Hey, so guess who is mulling new legislation to solve the alleged problem of Obama’s “czars”? Joe Lieberman!
He may even hold hearings on the czars, as the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Since this will confer legitimacy on an attack that has mostly emanated from Glenn Beck and the hothouse right, it could prompt an “I told you so” chorus from those who argued that Lieberman should be stripped of his committee slots.
Leslie Phillips, a spokesperson for Lieberman’s committee, confirms by email that Lieberman’s legislation is “in the early conceptual stage.” She also said a hearing is in the works, with its schedule up the air until the committee can nail down witnesses.
Feingold's hearing yesterday should have actually ended this debate in Congress, not begun it. The panel, assembled on a bipartisan basis by Feingold and Tom Coburn, pretty unanimously argued that the Obama Administration was within Constitutional boundaries to have Presidential advisors in the White House. But Lieberman loves those Fox klieg lights (you know, the network who gives you "what we believe to be the facts"), and so does his partner in crime on the Committee, Susan Collins:
John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, compared the czars to the position of White House chief of staff, saying both hold great influence and can speak for the president, but their legal powers are limited.
Their "practical authority . . . is not legal authority, and as long as the distinction is rigorously maintained there will be no legal problem," Harrison said in his written testimony.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who had also written Obama questioning the czars, said in a statement the issue was not dead. The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where she is the ranking member, will hold a similar hearing next week.
"The appointments of so many czars have muddied the waters, causing confusion and risking miscommunication going forward," Collins said.
Lieberman's call for legislation is the first time that has come up, taking this to an additional level. And it's not surprising coming from Holy Joe. You may recall that he got Glenn Beck into Yale. Yes, that's right:
"One local politician who appreciated Beck's regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the '90s, until they fell out over Lieberman's refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck's search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn't last long at Yale. He took one class, "Early Christology," and dropped out."
Lieberman has appeared on Beck's show in the past. And once he submits this legislation, I'm sure he will again. He loves that klieg light.
It's definitely looking like keeping Lieberman as the chair of the committee in the Senate that can investigate the executive branch was a sound decision by Democrats.
Another classic look at Glenn Beck's early career from Alexander Zaitchik, who's clearly about to write a great book. Here's where the classiness of the new leader of the anti-government movement really comes out:
The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."
Because Glenn Beck had the foresight to get out in front of an anti-government movement that does not fall neatly along left-right lines, movement conservatives are lashing out at him:
Beck added that McCain would be worse than Obama:
"I think John McCain would have been worse — [laughs] How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?"
Beck’s opinion elicited a fierce and angry response from right-wing radio host Mark Levin yesterday. “To say [McCain] would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact,” Levin said on his radio show. He then suggested Beck is playing politics: “I don’t know who people are playing to. I don’t know why they’re playing to certain people.”
Levin never mentions Beck by name (he refers to Beck as “the 5 pm’er” because Beck’s show airs at 5 pm on Fox News). He concluded with this final dig at Beck:
"I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic."
Levin's right, to an extent. Beck has no coherent worldview, and his de facto leadership of the Ron Paul movement - which he came to very suddenly after expressing contempt for it - is nothing short of opportunistic. And it's killing his competition - Joe Scarborough, Peter Wehner, The American Spectator, even Rush Limbaugh. They're jealous of his attention, his opinion leadership. The fact that the knives came out after the TIME cover story is not coincidental.
But there's something a little more interesting at work. While Beck is a mess from an intellectual standpoint, and his bashing of Republicans is little more than cover, at least a part of the movement he's positioned himself at the front of doesn't have a worldview that falls into any ideological box. Sure, corporate forces aligned with the movement GOP are trying to co-opt it and steer it to business-friendly ends, and the protest audience is as variegated as any would be on the left. But there's an element in there that is not easily defined:
In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.
But all that said, there are some identifiable -- and plainly valid -- underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That's when conventional political language ceases to be useful.
Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties' establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom -- the Ron Paul faction -- objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these "tea party" protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.
I don't think, in the end, that it's supposed to make sense. Politics has a tribal component and is waged much like sports fans wage their battles against one another. There will always be a sizable audience for a polemicist, whether viewed as partisan or non-partisan, especially when his or her attacks always seem to fall on the Democratic occupant of the White House. But I think Beck's unpredictability, as well as his reaches into the depths of wingnuttery - wait until the Christian conservatives figure out Beck chose to be a Mormon - frighten the establishment in the GOP. They tolerate him when he's whipping up a frenzy against Obama, but he could just as easily call to break up the banks - whatever he thinks will make him a ratings point - and suddenly the clean ideological lines break down.
