Taking Us for a Ride

Turn on the TV cable news or glance at the homepage of The Times tonight and what do you get?  Not the collateral damage of murdered children in Afghanistan.  Not the growing crisis of widespread unemployment. Not the Congressional challenge by Dennis Kucinich over the right of the president to wage war in Libya.

Here is what passes for news today, this week, next month.  Only the faces will change.  Because it's all about the personalities of the lunatic fringe political sweepstakes, and everybody is covering this crap.  Somebody who we all thought went away suddenly buys a million dollar house in Arizona and takes a motorcycle ride and goes on a bus tour and has pizza with Donald Trump.  So she is obviously running for president, according to Beltway media insiders whose job is to deflect our attention away from serious issues that might be hurting us.



The Wonderful World of Journalistic Make-Believe



From The Times: "An aide to Mr. Trump said Ms. Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, had sought the meeting, having 'reached out' that morning. Ms. Palin has generated more buzz about a possible presidential bid with the start of her road trip on Sunday — she has visited Gettysburg and the Liberty Bell — did not reveal why she wanted to pay a call on Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania. His own flirtation with a Republican presidential campaign ended last month amid speculation it was all intended to jolt his business interests."

Doesn't take much to generate buzz in their busy little brains, does it?  What are they thinking?  Better yet, what are they drinking?  I think I must be missing something, not to be experiencing that elusive Buzz.

And here is how annoying White House correspondent Chuckles Todd put it in the lead item on NBC's "First Read" email this morning: "Over the next 10 months, the race for the Republican nomination will become the chief political story in America, and that will affect the contours of the general election. We even started seeing it yesterday, with Palin, Pawlenty, and Bachmann taking center stage. 'The Democratic ‘race’ is more akin to watching a single athlete run a marathon,' says Democratic strategist Jano Cabrera."

In the shallow world of Washington journalism, the race is the thing.  Who is tweeting what?  What conservative bad boy hacked a congressman's Twitter account to insert a naughty pic?  Why is Sarah being so coy and hard to get?  Why do they care, why do they think anybody cares?

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that Obama, the cool adult front-man of the Oligarchy, is an obvious shoo-in.  He is so comfortable, in fact, that he just hired a new White House attack dog to tamp down the disaffected base of progressive idealogues.   The job has been given to DNC operative Jesse Lee, whose new title is "Director of Progressive Media & Online Response". He will be responsible for blogosphere PR , as well as squashing any negative stories.

The position is being criticized by both the Left and the Right. Fox News is calling Lee the Administration's new "Pushback Czar."  Sounds about right to me.

The pols and the hacks have our ostensible journalists both coming and going.  It's an irresistably heady mix of propaganda and infotainment.  Keep us alternately dumbed down and titillated and frightened. It's the age of American neo-fascism.

What Was She Thinking?

To hear the political hacks and lobbyists and experts in diplomacy tell it to The New York Times, Elizabeth Warren has committed the biggest breach of etiquette since Michelle inappropriately touched the Queen. You just don't tell an honorable member of Con-gress that you're fixing to quit the room, especially if you're an uppity liberal female bureaucrat!

Warren, a low-key but passionate consumer advocate, is so despised and feared by Wall Street that the Senate Republicans are refusing to shut down business this week in order to forestall a possible presidential recess appointment behind their backs. Barney Frank is calling the move a slap in the face of democracy.

Meanwhile, a petition with nearly one million progressive signatures, demanding that she head her own consumer agency, is headed for the Oval Office.  Politicians in both parties are being backed into a corner over an appointment none of them has the spine or the stomach for. They are all too beholden to their real masters, the banksters.


So powerful men are doing what powerful men do when confronted by an assertive, powerful woman. They call her a bitch.


Oh, they're being cagey and cunning and oblique about it. They used another woman, a New York Times reporter named Sheryl Gay Stolberg, to get their message out.  According to the Sunday piece, called "The Polite Way to Say No Way," Warren probably blew her own chances for nomination by not being deferential enough to a subcommittee congressman. Stolberg wrote that Warren has committed "a bureaucrat’s brazen violation of a cardinal rule of the Capitol Hill etiquette book: the Congressman Is Always Right."


