Month: January 2012

scrapple tv news! fresh off the griddle:  Joe Paterno is still dead, the Inquirer/DN might as well be, Chris Christie is an apologist for George Wallace, and more!

With 94% of the vote counted in Florida, there have been roughly 1,583,000 votes cast. In the 2008 Republican primary in Florida, roughly 1,950,000 votes were cast. There’s probably about 100,000 votes left to count tonight, but we can already see that despite a growing population, approximately 300,000 fewer Republicans voted tonight than four years ago. Even so, Romney is going to wind up with about 130,000 more votes than McCain received when he won the Sunshine State. McCain won with 36% of the vote, while Romney is currently holding steady at forty-seven percent.

Clearly, this was a strong showing by Mitt Romney. But the overall turnout numbers are definitely depressed. I think that’s what we’d expect to see from this shitty cast of candidates, but it’s also probably a result of the saturation-level of blisteringly negative advertising. As if Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul were not ridiculous enough on their own, Floridians were reminded two hundred times a day.

What would have me worried is if people were coming out of the woodwork to vote in these primaries, but, so far, that has not been the case.

It has been a great night for Romney, but every time he’s gotten in this position before, the Republican base has regurgitated him like a sour apple. There are still some unanswered questions. Is Ron Paul completely finished or has he built an infrastructure to succeed in the upcoming caucus states? Is he lying like a snake in the grass, or is his 7% performance tonight more indicative of his prospects? If there is one more anti-Romney backlash in store, will it go to Santorum or Gingrich? How much longer will Santorum soldier on?

The common wisdom is that Romney will win the Nevada caucuses easily, and I share that expectation. But if it doesn’t happen, this thing could still stay interesting. Personally, I don’t mind Gingrich and Paul continuing on taking their shots at Romney (although Paul doesn’t do much of that), but unless they’re going to win somewhere, I’m ready for Romney to wrap this up. I don’t want him getting organized in every state in the union. Ding him up a little more, but after Super Tuesday, leave the organizing to the professionals on the Democratic side. We don’t want the competition.

This was clever. If women need to pay for a sonogram before getting an abortion then men can pay for a rectal exam before they get their boner pills. It’s actually better than what I would have suggested, which is a mandatory x-ray of their testicles.

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It’s very important to show member states that the U.S. takes its responsibility in tough situations. A timely speech not to make war, but an attempt to avoid military intervention and civil war. This once again illustrates the change in the Obama administration since summer 2011 and a policy of peace making in the greater Middle East. Can Obama and Clinton accomplish their objectives working with regional powers like the Arab League, GCC states and the EU?

Syria: UN Security Council debates response to violence with VIDEO

The council is deciding whether to adopt an Arab League plan calling for an end to violence and for President Bashar al-Assad to stand down. Qatar’s prime minister urged council members to take action against what he called Mr Assad’s “killing machine.” Russia says the plan amounts to regime change and could lead to civil war – it is expected to veto the resolution.

 « click for video C-Span [soon]

Syria unrest: Clinton and Hague back Arab League plan at UN

(Guardian) Jan. 30, 2011 – Hillary Clinton, William Hague and Alain Juppé are due at the UN security council in New York on Tuesday to support an Arab League plan to end the violence in Syria and to try to overcome Russian-led opposition to a UN-backed demand for political change in Damascus.

As Syrian forces poured into Damascus districts to wrest them from rebel control, a joint European-Arab resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to hand power to his deputy as a prelude to political transition won the support of the 10 security council member states necessary to force a vote.

Diplomats at the UN said that a vote on the resolution, formally presented by Morocco, was likely by Thursday, after the council considers a report on the Syrian situation by the Arab League secretary general, Nabil Elaraby, and the Qatari prime minister, Hamad Bin Jassim, on Tuesday followed by an ambassadors’ meeting on Wednesday aimed at finding a compromise formula acceptable to Russia, Assad’s principal supporter on the world stage.

“We believe the UN must act to support the people of Syria and that Russia can no longer explain blocking the UN and providing cover for the regime’s brutal repression,” a Downing Street spokeswoman said.