Now, if there was a coherent Democratic Party which would argue for the virtues of government and its role as a protector of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and the common good, the ideologies of the parties would be a little cleaner, and the DC establishment wouldn't be such an inviting target. In a way, Democrats have brought this on themselves. They invented a Glenn Beck by failing to make the case for government themselves. And as a result, distrust of government is rising.
So what. Mitt Romney flip-flopped on an issue? Call the Guinness people, I think he's actually set the record now.
No, the real interesting trip down memory lane today is that Glenn Beck favored the bailouts a year ago, when TARP was being debated in Congress:
But these are anything but normal times. I thought about it an awful lot this weekend, and while it takes everything in me to say this, I think the bailout is the right thing do.
The “REAL STORY” is the $700 billion that you’re hearing about now is not only, I believe, necessary, it is also not nearly enough, and all of the weasels in Washington know it.
Now THAT is an interesting reversal. Before his appearance on Fox News and in everyone's hearts, Beck ran a Morning Zoo-type radio show and had an unremarkable stint on CNN Headline News. He certainly hadn't latched on to any wave of discontent with federal spending or libertarian economic theories. He repeatedly called Ron Paul "a crackpot on so many issues" and prefaced every discussion of him by saying "I don't agree with Ron Paul on everything--not by a long shot." Here's Beck calling Ron Paul supporters terrorists:
"It's really not the way I would go, tying in my movement with a historical terrorist attack, especially in post-9/11 America."
This is the guy who put together a rally on September the 12th.
Beck saw a movement stirring on the furthest reaches of the right and got out in front of it. Before that he was pretty firmly behind his President in bailing out the top banks.
The difference is that now, the political energy on the right is with the teabaggers, and it makes sense to Beck to capitalize on that energy. But he has nothing approaching a coherent worldview. Whatever gets the most eyeballs.
I really hope that libertarians take a look at the guy who has appointed himself the public face of their movement.
...Here's a Paul supporter video that has the very clips of Beck supporting the bailout:
... This is amusing, Beck claimed on his show today that he hated Bush for those bailouts which he initially supported. I think this shows that the truth about his changing stories is coming out and he's trying to pre-empt the criticism.
I'm happy to see some Administration pushback on the bogus czar issue. Anita Dunn penned this blog post debunking some of the Beck-inspired myths about "czars," which is basically a title for an adviser to the White House. This is a media creation, encouraged by past Presidencies who want to be seen as proactive, to label someone with oversight over a particular issue a "czar" to prove attentiveness. The czars have almost always been ineffectual, the most famous example being the head of the ONDCP, or "drug czar". I'd prefer the media didn't use the term for hires who are coordinating various policies, in the same manner as has been done for many, many years.
Still, it's good to see this kind of spirit:
But of course, it’s really the hypocrisy here that is noteworthy. Just earlier today, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California and one of the leaders in calling for an investigation into the Obama Administration’s use of "czars", had to admit to Fox News that he had never raised any objections to the Bush Administration’s use of "czars". Many of these members who now decry the practice have called on Presidents in the past to appoint "czars" to coordinate activities within the government to address immediate challenges. What is clear is that all of this energy going into these attacks could be used to have a constructive conversation about bringing this country together to address our challenges moving forward – and it doesn’t take a "czar" to bring that about! Just some folks willing to act in good faith [...]
Many of the same critics who are decrying these roles have applauded or even pushed for them in the past. Sen. Robert Bennett has criticized czars as "undermining the Constitution," but reportedly prodded President Clinton to appoint a Y2K Czar. In a 1999 CNN appearance, Sen. Bennett said "I think John Koskinen has been superb. I wrote the president six months before John was appointed, recommending that he appoint a Y2K czar." At a 1999 National Press Club luncheon, Bennett told reporters the Koskinen was "there to help, prod, give information, and make analyses and reports" and said he spoke with the czar to ensure "we maintain the kind of bipartisan and across-the-government sort of communication that this never becomes a political issue."
Senator Lamar Alexander has also criticized President Obama’s "czars," calling them "an affront to the Constitution." But during remarks delivered on the Senate floor in 2003, Sen. Alexander said "I would welcome" President Bush’s "manufacturing job czar." That same day in the Senate, he also expressed support for President Bush’s AIDS czar Randall Tobias.
Robert Gibbs followed up on this in the White House briefing room today, even noting that the aforementioned Randall Tobias showed up on the D.C. madam's list, to little comment from the Republican side of the aisle.
All this is fine, but the Beck/Fox News crowd has been riling up their folks about czars for months now. One czar, Van Jones, was already picked off and forced to resign. Uber-wingnut Jack Kingston has a bill with 99 co-sponsors to cut off funding for advisers unconfirmed by the Senate. "Czar" is part of the teabagger lexicon (go about 6:22 in):
The time to go on the offense against this was about four months ago. There is no such thing as "not giving the claims oxygen" by responding. This is a fight, and the opponents don't play fair. The Administration is finally coming around to getting in the arena, but it's way late in the game.