While Stolberg did give fair comment  to a few Democrats praising Warren, she failed to go beyond treating the story like a TMZ scandal of a gross breach in etiquette.  Nowhere did she mention that the hearing time was changed at the last minute. Nowhere did she mention that Rep. Patrick McHenry had immediately launched into an ad hominem attack against Warren from the outset of the hearing. Like other corporate media outlets, The Times has chosen to dwell on the "sensationalistic" final few minutes of the hearing when words were exchanged.


Stolberg obviously did not watch the hearing in its entirety.( Her usual beat is The White House, so you have to wonder about the provenance of her article.)  Warren remained calm, cool and collected throughout, even as she was accused of lying by McHenry from the outset -- about whether she did or didn't talk to the Justice Department about bank mortgage fraud.  Rarely did he allow her to even answer one of his questions without his own rude interruptions.


Since writing my initial post on the hearing, I have learned a few more unsavory facts about McHenry, other than the most publicized one that he is a shill for the big banks, and that he got away with taking a bribe from Countrywide Financial while he was supposed to be investigating it.  Here are a few more tidbits about this Karl Rove protege, who may have had a hand in the rumor mongering that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child during his primary fight with George Bush.

 - In 2008, while on a Congressional visit to Iraq, he threw a hissy fit after being denied access to a gun.  He called a soldier a "two bit security guard" in another one of those name-calling exchanges he seems to be so addicted to.


- He put a video on his campaign website that violated Defense security guidelines by divulging information about Iraq deployments.


- During his  2008 campaign, McHenry called his opponent, Daniel Johnson, "Nancy Pelosi's chosen recruit" with "pockets stuffed with cash from Washington liberals."  He later erased the slur from his website following pressure by his own party.


-  He was one of the signatories in a letter to the IRS demanding  an investigation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for excessive lobbying and failure to register as a lobbying organization.


- He introduced legislation to put Ronald Reagan's face on the $50 bill.


- During the Mark Foley pedophile scandal, he claimed it was engineered by Democrats.


-He was one of Tom Delay's staunchest defenders when the former speaker was indicted on money laundering charges.


-He proposed a military strike on Iran.


And on and on it goes.  Yet Elizabeth Warren erred in not showing him the due deference he is so eminently entitled to, according to the lobbyists and other hacks The Times used for its source material?


Commenter Jay from Ottawa reports that when he tried to email McHenry demanding that he apologize to Warren, his message was returned because of server overload.  Thinking that perhaps McHenry had rigged his email to reject all references to her, I emailed McHenry with a phony "I Love You" as the subject matter.  No dice.  I got mine back from the Mailer Daemon too.


It doesn't sound like the congressman has any friends left.  His own colleagues are disowning him. His inbox has exploded. Yet the New York Times sources think he is due some respect, just because the sick custom is to call all congresspeople "The Honorable."  Go figure.

Update -- here is the link to the Times article again; apparently it was not showing up well in this post: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/weekinreview/29etiquette.html?ref=us

No Warren Recess Appointment

President Obama will not be making his hoped-for recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren to head her own Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because there will be no Senate Recess.  Republicans blocked it, and Harry Reid caved.  Read the details here.

You have to wonder if this is just what the Obama Administration was hoping for, since not one Democrat is offering an explanation or a complaint.  With no recess appointment of Warren, and the Dodd-Frank Law stipulating a nomination by a July deadline, and the Republicans vowing to block anybody from heading the bureau, you have to wonder if this spells the death of the agency itself.

With the lightning-fast speed of passage of the Patriot Act extensions today without debate, it's pretty obvious we have one unified oligarchic party under the guise of bipartisanship.  Our only recourse is to kick these bastards out come election time, district by district and state by state.

As far as the President is concerned, he's coming back from his World Leader tour this weekend, still basking in the glow of global adoration.  With any luck, this current resurgence of the Obama Personality Cult, the never-ending orgasmatron of the Osama Assassination Celebration will quickly wind down and progressives will again stop fixating on loony-tune Republicans and hold this President's feet to the fire.

Let's face it. He could have appointed Elizabeth Warren a year ago, and chose not to.  It's just too easy to blame the usual easy suspects, the craven Republicans, for this one.

