Month: May 2015

One thing to remember about Bernie Sanders is that he kept getting reelected as mayor of Burlington because people basically liked the results of his ideas when they got to see them in action. As a congressman and a senator, he hasn’t been able to impose his will or vision on the political process but the country has learned to accept many of the ideas he first introduced as the mayor of Burlington, and he’s won over doubters in the local business community and in the Democratic Party leadership who initially thought that his ideas were loony and dangerous.

That doesn’t mean that he’d be successful as a president. After all, much like Obama or even Clinton, he’d discover that you can’t do much if Congress is filled with skeptics and obstructionists. But he’s worth listening to. In the long run, he probably will see a lot of his ideas win out, one way or the other.

Things are getting a little sketchy at the top of our government. Obviously, the vice-president is entering a period of mourning after the loss of his son, Beau. And now Secretary of State John Kerry has broken his femur in a bicycling accident in France. The administration is operating under an unusual amount of stress at the moment. Let’s hope things remain relatively calm for them at this time so they can gather their wits and begin to recuperate. It’s easy to make big mistakes in circumstances like these.

My thoughts are with the Biden family as they mourn the loss of their son Beau, who died much too young of brain cancer at the age of forty-six. It’s painful to contemplate the idea that Joe Biden will have to bury another one of his children. He’s endured far too much personal loss in his life. I just hope he knows that there are a lot of us out here who have been inspired by how he’s managed to confront the most crippling tragedy and still live a purposeful life full of meaning with grace, humor, and dignity. I know that losing Beau will be a tremendous new challenge for him and his wife Jill, and I hope they get the support that they’re going to need. My thoughts are also with Beau’s wife Hallie, and their two children, Natalie and Hunter.

From my limited (digital) interactions with Howie Klein, I like him a lot. And I have no problem at all with his enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders. But I don’t get why he’s bashing Martin O’Malley for echoing some of Bernie’s themes. Even if O’Malley is a bit of a Johnny-Come-Lately on the economic populism, don’t we want a couple of candidates on Clinton’s left pushing her in our direction? The worst that can happen is that it inoculates her from charges that her maiden name is really Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin. And, since she’s not a communist or even a socialist, I don’t see why a little truth in perception is a bad thing in this case.

The last time someone named “Clinton” was on a presidential ballot in Arizona, they won 47% of the vote and carried the state. Of course, Bill Clinton was the incumbent president and he had a little help from H. Ross Perot who siphoned off some of the proto-Tea Party vote. But, still, he won.

Yet, 47% was a high water mark. In the four elections since 1996, the Democrat has received either 44% or 45% every single time. That’s interesting because it’s been so stable despite major differences in the political climate in each election and despite Arizona’s well-known explosive growth of the Latino population.

Next year, Sen. John McCain will seek reelection and he might expect that he’ll have a little help from the Republican at the top of the ticket. The historical record largely supports that assumption, but there are two factors that should concern him. The first I have already mentioned. Bill Clinton won the state in 1996, so it’s conceivable that House Clinton could cobble together another winning coalition. The second is that eventually the changing demographics of the state are going to show up and cause a shift. The Democrats won’t be trapped in the 45% range forever, and 2016 could be the year this becomes evident.

Republicans in the state seem highly confident that McCain will cruise to reelection despite getting a strong challenger in Democratic Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick. What’s notable about what they’re saying is that they think they can tie Obamacare around Fitzpatrick’s neck and sink her campaign. They tried this last year in a great year for Republicans and they failed to knock her off, but they think a statewide race will be different.

The thing is, even former Governor Jan Brewer realized that the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act was a good deal for Arizona and she used it to cover about 300,000 Arizonans. It turns out, all the hyperventilating about the law was just hot air. And if you ask people about it, they support it right up until the moment you call it Obamacare.

The Medicaid expansion was broadly supported in polls conducted by Brewer’s office as she sought to implement the program. But whenever “ObamaCare” was included in one of the questions, “support fell off the table,” [GOP strategist Matthew] Benson said.

“That term and that issue are going to be a huge problem” for Kirkpatrick, he added.

You know? I’m thinking, not so much.

The assumption here is that statewide President Obama is unpopular and that the voters there will be voting for the Republican nominee in strong numbers. But the election should be relatively close regardless of who wins, and there’s at least a possibility that the Democrat will carry the state.

If John McCain is going to rely much on Kirkpatrick’s vote for Obamacare, he’s setting himself up for a big defeat.