BECK: Nobody is saying we’re blowing children up or anything like the Taliban. But this is the same kind of tactic being used now in America. You can’t get your agenda, so you unleash the hounds and point the fingers, and everybody is a racist.
There's also the issue of how, for the oppressed whites on the right, the worst kind of racism is calling someone a racist, not actual racists engaging in racist actions.
Still, the hypersensitive to fictional allegations of racism highlights once again the basic outlook of the contemporary conservative movement on race. Actual racism against racial minorities is, according to conservatives, a trivial or non-existence problem. By contrast, anti-racism gone too far (often known as “political correctness”) is seen as a huge social problem against which one must always be on guard.
The Colbert Report last night featured one of the most subversive and brutally honest half-hours of television in recent memory. It's a sad commentary that it takes a comedy program to provide more news and information on one of the most critical subjects in American politics that anywhere else in our broken media and political landscape, but I'll take this argument wherever I can get it. Colbert spent two full segments of his show focusing on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which could - and probably will - lead to deregulating the entire campaign finance process, allowing corporations to give unlimited money to any candidate of their choosing. This severe step backwards with enormous implications has been barely discussed in any traditional media setting, but Colbert went after it vigorously, discussing the consequences and even the flawed legal rationale, a true third rail of American politics, corporate personhood. Colbert explained that the 1886 case (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that conferred 14th Amendment equal protection rights onto corporations wasn't even in the original ruling. But when the Chief Justice made an off-hand comment that the Court wouldn't hear an argument on whether the 14th Amendment applied to these corporations (saying, "We are all of the opinion that it does"), the court reporter wrote it into the ruling opinion, and the precedent has held ever since. And that reporter of the Supreme Court didn't only have ties to the railroad barons, he used to run one.
These are subjects you just never hear about in the American media, precisely because the American media is owned by giant multinational corporations, who benefit from the corporate personhood rule and would stand to benefit more from deregulating elections so they could use their "speech" to buy candidates and fund their own with unlimited resources. And despite being on a Viacom-owned network, Colbert says, skewering the immorality and psychopathology of the corporation, "Corporations are legally people... they do everything people do, except breathe, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River."
There's some backstory to that remark. Colbert actually worked with Robert Smigel on the "TV Funhouse" bits from Saturday Night Live (he's one-half of the Ambiguously Gay Duo), including the infamous episode from March 1998, Conspiracy Theory Rock. Here are some of the actual lyrics (remember this aired, albeit one time, on NBC, whose parent company is General Electric):
It's a media-opoly A media-opoly. The whole media is controlled by a few corporations thanks to deregulation by the FCC.
You mean Disney, Fox, WestingHouse, and good ol GE? They own networks from CBS to CNBC. They can use them to say whatever they please, and put down the opinions of any one who disagrees. Or stuff about PCB's.
What are PCB's? They come from power plants built by WestingHouse and GE. They can give you lots of cancer that can hurt your body, but on network TV, you rarely hear anything bad about the nuclear industry [...]
But the bigshots don't care. They're all sitting pretty. Thanks to corporate welfare. What's that now?
They get billions in subsidies from the government. It's supposed to create jobs, but that's not how it's spent.
They pulled this cartoon from the rerun broadcasts and it never aired again.
Colbert didn't just provide this lesson in corporate control of government in his "The Word" segment, but then had Jeffrey Toobin on to explain how the expected Supreme Court ruling would impact elections:
COLBERT: If this goes through, if they decide in favor of the corporations here, what's going to happen to elections?
TOOBIN: Well, they will be essentially deregulated. Corporations will be allowed to give money, corporations will be allowed to broadcast programs that are in favor of one side or another, it'll basically be no more rules about what corporations can do in political campaigns.
COLBERT: Now when I ran for President in 2008, as the Hail to the Cheese Doritos Stephen Colbert campaign for President, I was told that I actually couldn't do that, that I was breaking federal election law by being sponsored by that corporation. But if this goes through, if this court case, if they win, does that mean that I retroactively won the election?
TOOBIN: I don't think it means that.
COLBERT: But could you do that? Could I actually just wear a NASCAR suit and just have logos all over me and run for President as the sort of Gatorade Thirst for Justice campaign for President?
TOOBIN: You definitely could. No question.
COLBERT: What does it mean to individual donation? A corporation, as a person, gets to give any amount of money, but I as a person can give only $2,500.
TOOBIN: That's what's potentially the next legal challenge. Because if giving money is a form of speech, as the Court has held at various times, you can't prohibit a company from giving money. And then presumably the next step would be that you couldn't have limits on how much individuals could give either. That's the potential implication of this decision.