Damned Demagoguing Democrats

Are you as tired as I am of Republican pols and pundits accusing Democrats of demagoguing them?  Do they choose that word because it has a nice alliterative ring? I mean, why not save their breath, and just call the opposition a bunch of mean old DemDems?  Take the gog out of Demagogue, for crying out loud.  Just for the hell of it, I Googled "Demagoguing Democrats" and got over 700,000 hits.


Still not having anything better to do, I went to LexisNexis and typed in "Demagoguing Paul Ryan" and came up with slightly fewer results from the newspaper option. I was aghast and agog reading them, because it seems like these overpaid pundits and columnists and hacks are all getting their marching orders from some centralized Reactionary Word Bank.  Here are just a few of the gems, beginning with Chief Gemstone Paul Ryan:

The tragic irony is that if the Left succeeds in demagoguing to death the only plan that saves Medicare, this political victory will diminish any incentive to avert Medicare's imminent end. -- Paul Ryan, Washington Post op-ed, 8/6/10.

It is an important conversation starter... a broad and brave call for dealing with politically charged issues that Congress and Obama are studiously avoiding or demagoguing. -- unsigned editorial, New York Daily News, 4/11/11.

The Administration just needs to stop demagoguing and join the adult conversation. -- Kevin Ferris, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/22/11.

Paul Ryan has just released a bold and serious plan.... Obama is demagoguing the Ryan Plan. -- Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 4/8/11.

Now, I know the Democrats... they have been demagoguing the Republicans on Medicare. -- Donald Trump, via New York Times article, 5/3/11.

Next time you see a politician demagoguing Medicare, ask this: should we be using our resources in the manner of a nation in decline or one still committed to stoking the energy of its people? -- David Brooks, The New York Times, 5/11/11.

Now, can we (meaning you Democrats) just get past the demagoguery? -- Cal Thomas, USA Today, 2/24/11.

Democrats Demagogue Medicare: Liberals Play Politics as the Health Care Plan Goes Belly Up -- headline of Emily Miller op-ed, Washington Times, 5/3/11.

Interestingly, accusing the opposition of demagoguery has been a favorite tactic of conservatives in the past.  Case in point, according to a Wikipedia entry, "in the 19th Century, political reactionaries branded their opponents as demagogues and directed numerous reprisals and censorship against them. Representatives of the German Confederation of German-national and liberal groups were accused of Demagogenverfolgung, subversion and sedition.


A famous usage was by the aging Erich Luedenddorf, an early supporter of Hitler, but who later called him "one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and will inflict immeasurable woe on our nation."

Since Hitler is still conventionally viewed as the greatest/worst demagogue of all time, and his name has become synonymous with the word, and an early tactic of the Tea Party during the health care debate was to carry posters of President Obama wearing a Hitler mustache, it is not too much of a stretch to conclude that the more genteel conservative pundits are deliberately and cynically using the demagogue word as code for something worse -- something extremely hateful.


It's all part of what is called The Big Lie -- some of the Republican pundits are taking their own demagoguery and deflecting it to the Democratic opposition. Again, from Wikipedia:


"The phrase (Big Lie) was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services  in describing Hitler's psychological profile. His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."


Hmm... methinks Paul Ryan and Co. are the real, neo-Fascist demagogues in the mix.  The Republicans refuse to compromise, refuse to negotiate, refuse to acknowledge that the deficit was caused by tax breaks for their rich friends and subsidies for the corporations, blame their one person at a time (Obama), even going so far as to question his citizenship and patriotism. And boy, can they ever whine when they don't get their own way.

"Mommeeeee... They Won't Stop Demagoguing on Me!"

The only thing left for Obama and the Democrats to do is to stop negotiating with these Repugnant Republicans and let their demogoguery nonsense boomerang right back at them.

The Spanish Inquisition, Republican Congressional Edition

For an obscure subcommittee hearing broadcast on C-Span, it was pretty exciting TV.  It was also a pretty disgusting display of Republican mendacity.  But what else is new?


The title of the latest attempt to sling more mud on Elizabeth Warren and her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was "Who's Watching the Watchmen?" But Democratic TARP and Oversight member Carolyn Maloney quipped today that it might more aptly have been named "Let's Pretend the Financial Crisis Never Happened."


And the Chairman of the Subcommittee had a typical Republican doublespeak of an opening statement too. "The American people have a right to know," Patrick McHenry (R-NC) was essentially complaining, "if the government is overreaching and unfairly protecting the American people by cracking down on the poor maligned banks and credit card companies!"