Juppé’s spokesman, Bernard Valero said: “The goal of tomorrow’s ministerial meeting is to ensure that the security council has an opportunity to listen to the report by the Arab League, which has been involved on the ground since the end of December, and that it is able to support its efforts and recommendations.”

Moscow, which has threatened to veto the security council resolution, views it as a western-backed attempt to open the door to military intervention.  

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Maybe it’s because the blogosphere is only really two presidential elections old, or maybe it’s just an inalterable characteristic of the left, but I hope one day we are collectively experienced enough to absorb the futility of which Bob Cesca speaks:

It always happens. When Republicans are in charge, we take the gloves off and fiercely attempt to replace them with a Democrat. But when Democrats are in charge, too many liberals take on this too-hip-for-the-room attitude and either criticize the arrangement of the two party system or insist that both sides are evil.

Neither side is flawless, however, one side is much closer to our values. The other isn’t even close. Shitting on “both sides” only serves to weaken the closer side — the Democratic side.

I’m just reaching middle-age, so it’s not that I am so long in the tooth that I’ve had time to figure out what younger people still need to learn. And it’s not like I’m not guilty myself. I abstained from voting in 1996 because I was displeased with the Clinton administration. When they impeached the Big Dog I woke up.

Electing presidents is only one opportunity for progressive activism. If you want to go out and try to fix our electoral system, I’m fully supportive of that. If you want to work on issues that both major political parties oppose, there are plenty of areas that are ripe for activism: prison reform, the War on Drugs, a less interventionist foreign policy, a smaller military/intelligence/homeland security budget, restoring sanity to our detainee policy, etc. However, you should recognize that changing these policies requires efforts that are largely divorced from electoral politics. Neither party is running many candidates who are on the right side of these issues. Some may pay some lip service to cutting defense spending or closing Gitmo, for example, but they don’t mean it. The ones that aren’t crazy are cowards. And, in any case, there’s not enough of them.

Think about an issue like marijuana legalization in terms of the struggle to win support for gay marriage. You have to convince the people and then the politicians will follow. It’s never going to work the other way around.

I’m still pissed that after we poured our guts into getting Barack Obama elected, a bunch of liberals decided to start attacking him before he could even be inaugurated. And then too many of them obsessed about policies that were dictated by congressional arithmetic, or by the lack of courage and unity of Democrats, or by political reality. Most of what is really wrong about America isn’t questioned by either party and has been a feature of every administration since the end of World War Two. Yet, one of the political parties is not what it used to be. It can be aptly described as:

80% paranoid imbeciles squatting in the rubble of the Space Age raging about Negroes and socialism.

20% hucksters turning a buck by pandering to the rage and paranoia of rubble-squatting morons.

Some of us noticed this during the Bush years. Most of the rest of us have learned it since then.

I mean, even if the president wasn’t the best, most effective, least ethically challenged president we’ve had in over half a century, he’d still be the only thing standing between us and an administration that would make Bush and Cheney look moderate. Did they not do enough damage in eight years to convince you that there’s a difference between the two parties? Really? You need more proof?

Oh, good. Dan Burton is retiring. Now he can dedicate more time to shooting watermelons in his backyard. I had forgotten about his proposal to build a transparent bullet-proof shield around the House chamber. I guess he took a look at Congress’s approval numbers. He was also a major pimp for the vaccines-cause-autism crew, and that appears to be discredited.

How quickly we forget the insanity of the 1990’s. Dan Burton had a lot of hits.

Another Burton obsession is the AIDS virus. As with the Foster case, he attracted attention, and considerable criticism, when he proposed mandatory AIDS testing for everyone in the country. According to former representative Andrew Jacobs Jr. (D-Ind.), Burton is so concerned with AIDS that he will not eat soup in a restaurant.

Just think about that for a while.

You might not be seeing a lot of evidence of this yet, but there’s a very strong likelihood that, as the year progresses, mainstream political journalists will settle on what Bob Somerby famously called “a story they like” — a story that offers a comforting narrative, facts be damned. The story will be that the Republican Party almost went over the edge with all that tea party craziness, but cooler heads prevailed: the “moderate” Mitt Romney won the presidential nomination and teabag-friendly presidential candidates (Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Santorum) were rejected. The GOP is now safe as houses!