COLBERT: So right now, corporations would actually have more power as people than people, until people catch up with corporations.
Here's the point. Stephen Colbert, a comedian, devoted his show to arcane campaign finance law to show the power of corporations to engage in a hostile takeover of government and extract virtually any law they choose, with no consequences for any wrongdoing. Consequently, the self-described populists on the right - aided by a hapless political class - are working their minions into a frenzy over some unidentified alien "other" coming to take your hard-earned tax dollars, without the pernicious influence of rapacious corporations ever entering into it. Anonymous Liberal had a great post on this yesterday.
But even if you take these film-makers at face value and assume the worst, the reality is that ACORN has thousands of employees and the vast majority of them spend their days trying to help poor people through perfectly legal means (and receive very little compensation for doing so). Even before yesterday's Senate vote, the amount of federal money that went to ACORN was very small. This is a relatively insignificant organization in the grand scheme of things, but it's an organization that has unquestionably fought over the years to improve the lives of the less fortunate in this country.
That the GOP and its conservative supporters would single out this particular organization for such intense demonization is telling. In September of last year, the entire world came perilously close to complete financial catastrophe. We're still not out of the woods and we're deep within one of the worst recessions in U.S. history. This situation was brought about by the recklessness and greed of our banks and financial institutions, most of which had to be bailed out at enormous cost to the American taxpayer (exponentially more than all of the tax dollars given to ACORN over the years). The people who brought about this near catastrophe, for the most, profited immensely from it. These very same institutions, propped up by the American taxpayer, are once again raking in large profits.
But rather than focus their anger on these folks, conservatives choose to go after an organization composed almost entirely of low-paid community organizers, an organization that could never hope to have even a small fraction of the clout or the ability to affect the overall direction of the country that Wall Street bankers have. ACORN's relative lack of political influence was on full display yesterday, when the U.S. Senate (in which Democrats have a supermajority) not only entertained a vote to defund ACORN, but approved it by a huge margin (with only seven Democrats opposing).
Absolutely. Set aside the fact that the Glenn Becks of the world are smearing community organizations that help low-income folks, often at variance with the facts. It's the intensity of focus from the privileged on the poor, the disenfranchised, and yes, minorities, when measured against the influence and giant multinational corporations who are on the verge of buying American elections, that strikes such a discordant note. But not for the hucksters pushing the smears and the paranoids and racists who lap it up. They want to believe that black people have the power in America and they're coming for you and your children, so they can ignore the fact that they've been duped - that the ruling class has controlled the political machinery to keep them underfoot, and handed them welfare queens and illegal immigrants and all sorts of other members of the "lower orders" on which they can focus their attention. This boils down to a largely homogenous class of people not wanting their money, or anything, really, to go to people who don't look like them. "Illegals" or the undeserving poor need not apply. It's been a time-tested tactic going back to Richard Nixon's Southern strategy. And it allows a majority ruling class of whites, terrified that their stranglehold on the country is slipping away, to pretend that a race war is coming when it's the class war grinding them into the dust.
Matt Taibbi called it the peasant mentality. The powers that be get the lower classes to fight amongst themselves and split along ideological or tribal or other identifying lines, leaving room for them to prosper. For Republicans, that means painting their opponents, who are less homogenous and are made up of so-called "outsiders" of society - the poor, the disenfranchised, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, etc. - as undeserving of really anything; and painting the leaders of that party - whether it be a Governor from Arkansas or a war hero from Massachusetts or South Dakota or a multicultural community organizer from Illinois - as the head of a movement to destroy American culture. That's really basically it.
And all the while, both sides in DC studiously ignore the near-complete capture of the country by companies seeking only profit, and the corporate-owned media just follows the manufactured drama and goes mute on the critical stuff, such that it takes a comedian to shine a spotlight on this unexamined corner.
Yesterday, the Senate quietly invoked cloture on Cass Sunstein to be the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. I'm not really a fan of Sunstein, but Glenn Beck was about to unleash the dogs of war to attack Sunstein for whatever rattles around in his head. Sunstein, according to Beck is one of those unaccountable "czars" that are destroying America from within. Cloture accomplished several things:
• By being confirmed by the Senate, Sunstein actually became... accountable to a Senate vote. And he got 7 Republicans to vote for him. • Happening just days after Beck's witch hunt of Van Jones, obviously this shows that people are undeterred about further attacks from him. • Sunstein did get 35 votes against him for a fairly uncontroversial position, which means he'd face a lot of opposition for controversial position like Supreme Court Justice. And I wouldn't like him, a moderate to conservative, as a Supreme Court Justice. So we probably won't see that now.
Win-win-win!