 The nature of the Republican questioning of Warren today by Subcommittee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC),  was typically inquisitorial. McHenry's first lame tactic was to accuse her of having the nerve to talk to state attorneys general and the Dept. of Justice over the mortgage fraud settlements, and doing so behind the Republicans' backs, and then committing perjury by omission!  Apparently, he was under the mistaken impression that Warren needs Congressional okay before speaking with any government agency, and that she needs to report such discussions to him.  In person, presumably.  He pretty much accused her of lying to Congress.  He repeatedly interrupted her attempts to answer his questions with the usual prosecutorial "It's either a yes or a no!"


(McHenry, incidentally, has reason to hate and fear Warren. He came under fire last year while he was "investigating" the Countrywide subprime mortgage scandal, and it turned out he had accepted $5500 from the Countrywide PAC for his reelection campaign, and kinda-sorta forgot to let anybody know. But Chris Dodd got a sweetheart deal from Countrywide too, so they couldn't very well give Dodd a pass and then pick on McHenry, could they?)


The hearing had originally been scheduled for Tuesday morning, but was delayed until afternoon because of Bibi Netanyahu's joint session of Congress address.  Warren had another meeting scheduled, but agreed to answer questions for an hour. But when it came time for her to leave, a desperate McHenry (whose bullying questions had failed to break her), accused Warren of bailing out before her time was up.  When she tried to explain that her truncated testimony had already been agreed to by his own staff, he shrilled: "You're making that up!"


As Warren sat there, her mouth agape, Democratic committee member Elijah Cummings calmly noted that McHenry was again accusing her of lying.  McHenry sulkily backed down.


Earlier, Cummings had urged Warren to stay on in her position as head of the agency she had created after the financial meltdown of 2008. "I'm begging you to keep up the fight," he pleaded, noting that the full impact of the chicanery of the big deregulated banks had yet to be felt among his constituents.  Houses are still being foreclosed, the unemployment rate is still sky high, the banks have yet to be held accountable.  Warren's bureau is the only federal government agency to be focused exclusively on the consumer rights of families.


Cummings noted that while the banksters haul in an annual $59 billion in overdraft fees alone, the CFPB operates on a shoestring budget. Warren said that although the spending cap on the agency is $600 million, she expects it to operate for only half that amount next year.


Meanwhile, The New York Times was reporting that certain "Democratic officials" have been urging Warren to run against Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race next year rather than stay on in the Bureau. These officials naturally are anonymous. This might sound like somebody helping her get into politics, but to me it smells more like a gentle nudge under the bus, and a way to make her go quietly away.  Her putative boss, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, has made no secret of his lack of enthusiasm for both her and the bureau.  Wall Street is not interested in consumers.  Geithner is obviously not interested in consumers.  Watch out for attempted "bipartisan compromises" down the road.


And watch out for next week, when Obama will have a golden opportunity to recess-appoint Warren during the Senate vacation.  Congressional Democrats have already written him a letter urging him to do just that.  This is one of those times to hold the president's feet to the fire as he has so famously urged his "base" to do.  And Warren herself has stated she has no plans to run for any political office.  She is staying right where she is.


And well she should. She is as popular in the U.S. as Obama apparently is in Ireland.  Since a primary challenge to him now seems out of the question, there is always 2016. She would win in a landslide. NY State Attorney General Eric Scheiderman might be a shoo-in too. Between the two of them, we have many fat little bankster rolling heads to look forward to. But watch out too for even more Republican smear campaigns while we're waiting for the roll-o-rama. 

She's Not Going Anywhere

Update:  some video from the hearing:


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43160971#43160971

McHenry later told Politico he was shocked at what he called Warren's "blatant sense of entitlement". The MSM, let me add, is spinning this story as a spat between Warren and McHenry.  I watched the whole hearing and can attest that this North Carolina boor of a man had it out for her from the get-go: he essentially called her a liar a few minutes into the testimony, was rude and hardly allowed her to answer a single question.  If anything dragged the proceedings out, it was McHenry's grandstanding.  I don't think I could have been as cool and civil as Elizabeth Warren.  Watch the whole thing on C-Span and decide for yourself.