In a front-page New York Times story today, Michael Cooper asserts that the GOP appears to have gotten all that crazy stuff out of its system at the state level:

Second Year In, Republican Governors Moderate Tone

A year after a coterie of new Republican governors swept into the statehouses and put in place aggressive agendas to cut spending and curb union powers, sparking strong backlashes in many places, many of them are adopting decidedly more moderate tones as they begin their sophomore year in office.

… many of the new Republican governors who swept into office last year, taking aim at collective bargaining rights, are striking less confrontational notes as they begin the new year, at least judging by what they have been saying in their State of the State addresses.

But there are a few problems with Cooper’s narrative — as he himself notes:

Of course, governors do not always propose their toughest measures in their annual speeches to lawmakers. Last year, [Governor Scott] Walker of Wisconsin used his State of the State address to call on government workers to contribute more to their pension plans; he did not mention his plan to curb collective bargaining rights until later.

Oh yeah — that.

Also:

To be sure, some governors — both first-termers and veterans — are still proposing measures that are sure to cause controversy this year.

Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, proposed a major overhaul of the state’s tax system that would lower tax rates but eliminate deductions and credits — including popular ones, like deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions and tax credits for poor families….

And more laws that aim to curb the power of unions are being pursued in a number of states this year.

Unions and Democrats were thrown on the defensive this year in Indiana when [Governor Mitch] Daniels, serving in his second — and last — term, switched course and decided to support a bill to ban union contracts from requiring nonunion members to pay union dues….

In South Carolina, a right-to-work state whose unemployment rate remained at 9.5 percent in December, above the national average, Gov. Nikki R. Haley, a Republican beginning her second year in office, took a hard line on unions in her address to the Legislature. “I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country,” she said, calling it “an economic development tool unlike any other.” She pledged to “make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina.”

Teacher tenure continues to be a flashpoint in many states. The governors of New Jersey, South Dakota and Virginia all used their speeches this year to call for abolishing or weakening it….

But hey — apart from all that, the GOP is really, really mellowing!

Except that’s not true. Cooper doesn’t even mention what’s going on in Republican-dominated states with regard to abortion and reproductive rights. Here’s a sample of January headlines from Google News:

Abortion Ban to Be Proposed in Kansas Legislature

Abortion Bills Fill Desks in Virginia Capitol

Florida Lawmakers Push Again to Restrict Abortions

New Hampshire Considers Defunding Planned Parenthood, Weakening Domestic Violence Laws

But that’s not how the press wants to cover the GOP in the year of the Romney-Obama race. That’s not how the press ever wants to cover the GOP — the press never wants to acknowledge the party’s extremism. The press wants to say that the party is fine, our two-party system is fine, and anything intemperate that Republicans have ever done is anomalous, and unrepresentative of the fine folks all insider journalists meet at cocktail parties. So we get stories like Cooper’s.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog)

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A Civics lesson. LOL

Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC Hauls in More Than $1 Million

(ABC News) – The Stephen Colbert super PAC is run by a comedian, but the political action committee’s bank account is no joke, based on federal reports filed today. Colbert created the super PAC, officially called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow in June.

The super PAC is “rolling seven digits deep,” as Stephen Colbert,47, said in a statement to the Federal Election Commission today, having hauled in more than $1.02 million as of Jan. 30.

“We raised it on my show and used it to materially influence the elections – in full accordance with the law,” Comedy Central comedian Colbert said in a statement. “It’s the way our Founding Fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.”

In the last six months of 2011, Colbert’s PAC spent about $150,000. As of December 31, it had nearly $640,000 cash on hand, according to the FEC report.

The majority of the spending went to creating the super PAC’s web site, legal fees and media consulting fees. The PAC spent about $31,000 on “t-shirt manufacturing” and about $3,000 on “advertisements” as well.

While super PACs can, by law, accept unlimited donations, the largest amount Colbert’s PAC received from one donor was $19,200, which was given by Alex Rigopulos, the CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. A total of 339 people donated to the PAC from July through December.