FWIW, Beck's jihad against Van Jones appears to have been motivated by oil industry lobbyists opposed to his work on green jobs. Of course, with Jones being rehired by the Center for American Progress, it's likely he'll have a MORE vocal role in pushing for green jobs now, so I don't see how this helped them.
...Yosi Sergant, a midlevel NEA staffer, has been asked to leave his post based on some such nonsense from Beck. So I may have been premature.
I expected this, but it's still kind of depressing what has been done to Van Jones.
I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today.
On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide.
I have been inundated with calls - from across the political spectrum - urging me to “stay and fight.”
But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.
It has been a great honor to serve my country and my President in this capacity. I thank everyone who has offered support and encouragement. I am proud to have been able to make a contribution to the clean energy future. I will continue to do so, in the months and years ahead.
People who have said extreme things at some point need to resign. I eagerly await the resignations of the entire Fox News primetime lineup and about 85-90% of the GOP caucus.
Look, Presidential advisors get too hot to handle and they resign. Happens all the time. Off the top of my head, Alberto Gonzales, Don Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. But those took forever to consummate. Jones had one bad week, with the right-wing Wurlitzer ramping up to epidemic proportions. It turns out that the worst accusation, his signing a Truther statement, had an alibi - the Truthers flat out lied to him about what the statement would say (although, a Truther comes to me with a pen and paper, and I go running in the other direction). And that was enough for the White House to call no joy. Which is kind of pathetic and shows a complete lack of loyalty.
Really, Van Jones wasn't chased out of the White House because of any statement or action. It was because of what he believes.
To understand why and how he's being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.
The "why" is simple: he is a genuine left-wing liberal with a White House job. He is black. He used to be radical, and probably still has radical sympathies (you know, caring about poor black people and all that). He is, in other words, fucking terrifying, if you frame his story right [...]
Here is the message machine in its platonic form: Glenn Beck introduces his audience to a group Jones once belonged to called "The Apollo Alliance" on August 24th. 72 hours later a constituent is asking his (Republican) representative if this Apollo Alliance wrote the health care bill. The Rep has no idea what the guy is talking about, but the rest of the audience certainly does ("Van Jones!" they shout).
And now, here we are. His name on an old 9/11 truther petition is dredged up. An amusing clip in which he calls Republicans assholes (but explains that he, too, is an asshole) is on CBS News. Jake Tapper and Politico are on the case.
That is how a smear becomes a meme. Schoolhouse Rock, 2009 style.
People in the progressive movement identify strongly with someone like Van Jones. He delivered the keynote at Netroots Nation 2008. He had a best-selling book about the Green-Collar Economy last year. His star was rising as he combined the unconscionable problem of urban poverty with the inescapable reality of climate change to find real-world solutions to both problems. And some people on the right couldn't handle that.
Glenn Beck, smarting from losing 57 advertisers in a few weeks, took a scalp in the form of Van Jones. Fox News may have a whole other problem before too long.
Truthers, Birthers, And Their Proper Side Of The Fence
I've seen Van Jones speak and had the opportunity to talk to him at the DNC last year. I'm going to rerun a bit of that discussion and have you tell me if these are the words of a Communist:
On green jobs, which is Jones' real focus area, he stressed that we need to move the environmental conversation from a cultural one to a political one. The green-collar economy "can be a place for people to earn money, not spend money. We need collective action for green citizenship, to create the jobs of the future in a Green New Deal. As long as carbon is free we're never going to move forward." He was pleased by the recent efforts by municipalities and states (green jobs bills have been passed in Massachusetts and Washington state, and the US Conference of Mayors is on board as well), but recognizes that the federal government must be involved as well. "This is about laws, not gizmos. Technology cannot be the savior. This has to be a bottom-up, inside-outside AND a top-down strategy. If the Feds are MIA, human life will be MIA in the future."
We talked about the offshore drilling debate, where Jones clearly stated that the Republicans won the day by lying to the American people. He had three major points:
• There is no such thing as American oil. There is oil drilled by multinationals that is sent overseas to China and India. American offshore driling will do nothing to solve any American oil problems.
• We banned drilling in offshore areas not to save birds and fish, but because of coastal families and coastal communities, because kids were walking into the water and coming out with oil on them, because property values were plunging. Democrats should not be willing to throw away America's beauty for a 2-cent solution in 10 years.
• We've seen the new phenomenon of the "dirty greens," who want to have an "all of the above strategy" on energy, with solar and wind, but also clean coal and drilling offshore and shale and all these dirty polluters. "All of the above" is not a strategy. It's not a wise choice, but a stupid swipe at a persistent problem.
That sounds like pretty mainstream liberal conceptions on energy and the environment. Jones was an activist who went into the government because he saw the need for a federal strategy to deal with green jobs.
