Choosing Warren: This Would Be Bad, Because… ?

Excellent article by Joe Nocera, in the NYTimes, on the way that “Consumers [are] Clamoring for a Leader”:

... “We’re Trojan-horsing people with the messaging,” said Bonnie Abaunza, one of the Brigadettes. In addition to Mr. Zimmer, supporters of the Main Street Brigade include the directors James Brooks and Ron Howard as well as other Hollywood celebrities. Its purpose is to back the work of Americans for Financial Reform, a large coalition of organizations pushing for financial reform. The coalition’s Web site lists the subjects it follows, including foreclosure, derivatives and mortgage reform.

And, of course, Elizabeth Warren.
[...]

What struck me… was the bluntness of [Warren’s] language. She used words like “tricks,” “fleece,” and “bribe” to describe the actions of mortgage and credit card lenders. And I think a lot of her appeal stems from that simple fact: she describes abuses — predatory lending, hidden fees, bewildering “disclosures” that hide more than they disclose — in precisely the way most Americans have experienced them. She conveys a powerful sense that she understands what we’ve been through this last decade.

Her critics have complained that in her quest to avenge the downtrodden consumer, she could endanger the safety and soundness of banks, by writing rules that would strip them of billions in profits. Her essential position is that if taking advantage of borrowers is necessary to save the banks, then there is something deeply wrong with the banking system in America. The American Bankers Association may not agree with that, but that is unquestionably what most Americans believe. And they are right.

Please go read the whole article. I’ve seen a lot of the classic progressive circular-firing-squad harumphing that if so many people want Elizabeth Warren appointed to head the agency she was largely responsible for starting, there must be something wrong with the idea. Especially if some of the agitators are ‘Hollywood liberals’ who cannot possibly understand what Heartland Americans™ want from their government. And besides, if Obama does appoint Warren, his critics will slam him for picking an aging white feminist with a working-class background—the conservatives will say she’s a token, and the activists will say she’s a PUMA. Because those same critics would never, ever object to a white upper-class man from a privileged background, of course…

Sometimes, rarely, the “simple” solution is also the correct solution. I really hope Obama appoints Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau come September, when he’s back from his vacation and we’re all ready to Get Serious again.

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We don’t need no stinking majority

This (from the Hill via NoMoreMisterNiceGuy) isn’t getting as much attention as I thought it would:

He (Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy) suggested that if that happens some Democrats might not support Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to be speaker, and might instead opt to vote with Republicans to pursue their priorities.

... “Why do you think that if we don’t win 39, we still couldn’t be able to get speaker?”

His musings suggest the GOP is looking at options to make now-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) the speaker of the House by pursuing a coalition with Democrats….

When I was in California, Willie Brown convinced someone a Republican in the State Assembly to switch allegiances and support Brown for speaker…which allowed Brown to remain speaker. And there was that debacle in New York State where two Democratic State Senators switched allegiances and made a Republican the Senate Majority Leader (temporarily).

Is there any precedent for this at the federal level? Or is this guy smoking tea?

Update. I forgot about Jeffords. Duh.

But McCarthy suggests that this could be done with 5 or so Democrats switching allegiances. Is there any precedent for anything on that scale?

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Early Morning Open Thread: Soiled-Dove-Grey Lady

Once again, the rumors are getting louder about the New York Times going (back) behind a paywall. It probably says a lot about my personal biases that I found Foster Kamer’s Gawker article the most interesting—not least because of the comments engendered by it. You don’t get nearly such a range of… creativity… in the “Letters to Ye Editors”.

I would actually be willing to pay some kind of subscription to keep a high-quality “paper of record” online, because I’ve reduced a 30-year daily newspaper addiction down to a Sunday-only over-the-counter purchase for the ad inserts and leisurely browsing when screenreading isn’t convenient. And as a comparatively old person with an established pressed-pulpwood addiction, I should be a prime target. But I bitterly resent the idea of giving so much as a thin dime to the godsdamned New York Times, because they’re the Gordon-Gekko-besotted bandits who eviscerated my dependable Boston Globe and sabotaged its various delivery services in a (vain) attempt to “convince” Bostonians of a better-than-fourth-grade reading ability to switch to the NYTimes. As it turns out, Sulzberger’s People could wean me off buying the Globe, but they couldn’t force me to buy the Times, and I can only assume I’ve got plenty of company out here in the wilds beyond the Hudson. Suggestions as to alternative options gratefully accepted.