In the weeks leading up to the South Carolina primary, Colbert transferred power of his super PAC to fellow comedian Jon Stewart in an on-air ceremony on “The Colbert Report” complete with a sci-fi-style money-power transfer and celebratory balloon drop.

Read more …

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N E W S L E T T E R

Dear Super PAC Nation,

For those of you holding your breath for the past few weeks, you may exhale. For those of you who did not survive holding your breath: You did not die in vain. Because I, Stephen Colbert, have regained control of Colbert Super PAC.

Earlier tonight, I confronted Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, and chased him all the way to The Colbert Report, in the most action-packed TV crossover since that time Urkel guest-starred on Full House.

The way I see it, the Supreme Court said that money is speech, and Jon Stewart was hogging all my speech. Now I’ve taken that speech from Jon, making him like that movie “The Artist”: French.

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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

Steve M. is worried that Gingrich’s extreme clownishness is not so much damaging Romney as it is making him look reasonable and presidential by comparison. There’s something to that. Before I talk about that, though, I’d like to attempt to ease Steve’s mind a bit by pointing out that the Gallup poll he cites is a bit of an outlier. When Rasmussen is showing a five point lead for Obama in a head-to-head with Romney and an approval rating north of 50%, you can be sure the president is doing better than a dead heat with R Money (his rapper name).

Here’s where I think Steve is correct. When Newt goes on and on about how Romney is pro-choice (he’s not), pro-taxes (he’s not), pro-ObamaCare (he’s not), and whatever else he is or is not, it makes Romney look more moderate than he really is. Calling him a “Massachusetts moderate” over and over again actually helps Romney with the general electorate. Romney’s chances against Obama are not being hurt by attacks from his right.

But they are being hurt when Gingrich talks about Bain Capital or accuses him of being a flip-flopper with no principles. When Newt calls him a liar and dishonest, he leaves a few marks on Romney’s character. Romney wants to run as a successful job-creating businessman with airtight moral values. And he’s got some fatass Georgian demagogue out there saying he’s a deceitful rip-off artist. At least Little Rickey Santorum understands that the proper way to attack Romney is on health care. Santorum wants to win the nomination, but it’s not worth risking the total destruction of the probable nominee. The swing-voters aren’t going to vote for Obama because of RomneyCare, but they might vote for him because they think Romney is some combination of Ebenezer Scrooge, Henry F. Potter, and Scrooge McDuck.

And some criticisms have a lasting sting. Jon Huntsman called Romney a “perfectly lubricated weather-vane.” There are some insults you just can’t take back. For a different take on the impact of Gingrich, John Batchelor has one of those lame no-one-on-the-record pieces at The Daily Beast. His anonymous Republican sources are not enjoying the spectacle.

“…If Newt is the candidate, he’ll lose badly. If Mitt is the candidate, he’ll lose slightly less badly … So what you have is an almost complete guarantee that if these are the candidates, Barack Obama will be reelected.”

Or, with more punch:

I asked a veteran Republican member of Congress what this year looked like from Capitol Hill following the President’s workman-like State Of The Union address. “A year from now, the president will make the same speech, and the House leaders will still think what they’re doing matters, and the Senate will still be where everything goes to die. No change except I’ll say, ‘Mitt who?’”

So, yeah, there is some upside for Romney in looking relatively sane and presidential compared to the Newtser, but his main rationale for being the president is getting pretty tarnished. He’s not inspiring much confidence.

I hope Newt stays in to the bloody end and then gives a nasty speech at the GOP convention that insults everyone and their mothers.

Sen. Richard Burr has a lot of nerve. He was one of only two senators to vote today against a bill that prohibits members of Congress and their staffers from making stock trades based on insider information. Back during the economic collapse, Sen. Burr was briefed by the Treasury Secretary on the severity of the crisis. This is what he did with that information:

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take. And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

He didn’t warn his constituents. He panicked. He sought to protect himself, but he didn’t seek to protect the people of North Carolina. And now he opposes a ban on members of Congress repeating his cowardice and selfishness.