But because he was previously involved with Color of Change, who has engineered a successful boycott of Glenn Beck, the Foc News crew has wanted to collect Jones' scalp. So they point to comments and replay them over and over. Not really anything he did, but things he said (ooh, he called Republicans assholes! What delicate sensibilities these chaps have), things he's signed. Although, I have to agree, this was certainly a mistake.
President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has been targeted again and again by conservatives for his controversial views and now they’ll have another item to use as fodder.
Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”
Jones has thus far apologized for prior statements and said he didn't agree "now or ever" with the 911 Truth letter. But if he has to leave his job at the White House, that will be the reason. And he absolutely made a mistake
But it brings up something interesting. There are now around a dozen Republican members of Congress who have co-sponsored legislation, essentially asking the President to reveal his birth certificate. The Birther phenomenon is at least as crazy and irresponsible as the Truther phenomenon. Why would it be OK to have 12 members of Congress who are conspiracy theorists, and not one in the White House? Now, the members of Congress would tell you they're not conspiracy theorists. So would Van Jones.
The range of debate that's acceptable and unacceptable keeps changing, somebody send me a scorecard.
He brings up a very good point about what could happen in the absence of a strong public option or single payer system. You would generally have the federal government subsidizing private insurance companies without any cost containment. Individuals forced to buy insurance would only have the options among private companies, and they could raise their premium rates as much as they want every year, without being forced to compete with a more efficient alternative like a public option.
This is exactly what we're seeing in the market right now. And you don't have to believe me. Just believe none other than Glenn Beck.
Before leaving for his "vacation" this week, Beck taped a show about small businesses and the struggles they're having staying ahead. The show, aired August 17, got around to Beck asking some small businessmen about their health care costs. This extraordinary passage followed.
BECK: I just had a meeting with my staff, because I'm a small business owner, my company's called Mercury, and we're an entertainment company, we do all kinds of stuff. And I cover 100% health care. And we have the best that we could get for New York. This year, I think our health care went up 40% and then the next year it was up like 47%. And they keep taking away options. This year when we renewed, the health care provider came into my office and he said, "Are you really going to pick that?" And I said, "Well, yes, as long as I can." And he said, "You are the last person in the state of New York that is covering your employees like this." And I said, "Well, I just had a meeting with my employees and I said, 'I don't know how long I can do that, but we'll do it as long as we possibly can.'" But they're making it impossible. Does anybody else find it impossible? They make it impossible for you to do the right thing for your employees!
Beck doesn't want to fill in the "they" there, and I'm sure he figures his viewers will just substitute "government". But of course, the unnamed "they" is, clearly, the private insurance market and the health care industry in general. There has been no limit on their growth, no effort to control costs, and in fact the incentives go in the opposite direction. And it's crushing small businesses. Even GLENN BECK understands that. Without any need for competition, with regional monopolies across the country, with no meaningful checks on their power at the federal level, insurance companies can charge more and more for premiums and deny enough care to enough people to make exorbitant profits that allow them to pay CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, stock options and perks.
And it's worse for the individual, who has no leverage, and often, no insurance. The health care market sees these people coming a mile away, and their eyes light up.
For example, one doctor billed $4,500 for an office visit when Medicare would have paid just $134. Another doctor billed $14,400 for removal of a gallbladder when Medicare would have paid $656. And a hip replacement cost $40,000 when Medicare would have paid $1,558.
....[Jeffrey] Rice said people should know they have a choice even when their insurance company is paying the bill. "Everyone knows you don't buy a car without knowing what the Blue Book value is. Well the same should be true in health care," he said.
....Previous research published in 2007 in the journal Health Affairs showed the "uninsured and other 'self-pay' patients for hospital services were often charged 2.5 times what most health insurers actually paid and more than three times the hospital's Medicare-allowable costs." The study by Gerard Anderson also found the "gaps between rates charged to self-pay patients and those charged to other payers are much wider than they were in the mid-1980s."
The lack of leverage in health care feeds the skyrocketing costs. Nobody should have to go broke because they get sick. Individuals empowered through collective action and purchasing power should be able to drive down those costs, without bankrupting health care providers. But the insurance companies would rather funnel that savings, the difference between what providers charge for the uninsured and the insured, into their own bank accounts. Without an incentive to make the product cheaper, the system will limp along and lots of people will get rich at the expense of tens of millions, who either have no insurance, or who find themselves denied coverage when they need it.
For all the talk of the insurance industry being a "constructive partner" in health care, they have not banned their own shameful practices of denying coverage and care, because even though they claim to support those changes, they will wait until the last possible moment to shut down their racket.