But it gladdened my shriveled heart to read that The Moustache of Understanding is no longer sanguine about the free exchange of ideas in the global marketplace…

Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times’ last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. Not long before the Times ultimately pulled the plug on TimesSelect, Friedman wrote Sulzberger a long memo explaining that, while he was initially supportive of TimesSelect, he’d been alarmed that he had lost most of his readers in India and China and the Middle East.

“As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition,” Friedman recently told me by phone. “What was coming to me anecdotally from my travels was the five worst words that as a columnist you ever want to hear: ‘I used to read you before you went behind the wall.’”

Friedman is now “pro some kind of pay model,” he says. “My own feeling is, we have to do anything we can to raise money,” he told me. “At some point we gotta charge for our product.”

I asked Friedman whether any of the technologists he meets during his globe-trotting had presented any groundbreaking ideas for how to save the Times and journalism. While he’s optimistic about the coming crop of tablets and e-readers, the answer is no. “We’re in a megatransition. It hasn’t ever felt like anyone has the answer,” he said. “My macro feeling is that I’m glad I had this job at this time. It was great working at the paper when it was on dead trees and could pay for itself.”

Such are the harsh judgements that must be made when a Very Serious Person’s family fortunes are cruelly reduced from a decently prosperous $3-billion-plus to a mere handful of millions. Perhaps the NYT’s last paywall-free front page can headline a five-page article chronicling the sad plight of its most illustrious pundits, reduced to scrabbling for speaking fees and book contracts with the unwashed hoi polloi from Fox News and the wingnuttier outposts of Heartland America™.

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Ratfucking in the Bay State

Special elections, like next Tuesday’s to replace Teddy Kennedy, are all about voter turnout. And suppressing turnout, by discouraging Democratic supporters and potential swing votes, in order to give Scott “Cosmo Boy” Brown an edge is Rethug Ratfucking 101. Yeah, Martha Coakley lacks the fire and sparkle (vigah!) one might wish to inspire the progressive troops. But Coakley is the first woman within spitting distance of the seat because the Democratic powers-that-be here in the commonwealth are still very much Good Old Bhoyos, and they are terrified of any Vagina-American who doesn’t come across as a bloodless paper-shuffler. Coakley is the Massachusetts equivalent of Hilary Clinton.

And Scott Brown is Sarah Palin without the starbursts. He may even be dumber than Palin, although he doesn’t come across quite as vicious, possibly because he’s got more socially acceptable outlets for physical violence. Giving him a higher profile would make Boston comedians’ jobs a whole lot easier, which in combination with the traditional Irish/Italian ethnic gynophobia probably explains his endorsement by certain jovial professional alcoholics. As a lifelong drone in the state’s Permanent Minority Party, Brown’s never found a position he couldn’t be against before he was in favor, or vice versa—he’s a low-rent, downscale version of Willard Romney, doggedly pursuing the role of farce to Mitt’s tragedy.

Rethuglican tools like Byron York will be all over the airwaves this weekend, using the Wingnut Wurlitzer and their fellow Media Village Idiots to trumpet Brown’s “scrappy underdog” credentials. (They’ve also got an even-further-right stalking horse in the race, a glibertarian “Independent” whose entire campaign seems to be ‘My legal name is Joe Kennedy, and confusing elderly voters is what passes for an honorable tradition among us swamp yankees.’) It’s up to us DFHs to fight back against the Republican propaganda—and to remember that it’s always propaganda.

ETA: There were, of course, a metric shit-ton of both Brown and Coakley ads during the local evening news. NOT ONE of Brown’s ads use the word “Republican”—he calls himself an ‘independent’ who will ‘fight for all the people of Massachusetts, Democrats and independents and others’. The anti-Coakley ads are sponsored by some group whose name I caught as Citizens-Working-for-Better-American-Democracy (probably not the exact title), but again, scrupulously avoided the R-Word. Brown is very, very wounded that Coakley supporters would call him names, but the name used most often in those ads is Republican.