Let it be so.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the brick Victorian house.  The photo I am using is seen directly below.  I will be using my usual acrylics on an 10 by 10 inch gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Having already painted the large shadowed areas of the house, I began to paint the lit areas.  I’m again using brighter than normal colors as I did in the last painting.  The body of the house will be an orange color, a mixture of brown and ochre.  It provides a highly brightened version of the brick seen in the original photo.  As to the roof and foundation, I’ve gone my own way with a light brownish color.  These colors seen to play well with the blue shadowed areas.

The current state of the painting is seen directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

The awesome Texas legislature in Austin just passed a bill that will allow anyone who currently has a concealed weapon license to “to openly tote their handguns in a shoulder or hip holster.” This will allow all Texas males to fulfill their childhood fantasies of living in a Looney Tune state.

Next up, they can go restore order in the Middle East.

Pax Americana, now and forever.

Maybe you don’t pay too much attention to politics or maybe you do pay attention but you focus on what’s lousy about both parties. I get it. I understand. I mean “fuck those people” and “who has the time?”

But, you know, maybe pay attention to this:

[Charles] Murray is probably best known for co-authoring 1994’s The Bell Curve, a quasi-eugenic tract which argued that black people are genetically disposed to be less intelligent than white people. Yet, while The Bell Curve “practically spawned an entire field of scholarship devoted to debunking it,” Murray remains one of the most influential conservative thinkers in America today.

Dr. Murray’s pre-Bell Curve work shaped the welfare reforms enacted in the 1990s. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan cited Murray in 2014 to claim that there is a culture of laziness “in our inner cities in particular.”

Okay, so Paul Ryan was part of the last election. What about the one that’s coming up?

Last April, when Jeb Bush was asked what he liked to read, he replied “I like Charles Murray books to be honest with you, which means I’m a total nerd I guess.”

Does liking quasi-eugenic books about how lazy black people are genetically inferior make you a nerd? Or does it make you something else?

So, maybe you’re thinking that Charles Murray is more complicated than that and he has something more to say than that white supremacy is a scientific fact. That’s probably true. He does have more to say. Mainly, he says that billionaires should pool their money to form a fund that can challenge every effort of the elected Congress and the executive branch to regulate any kind of business activity. With enough frivolous lawsuits to contend with, the regulatory agencies would be neutered.

This, he explains in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, is a better way than trying to win elections.

By The People, however, rejects outright the idea that Murray’s vision for a less generous and well-regulated society can be achieved through appeals to elected officials — or even through appeals to unelected judges. The government Murray seeks is “not going to happen by winning presidential elections and getting the right people appointed to the Supreme Court.” Rather, By The People, is a call for people sympathetic to Murray’s goals — and most importantly, for fantastically rich people sympathetic to those goals — to subvert the legitimate constitutional process entirely.

Also, he’s still whistling to the racist dogs:

The Supreme Court, Murray claims, “destroyed” constitutional “limits on the federal government’s spending authority” when it upheld Social Security in 1937. Since then, the federal government has violated a “tacit compact” establishing that it would not “unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided America” (Murray traces the voiding of this compact to 1964, the year that Congress banned whites-only lunch counters).

So, this is who Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment candidate listens to. If you think there’s no difference between the two parties, you need to pay some more attention to American politics.

Sigh. It’s tough to endure things like this Henry Enten piece that argue that it’s well-nigh impossible to get to Hillary’s left without being a socialist senator from Vermont. It’s one thing to look at some metrics and some past statements and make an effort to compare former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s historical liberalism to Hillary Clinton’s record. But Enten goes a lot further than this and makes a bunch of mistakes in the process.

Let’s begin with some caveats about the metrics. O’Malley was a governor who never served in Congress. Clinton has never been a governor and her voting record reflects the fact that she served New York State, not the country as a whole. Taking a look at fundraising comes with similar problems, but it’s a valuable exercise. Public pronouncements aren’t tremendously different than voting records in terms of being influenced by whatever constituency you are attempting to serve at the moment. The mayor of Baltimore can be expected to sound more liberal than the governor of Maryland, even if they are the same person at different points in their career. The same is true of a First Lady, senator in the opposition from New York, Secretary of State, and candidate in a hotly contested Democratic presidential primary.

I think we can just put most of these metrics aside. For Hillary Clinton, the best indication of what she will do is what her husband did. This isn’t because they are the same person who would always make the same decisions. It’s because political families are families. They develop loyal patrons, fundraisers, political organizers, endorsers, staff, reporters, opinion leaders, lobbying groups, etc. On the margins, Hillary may differ on tactics. Here or there, she may have a different strategic vision. But House Clinton is still House Clinton, and it isn’t going to shed its skin any more than House Bush is going to shed its skin. I think it’s safe to say that there is a whole lot less daylight between Bill and Hillary Clinton than there was between the two George Bushes.