And things are going great for them at the moment. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average premium for a family plan in 1999 was $5,791. By 2008, the average premium was $12,680. So over a decade in which inflation increased prices by 29 percent, the price of family health insurance went up 119 percent. UnitedHealth, probably the most despicable of America's health insurers (look at any health-insurance industry scandal, and UnitedHealth is likely leading the way) just announced that in the second quarter of 2009, they made a profit of $859 million, every dollar squeezed from patient premiums and through the avoidance of what the industry calls "medical losses," meaning when they reluctantly pay for care [...]
So if the insurance industry really wants to demonstrate its good faith on health-care reform, here's what it could do: End these practices now. Don't wait to see what's in the final bill. Do it now. Stop denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. Stop rescinding the policies of people who get sick. Let people keep their coverage when they leave a job if they keep paying the premiums. Stop discriminating against pregnant women. You want to atone for your sins? Changing these policies would be a good place to start.
But they won't do that, most surely. They'd rather continue to profit off the pain and suffering of their customers. And until the politicians step in and change things, it will continue.
Glenn Beck can today criticize the questioning of Senators toward Judge Sonia Sotomayor, because unlike yesterday, they're actually asking the questions. It's just joyful to watch Jefferson Beauregard "Jeff" Sessions III niggle over 15 year-old statements rather than anything resembling the legal record. You can watch it here.
...it's sad to watch Sotomayor explain precedent to Sessions. He was a judge, you know.
I'm old enough to remember liberals praising Michael Scheuer because he criticized George Bush. Heck, I cited him in passing in this post back in 2006, although not with praise. But despite being quoted in serious journals of opinion, he always seemed a little off to me, which I guess makes him a great Glenn Beck guest.
Scheuer: The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.
Beck: Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.
Somewhere in his brain, Scheuer might have a sincere belief in protecting Americans. But he thinks that only by a major terrorist attack on the United States will we create the authoritarian society he prefers that would accomplish such a goal. It's wrong on the history, it's completely misguided, and it leads him to openly root for such an devastating attack. There's almost no antecedent for this anywhere in the world - hoping for mass death to force a closed, authoritarian police state.
This is the distilled worldview of modern conservatism.
To quote Gregg Levine, "What Part of “FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES” Don’t You Understand?" But I guess we're going to have to dive once more in to the obvious.
"I'm going to also -- and we'll announce this later today -- I'm going to do a fundraiser for them. I'm going to try to squeeze in a speech for lunch. So you can come and you can have lunch with me. And I think -- I don't know any of the details, but I've heard it's like $500 a plate or something like that."
Reynolds says "if heavily-promoted coverage is the same as 'financing' then the MSM 'financed' Obama’s campaign." Did I miss those $500 a plate fundraisers that Keith Olbermann and Brian Williams were throwing for Obama and promoting on air? Somebody shoot me a link.
It's really important to recognize that the teabag parties are funded by the same right-wing machine that funded every investigation into Bill Clinton during the "Hunting of the President" years. This comes from Dick Armey, the Scaife family, the Kochs, the Olins, all of the seats of right-wing power and money. There is actual anger at the grassroots about some of the Obama Administration's economic plans, but that would be coming from the left. This whipped-up frenzy from the right is coordinated and well-funded by front groups.
And that money hasn't yielded much more than this piffle. In fact, the GOP is out of ideas, out of allies, and out of time.
Vigilant Democrats worry today that the Republican Party is only playing possum, or that it can be revived by extraordinary means such as a Martian invasion. In fact, the GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality. What remains to call themselves Republicans are baldly badly educated or just prankish Confederate re-enactors—chubby men in gray and butternut suits with gold buttons and feather-tipped hats, clanking down stairs with shiny sabers. A handful of them are just boors from the South who look poorly on horseback and wave unread Bibles while calling for Billy Sunday to rise like the gold market [...]
What about the Republican Party right now? Isn’t it on radio and TV claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility and American power? Bypassing the stupidity of these claims, I am on radio, on what is called right-wing radio, and it is easy for me to see that my loudest colleagues, who compulsively repeat the cant of Conservatism for Dummies, are not sincere students of the Republican Party but rather barkers, hookers, establishmentarian jesters, cultists, and, in the worst instance, just thatch-headed whiners. Fox News is a parade of wet-eared Republican office holders, yet there is usually just one each allowed of the categories the Democrats own in multitudes: a Jewish-American, an Asian-American, an African-American, a Hispanic-American. Then there is the beauty pageant of fast-talking, rude Fox blondes—if they are not all the same woman in mood swings—who stridently mock the Democrats, yet have almost nothing to say about the Republicans, as if the party was a disappointing ex or mother’s latest beau.
Incidentally, there is a 10.31 Project website, but it only has the picture up write now.