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Little Nuts & ACORN

Latoya Peterson at Jezebel has the best concise explanation I’ve seen of the Great FOX News ACORN Scandal. She finds five key questions, and answers them, with an efficiency I can only wish the “established, professional” Media Village Idiots would use more often:

What does ACORN do?
Why did they come up in the 2008 election?
What’s happening with the current controversy?
Where have we seen James O’Keefe before?
What are the mitigating/aggravating factors here?

The comments are well worth reading, too. A number of people discuss their own history with ACORN, stressing the fact that a network of 1200 separate offices with a policy of hiring from the low-income neighborhoods they support, and the usual non-profit-organization tendency to underpay and overwork its staff, will inevitably offer a few soft targets for a right-wing Borat wanna-be with an unlimited budget and no more edifying hobbies to distract him. Since I, unlike Ms. Peterson, am not trying to be scrupulously unbiased, there was one comment I particularly enjoyed:

[T]here are two other “not-malice” possibilities that come to mind as well. 1) As has been pointed out, obvious real-life trolls were obvious and she was fucking with them. 2) When you work in community service in low-income and underprivileged communities, you are often helping people with various mental health problems and people who are just… off. You don’t want to just outright dismiss them, you want to welcome them and accept them, and you kind of develop an attitude of “let’s just hear this guy out.” You can wind up “hearing out” some genuinely messed up and terrible people, because you just kind of get used to folks coming in with very, very, very weird and sketchy claims.

I’m sure Mr. O’Keefe would appreciate the irony that he might just have been mistaken for a genuinely brain-damaged petty criminal looking for a sympathetic audience…

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Effective and disconnected

James Fallows has a very interesting take on Betsy McCaughey’s appearance on Jon Stewart:

As I mentioned this morning, I thought Betsy McCaughey was even more blithely disconnected from the world of reality than I had expected—but that she was weirdly “effective” against Jon Stewart, since there was no way to shame her by pointing out that what she said was untrue. She would just smile, mug at the audience in an “isn’t he cute!” way, and say, No, I’m right.

He then goes on to a lengthy discussion of why what she did worked in a weird way, including various emails. He also predicts that Republican operatives will emulate what McCaughey did. It’s an interesting discussion .

From my perspective, it’s all about the prop. Bringing the first 600 pages of the bill in a binder makes it look like there must be some truth to what she’s saying, even though she has trouble finding the right page and much of what she says is directly contradicted by what is in the bill.

This is actually a pretty old Republican tactic. Refer to some official document—whether it’s the constitution or some letter supporting your economic plan supposedly signed by hundreds of economists—even when what you’re saying has nothing to do with what is in the document. Bringing a hard copy of the document along is the next logical step.

I realize we’ve discussed this appearance before, but what what do you think? Did you think B-Mac was also weirdly “effective”?

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The Rats Turn On Each Other

This was fun to read:

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove was verbally accosted Thursday evening by an ex-chief of staff to former Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.).

Rove was quietly having dinner at the tony restaurant Charlie Palmer Steak on Capitol Hill when he was aggressively approached by Jason Roe, the former Feeney staffer. Roe, now of Federal Strategy Group, was “loud and boisterous” toward Rove. He was apparently (still) upset over the following comments Rove made on Fox News, the day after the election, in which Feeney — along with many other Republicans — went down in flames.

Democrats should remember that it wasn’t too long ago that they were busy shooting at each other and spending much of their time coming up with the best Bob Shrum insult.

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My Thoughts On The Santelli Allegations

For the sake of argument let’s grant Playboy that Rick Santelli’s now famous rant came from an authentic, absolutely genuine outrage that wealthy Republican backers might pay someone else to rant on TV instead of him. Obviously Santelli and the CNBC network would have some egg face but, other than that, who gives a crap? Did Santelli or any of his lame tea parties break out of rightwing blogs? If they did I missed it.