The biggest difference between Bill and Hillary Clinton isn’t their political inclinations or instincts but the passage of time between their campaigns. Bill Clinton had to run for nation’s highest office in a period of conservative ascendency while Hillary is running on the tale end of a two-term Democratic presidency. The demographics of the country have changed and so, too, have the country’s attitudes on a variety of issues. To put it in the simplest terms, if Bill Clinton were running for president in 2016, he would sound a whole lot more liberal than he did when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. If Hillary becomes the next president, she’ll have a more liberal agenda than her husband did for a very simple reason: because she can.

This is a filter that we need to apply to the Clintons, and I think it works in their favor for the most part. But not completely. Remember what I said about political families being families? Well, the Clintons attracted a certain strain of supporters in their formative stage precisely because they were willing to break with liberals and liberal interest groups. And these supporters now form the spine of their political machine. Their central nervous system is acclimated to doing battle with the left regardless of what either of them might choose to say out of political expediency today. Can Team Clinton ever truly play nice with the core of the Obama coalition?

I don’t think it has to be a relationship fraught with conflict and ill-feelings, but I also don’t think you can get the Rahm Emanuel wing of the party to ever play nice with the Bill de Blasio wing, or vice-versa.

Now, I don’t think Martin O’Malley is entrenched in either of these camps, but it’s certainly possible for him to reach out to the de Blasio camp and offer to be their champion. I don’t see how he is really constricted in this by any past statements and he needs to build a much broader donor base for himself anyway, so it’s not like he’d be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Let me be careful here to be clear about what I’m criticizing. If Enten wants to argue that O’Malley is not going to win the Democratic nomination because the left is by and large happy with Hillary Clinton, I agree with that analysis. It’s highly unlikely that anyone can do enough damage to Clinton to cost her her chance at the general election. If she doesn’t make it, it will be some group of problems of her own making that causes her downfall.

But Enten is making a different argument, which is that it doesn’t make any sense for O’Malley to approach this contest by carving out a position to Clinton’s left. But that’s the only thing that makes sense. It worked for Obama, and it can work again. And the reason it worked for Obama was because Team Clinton occupies the center-left with all their hawkish foreign policy goals and willingness to break with liberal orthodoxy.

If you ask an old hand how to run a political campaign, they’ll tell you that people want to feel like a candidate understands their problems and is on their side, and they don’t like politicians who flip-flop or change positions. Hillary Clinton’s strength is the strength of the Clinton brand. But it’s also her weakness. If you’re McDonald’s and the people want health food, you have a problem.

For O’Malley, it could be that his record makes him look like Burger King, but no one knows that. His brand is undeveloped. Howard Dean’s brand was undeveloped, too, which is why he briefly caught fire with liberals despite his ‘A’ rating from the National Rifle Association and other centrist proclivities.

Enten thinks that O’Malley lacks a signature issue to take to the left and doubts that anti-Wall Street populism offers an answer. My question is, then why is Elizabeth Warren so wildly popular?

Whatever his prior rhetoric, O’Malley has some serious liberal credentials, including on abolishing the death penalty and legalizing gay marriage. What he lacks is the voice of a progressive. He sounds too technocratic, like Michael Dukakis. So, how to solve that?

Start talking like a progressive.

It’s a no-brainer.

I have a long memory, so when I saw that the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois had charged former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert with “lying to the F.B.I.” about making large cash withdrawals from banks, it rang all kinds of bells. Some of the first diaries I ever wrote at Daily Kos were about FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and I haven’t forgotten the explosive charges she leveled at Hastert.

Vanity Fair has established that around the time the Dickersons visited the Edmondses, in December 2001, Joel Robertz, an F.B.I. special agent in Chicago, contacted Sibel and asked her to review some wiretaps. Some were several years old, others more recent; all had been generated by a counter-intelligence that had its start in 1997. “It began in D.C.,” says an F.B.I. counter-intelligence official who is familiar with the case file. “It became apparent that Chicago was actually the center of what was going on.”

Its subject was explosive; what sounded like attempts to bribe elected members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican. “There was pressure within the bureau for a special prosecutor to be appointed and take the case on, “the official says. Instead, his colleagues were told to alter the thrust of their investigation – away from elected politicians and toward appointed officials. “This is the reason why [Attorney General John] Ashcroft reacted to Sibel in such an extreme fashion,” he says “It was to keep this from coming out.”