Update II 5/25 -- here is a petition going to President Obama asking that he recess-appoint Elizabeth Warren:

http://act.boldprogressives.org/sign/sign_warrent_recessappointment/?source=bp

He's Not Only Nuts. He's a Heartless Tool

I missed this appearance by former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson on MSNBC last Friday.  Grayson, opining on Republicans in general and Paul Ryan in particular, nails it:

http://youtu.be/BM7u74sHUNk

Said Grayson, in his inimitable Grayson way: "We’ve got 40,000 Americans under the age of 65 who die every year, because they can't afford to see a doctor when they're sick. And now they want to extend that [tragedy] to the most infirmed, most victimized, sickest part of the population, our senior citizens, so that more will die. I honestly believe that if Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck announced one day that they were in favor of the Black Death, you’d see every Republican primary candidate for President go along with it."

I don't know if Grayson plans on running for public office again any time soon, but just on the basis of this graphic of Ryan (credited to "Blue Gal") in the email he sent me this morning, I will vote for him.  I don't care if I am a legal resident of his state or not.  Maybe he will return to his native New York and run here.  We need him.

And here is a petition to be delivered to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in anticipation of that den of vipers' vote on the Lyin' Ryan Medicare Kill Bill: http://dscc.org/.  Just be forewarned that every time you sign one of these petitions, you will receive daily emails from Democratic senators thousands of miles away begging you for money.  When I signed petitions for Single Payer in 2009, I got appeals for donations from Oregon, Illinois, California -- and even a note from Patrick Leahy's wife asking me to sign his birthday card.  You can, of course, always unsubscribe once all this stuff starts jamming your inbox. 

You Want Paul Ryan to Control Your Thoughts, Says Paul Ryan

There is no official transcript available yet from today's "Meet the Press", but I watched it twice to make sure I heard Paul Ryan right.

Confronted by David Gregory over poll results that show 80 percent of Americans don't want Medicare touched, Ryan replied that he doesn't listen to polls.  "Leaders are elected to lead and are supposed to change the polls because that's what the country wants," he said.

Ryan was essentially making the outrageous claim that once politicians are elected, they no longer need listen to the will of the people.  Well, we already knew that, but somebody finally came out and said it.  Moreover, it is Ryan's job to change what people only imagine they are thinking.  People cannot think for themselves and if they do express a thought, it is the job of Paul Ryan to tell them they are wrong, because deep down, they want somebody to tell them they are wrong.  Paul Ryan is certifiably nuts.  Anybody claiming the whole purpose of his life is to be a general in the "Battle for Fiscal Sanity" is certifiably nuts.  Anybody going on "Meet the Press wearing a day-glo orange tie is certifiably nuts.
  
But do you think David Gregory actually followed up, and tried to explain the meaning and purpose of polls to this reincarnation of Joe McCarthy?  Of course not.  He was more interested in asking if Newt Gingrich blew it when he called Ryan a right-wing radical social engineer, instead of pointing out that Gingrich was actually right for once in his life, regardless of his intent.

 Ryan blithely went on to pontificate that his plan would spare the current crop of seniors from having their lives disrupted, by generously waiting to privatize kill Medicare until the under-55 crowd reaches retirement.  He remains convinced that the over-55s are a bunch of self-interested old geezers willing to eat their own young in their quest for a comfortable old age on endless life support. And that they will all vote Republican to show their gratitude. In the same foul breath of Doublethink, he claims that the under-55s receiving his fiscally responsible junk vouchers will have the added satisfaction of enriching private insurance companies while giving the finger of contempt to government-run Medicare.  Plus, they are getting their ten-year warning of Endtimes.  And if Obama doesn't fix Medicare today, then he will be killing the current selfish old recipients that Ryan, in his infinite calculating wisdom, had decided to spare!  What was that you said about social engineering?

The Ryan Plan = "Saturn Devouring His Child" (courtesy of the addled artistic brain of F. Goya)

You know somebody is dangerously disturbed when even Newt Gingrich looks reasonable in comparison.  And I finally figured out that the reason the pundits all call Ryan "serious" is because of his facial expression. The guy never cracks a smile, not even a forced politician smile. 

 And he's even leaving the door slightly ajar, down the road, for a possible presidential run?  Bring on the Rapture, quick!