The point is larger than just that these anemic protests had less of an impact than a local WalMart closing. Obama’s stimulus is overwhelmingly popular with the average American. The idea that the trader asshats who caused this mess deserve some special concern or sympathy rightly strikes anyone who isn’t a freep as comically dumb. This isn’t the Clinton blowjob or even Terri Schiavo; the message just doesn’t have any resonance at all. The only people who give a rat’s ass long ago drank the kool-aid and passed out in the dirt.

The question boils down to whether Republicans planned this for weeks with extravagant financial backing, in which case they’re out of touch schmucks. Alternatively rightwing activists spontaneously decided that people would rise up against rescuing the economy. That would make them tone deaf schmucks. Rick Santelli obviously has some personal cred riding on the matter. For the rest of us, though, you’d need a degree in yiddish to tell the difference.

***Update***

This photo (via) will indeed soon eclipse the Moran image as the awesomest summary of rightwingerism ever.

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“What are we going to do?”

Implosion:

Breaking News from Big Eddie:
McCain Camp insiders say Palin “clueless”
Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.”

Awesome!
Popcorn, anyone?
Need a bailout strategy, Senator?

Update: Gonna add the Rumormongering category to this post. It’s not like we have anything to go on by Shultz here.

Update II:

An Ohio farmer would like to invite you to get lost inside the head of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Appropriate, since everything else seems to have gotten lost in there.

Update III: Even if Sarah Palin can’t win a debate, McCain can. In fact, he’s already won tonight’s debate!!

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Big Story?

The case of Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator who has doggedly tried to blow the whistle on some security-related shenanigans for years now, finally lurched into the mainstream with a story in Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Based on the last we heard from Edmonds one would expect the story to expose law enforcement failures that missed the 9/11 plot.

No, Edmonds has much bigger fish to fry.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

Now, nuclear espionage is a pretty serious claim, and without corroborating evidence one can see why US papers felt reluctant to run with it. It also explains why the libel-shy UK press laundered out the names, although some Kossack researchers claim to have filled them back in here. It’s mostly neocons.

But Edmonds is just getting warmed up. When al Qaeda attacked us of September 11, America fairly quickly rounded up a number of people who we had varying reasons to think might have been involved in planning or supporting the attacks. The problem is, according to Edmonds, that some of these guys knew enough about the above nuclear espionage to potentially bring on what they call in Washington an “accountability moment”.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

It goes on from there. Fault me if you like for not being paranoid enough, but the magnitude of Edmond’s claims helps me to understand why American reporters let the story pass. For one thing, I missed the part where they independently verified her claims. If you accuse prominent people of murder (nuclear espionage is arguably worse) then it helps to back it up. There are no Pentagon Papers here, at least not yet. The Times can independently corroborate the general background (Turkish espionage passed on to Pakistan) but not the bombshell.

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

In the end I’m left puzzled. I suppose that a former federal agent willing to make claims like this is news in itself, but the Times seems eager (if not quite ready) to go a step further and report the claims themselves. Until something tangible comes up that warrants stopping the presses (paging TPM Muckraker...) they should resist the urge. Citing Edmonds by name is the one thing that, for me anyway, bumps the story a step up from a Judy Miller snow job.

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Meta

Rumors that an editor was rumored to have heard rumors about a candidate appear to be just that- rumors.

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Emailgate: America Held Hostage, Day 4

The latest developments can be found here.

The whole thing is just weird. The only rational explanations I can think of are that Boylan wrote the email, and now wishes he hadn’t, or has allowed subordinates to write emails for him, one got a little overzealous, and now Boylan is dealing with the shit-storm.

There is, I guess, always the possibility that it was just a spoof to begin with, but you would think the military would want to get to the bottom of that. At the same time, let’s also remember the one thing that the idiots rabidly chasing Beauchamp never did- these guys do have a lot of shit on their plate at the moment.

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The Genesis of the Smears

Appears to have been an aide to Mitch McConnell, according to the Communists at ThinkProgress:

ThinkProgress has obtained an email that congressional sources tell us was sent to reporters by Sen. McConnell’s communications director Don Stewart.

On Monday morning, Don Stewart sent an email with the following text to reporters:

Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggers have done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his own business (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercial rental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that, according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹ despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k for the Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?