In her secure testimony, Edmonds disclosed some of what she recalled hearing. In all, says a source who was present, she managed to listen to more than 40 of the Chicago recordings supplied by Robertz. Many involved an F.B.I. target at the city’s large Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Consulate, as well as members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associates.

Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes. To a person who knew nothing about their context, the details were confusing and it wasn’t always clear what might be significant. One name, however, apparently stood out – a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. According to some of the wiretaps, the F.B.I.’s targets had arranged for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks. Under Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings.

Hastert himself was never heard in the recordings, Edmonds told investigators, and it is possible that the claims of covert payments were hollow boasts. Nevertheless, an examination of Hastert’s federal filings shows that the level of un-itemized payments his campaigns received over many years was relatively high. Between April 1996 and December 2002, un-itemized personal donations to the Hastert for Congress Committee amounted to $483,000. In contrast, un-itemized contributions in the same period to the committee run on behalf of the House majority leader, Tom Delay, Republican of Texas, were only $99,000. An analysis of the filings of four other senior Republicans shows that only one, Clay Shaw of Florida, declared a higher total in un-itemized donations than Hastert over the same period: $552,000.

It wasn’t a whole lot to go with and certainly not enough to try to take down the Speaker of the House, but it was interesting that after Hastert resigned from Congress he went to work for Dickstein Shapiro, a lobbying firm that does a lot of business in Turkey. According to the New York Times, Hastert has just resigned from that firm where he was serving as the “co-leader of the Public Policy & Political Law Practice.”

Now, what Edmonds claimed way back when was that Hastert was accepting bribes from Turkish interests that were being laundered as bundled small campaign contributions. This is very resonant of what Hastert was just indicted for doing.

Apparently, he was caught up in some kind of extortion scheme and he was paying someone off in order to keep them quiet about some sort of indiscretion he had made in the past. To accomplish this, Hastert was making a lot of relatively small (under $10,000 a pop) bank withdrawals. Keeping each withdrawal below $10,000 was supposed to prevent bank reporting requirements from snapping into effect and prevent governmental scrutiny, but it didn’t work.

Perhaps part of his problem is that he was late adopting the practice of making the small withdrawals.

At first, Mr. Hastert provided $50,000 in cash from several bank accounts to the person every six weeks, for a total of 15 such exchanges, the indictment said.

Banks are required to report cash withdrawals of more than $10,000, and in April 2012, bank officials questioned Mr. Hastert about sizable withdrawals from his accounts.

That July, Mr. Hastert began making smaller withdrawals, of less than $10,000, and he continued providing them to the person at prearranged meeting places and times, the indictment said.

Later, the arrangements changed so that Mr. Hastert was providing $100,000 every three months, the indictment said.

Once bank officials have begun questioning your banking activity, you’ve already crossed the threshold to attracting scrutiny. The indictment is cryptic about the reason Hastert felt compelled to pay this hush money, but it does provide a few breadcrumbs to follow.

In 2010, during meetings between Mr. Hastert and the unnamed individual, the two discussed “past misconduct” by Mr. Hastert against the person, according to the indictment.

In those meetings and in later discussions, Mr. Hastert agreed to provide money to the person “in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct,” the indictment said.

It sounds like whoever was demanding these payments had been personally wronged by Hastert which means that this probably isn’t simply an example of someone discovering something illegal that “Denny boy” had done. The fact that in 2010 it is phrased as “past misconduct” could mean that it occurred while Hastert was still serving as Speaker of the House. The imagination can go in a lot of directions with these little tidbits. Is this an angry father who wants compensation for something that happened to his daughter? Is this someone who got screwed by being on the wrong side of some graft-fueled business deal or appropriation? Whatever it was, it was bad enough that Hastert was willing to pay any price to keep it quiet.

And I guess he thought he had some experience with breaking up big lump payments into small increments in order to avoid detection.

Back on June 1st, 2008, after learning of Hastert’s new post-congressional lobbying gig, lukury wrote “If there’s any justice in the world, Dickstein Shapiro will soon be adding Dennis Hastert to their [list of] ‘Ex-employees who are now [in the] convicted felons’ Hall of Fame.”

Well, as of today, Hastert is an ex-employee of Dickstein Shapiro. It’s been a long seven-year wait.

Perhaps before too long, the second half of that call for justice will come to fruition, too, and Hastert will be a convicted felon.