is about a quarter of the opportunities that won’t look at us because of the lack of this law,” Daniels said.
While Daniels hasn’t publicly endorsed the proposal, his state commerce secretary testified in favor of it during a study committee meeting in July.

Daniels knows this is a politically perilous issue for Republicans- there are a significant number of private sector union members who vote Republican-so he’ll keep some distance between his carefully crafted brand and the policies he supports and actively, if not publicly, promotes. Daniels is a much better politician than Walker or Kasich.

Daniels is promising jobs (again) if he’s successful in ending private sector collective bargaining in Indiana, which is what he promised when he ended public sector collective bargaining in Indiana, way back in 2005.

These are the unemployment rates in Indiana and Ohio 8.9 versus 9.1

Daniels has had years and years to put in the far-Right “jobs” plan he created, and this is where Indiana is when compared to Ohio, in terms of unemployment: 8.9 versus 9.1

The ever-elusive job creators are apparently holding out for one more concession from Mr. Daniels. Well, not really “from” Mitch Daniels. Job creators are demanding one more concession from the people of Indiana. No jobs for Indiana unless there’s no organized labor in Indiana. Daniels has given them everything they demanded since 2005, and more, and he’s still chasing them down that hill. He just lowered the corporate income tax rate and they’re already back for more goodies. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t give them. They probably know that by now.

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