In the email, Stewart attacks Democrats for allegedly doing a bad job “vetting this family.” That effort to blame Democrats for the smear campaign seems to have swayed some reporters, as CNN this morning claimed that the real story is that “the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done.”

What is so surprising about all of this is not that all of the stuff in the leaked email has turned out to be completely false- that is just amusing. What is surprising is THE SPEED with which the “citizen journalists” ran with this, and echoed everything the leaked email did- just like good little soldiers. It was viral in no time.

I would not be surprised if Malkin, Limbaugh, and some folks at the NRO were not in the coterie of ‘reporters’ this was emailed to, nor would I be surprised if they got it from a friend of a friend (despite pretending to be different from the beltway crowd, all of the above are insiders to the Washington game, despite their protests otherwise). I’d like to know a little more about the freeper who ran with this in the first place, giving Michelle and others their “in” to run with the story without having to be the ones to take the blame for doing it. Who is icuwhatudo? What is her/his real identity? How is this person connected to the McConnell aide or the reporters who received this list. Or was it just a coincidence? If I prided myself in being a citizen journalist, those are the questions I would be asking.

And does anyone have any pictures of his living room?

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

At Wingnut Media Central, this “report”:

Ann Coulter did her best to drop a bomb on the October 10 episode of “Tucker” on MSNBC. At the conclusion of her interview, Ann Coulter announced that the National Enquirer was just reporting that John Edwards had an 18-month affair while on the campaign trail. You can read the story here.

Before going any further, this allegation must be met with a healthy degree of skepticism. First of all, the story is originating from the National Enquirer, which in and of itself, raises questions as to the story’s reliability. Secondly, Coulter had a notorious run-in earlier this year with Elizabeth Edwards on an MSNBC episode of “Harball.” Coulter would have every motivation to repeat a salacious tabloid sex allegation about John Edwards.

***

With that said, though, you would think that the mere allegation would be worthy of a media frenzy based upon its recent behavior. The media have extensively covered the “bathroom sex” case of Senator Larry Craig. Before that, the media happily reported when Sentator David Vitter’s phone number showed up in the records of the “DC Madam.” Even before that, the Mark Foley story lingered for a month during a crucial point in the 2006 campaign.

***

So now we have a tabloid allegation of marital infidelity by a presidential candidate. And the allegation has been repeated by Ann Coulter on MSNBC - so it’s not as if it can be completely ignored at this point.

But there are big differences between this story and the others mentioned. The sex scandals listed above all involved Republican politicians. And there is less possibility to frame Ann Coulter in a negative light here.

It is not unprecedented for the press to cover a sex scandal involving a Democratic candidate for presdient. Going way back in time, Senator Gary Hart ruined his presidential chances with an extramarital affair, which received plenty of press coverage at the time.

In this case, though, the question has to be asked: will the mainstream media pursue this allegation at all? If the media is to be consistent in its energized pursuit of sex scandals involving politicians, then it will be beating down doors to either confirm of refute this allegation. But will they? The first thought is that the media would be inclined to ignore the allegation, but the potential boost to the Clinton campaign might give the mainstream media a reason for following this storyline. Time will tell.

Let’s put aside the fact that the truth detectors at Newsbusters are comfortable regurgitating the National Enquirer. Let’s put aside their willingness to do Ann Coulter’s work of helping throw this story into circulation. Let’s put aside the fact that the chief difference between all the other “sex” stories and this one is that the others ACTUALLY happened. Let’s put aside all the questions and other comments and focus on the sheer devious nature of the evil liberal media.

Because, as the author clearly points out, if they cover the gossip, they are biased and trying to help Hillary. If they don’t, they are biased and trying to cover for Democrats.

In case you didn’t know, btw, Ann Coulter has a book to sell, so who knows what other bile she will belch into the body politic the next few weeks. One thing is sure, we can count on the citizen journalists at Newsbusters to give it wide play.

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Panty Sniffing Prudes

Larry Flynt may yet make Republicans regret the can of worms they opened by going apeshit about Clinton’s sex life.

Even more than they did when infidelity allegations brought down Newt while Clinton left office a popular president, I mean.

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