The transcript of this would actually be a direct contrast to the respectful take on Beck from the New York Times, so eager are they to ingratiate themselves with conservatives and not offend their delicate sensibilities. My favorite part of that:
In an interview, Mr. Beck, who recently rewatched the 1976 film “Network,” said he identified with the character of Howard Beale, the unhinged TV news anchorman who declares on the air that he is “mad as hell.”
“I think that’s the way people feel,” Mr. Beck said. “That’s the way I feel.”
Network was a satire, you idiot. About the vacuous nature of the news media. Which you exemplify.
BECK: So, the shooting in Alabama. Did you hear how they described this guy? I mean it was the typical, "He was a loner, he was quiet," oh really? But what they really described, when they really got down into it, what they said was, here's a guy who felt that he had been wronged. He didn't feel comfortable talking to anybody, he was disgruntled and everything else and then he went out and shot a bunch of people. As they were describing him and they said, you gotta go, now more than ever, you gotta start talking to people, you have to start connecting with people, because we're going into hard times, yada yada yada. As I'm listening to the description, first of all this guy's a psycho, clearly he's a psycho. But as I'm listening to him, I'm thinking about the American people that feel disenfranchised right now. That feel like no one is hearing their voice. The government isn't hearing their voice. Even if you call, they don't listen to you on both sides. If you're a conservative, you're called a racist, you want to starve children. Yada yada yada. And every time they do speak out, they’re shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?
O’REILLY: Well, look, nobody, even if they’re frustrated, is going to hurt another human being unless they’re mentally ill. I think.
BECK: I think pushed to the wall, you don’t think people get pushed to the wall?
O’REILLY: Nah, I don’t believe in this snap thing. I think that that kind of violence is inside you and it’s a personality disorder.
This is not an unfortunate attempt at a causal connection. This is Glenn Beck trying to justify himself to himself, with Bill O'Reilly (!) as the voice of reason. Since he's been put in his proper ideological box at Fox News, he has spiraled downward into this militia mentality ever faster. Today, he's doing his show from something called the Doom Room for a special called "You Are Not Alone."
Beck speaks to a small, strange, resentful movement at the far, far right of the spectrum that is emotionally unstable. There's clearly an audience for it, and increasingly the conservative movement is embodying it - note "the real problem is bisexuality, not mass murder" articulated by Rod Dreher - but it's notably dangerous. Beck is going to be leading a group out to the woods in Idaho and trying to secede within a month, I'm thinking.
Beck: You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families. It took me about a year. Um, and I had such compassion for them and I really, you know, I wanted to help them, and I was behind -- let's give them money, let's get them started, and all of this stuff. And I really didn't -- all the 3,000 victims' families, I don't hate all of them, I hate about, probably about ten of them. But when I see 9/11 victim family, you know, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh, shut up.' I'm so sick of them. Because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them. And again, it's only about ten.
So to see him tear up over the death of 9-11 widow Beverly Eckert, who died in that terrible Buffalo plane crash, is an act of hypocrisy by which all future hypocrisy can be judged. These guys wrap themselves in 9-11 so easily that they don't even know when they're contradicting themselves.
Here's Dick Armey, decrying political discourse as "inane" and demanding that serious people go about their business and contribute seriously, and then minutes later saying to Joan Walsh "I am so damn glad that you can never be my wife".
And then, here's Glenn Beck, actually doing the idling the car outside the studio to "do his part for global warming" joke, months after Colbert did EXACTLY THIS JOKE on his show:
These are respected members of the conservative media elite.
Glenn Beck, for whom the phrase "falling upwards" was invented, yesterday managed to, in one radio shift, call for the assassination of Jimmy Carter and say Hillary Clinton can't be elected because she's the "stereotypical bitch." Quite the exacta. Today, he claimed isn't a bitch but just sounded like one, which is an enormous difference that explains everything.
Then there's Fred Thompson, who has decided that a great way to kick off his Presidential run would be to make a play for the anti-Gandhi vote. Jon Swift does a good job applying the rapier wit to that, so I'll go no further.
Gandhi might be a hero to some people, but not to Fred Thompson. "When American's [sic] think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein." By opposing the war in Iraq liberals are, like Gandhi, on the side of Hitler.
Mark Noonan at Blogs for Bush lines up with Thompson as well, bringing the number of those on the side of the British Empire against one guy who went on a hunger strike and became the world's greatest symbol of peace and nonviolence in history to, um, two.
I'm really not offended by a whole lot that a conservative can say, other than the fact that the likes of ABC and CNN will dutifully pay money to broadcast it, and the entire conservative movement will support a candidate who spouts it. The point, as made by Hughes for America, is that this is the face of the Republican Party in 2007. This is pretty much who they are and what they believe. It's worth not forgetting.
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