If You Want Your Country Back, Start With This

Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to scale back some of the worst abuses of both the Patriot Act and the FISA legislation from last year. Obama Administration officials were noncommital.

At hearings in the House and Senate, the officials repeatedly said they had no position yet on legislation that Democrats have introduced that would tighten standards and oversight of surveillance tools authorized under laws including the USA Patriot Act.

"We are trying to figure out whether the provisions that are suggested there will work for us as is, or perhaps with modifications," David S. Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday on whether to renew a trio of Patriot Act powers set to expire Dec. 31.

Those provisions allow investigators to use "roving wiretaps" to monitor suspects who may be trying to escape detection by switching cellphone numbers; obtain from third parties the business records of national security targets; and track "lone wolf" suspects who may not belong to a terrorist group but may be planning attacks.

I'm surprised they've even gone to the level of noncommital. Executives generally want to retain the power handed to them.

But it took a non-lawyer Senator named Al Franken to explain in plain English why the roving wiretap statute offends the conscience.

Franken, who opened by acknowledging that unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, he’s not a lawyer, but according to his research “most Americans aren’t lawyers” either, said he’d also done research on the Patriot Act and in particular, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to get a warrant to wiretap a an unnamed target and his or her various and changing cell phones, computers and other communication devices.

Noting that he received a copy of the Constitution when he was sworn in as a senator, he proceeded to read it to Kris, emphasizing this part: “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”

Yes, it is "surreal" that some politician would dare look to the Founding documents for guidance when determining whether the roving wiretaps statute violates civil liberties. I'm no originalist, but I don't think there's a ton of wiggle room in "the persons or things to be seized."

The truth is that, for all the pretty talk about exigent circumstances and "the war on terror" and the need to conduct investigations in secret, almost all Patriot Act "sneak and peek" requests, where warrants could be obtained to conduct secret searches without telling the subjects, had nothing at all to do with terrorism, but standard-issue federal drug cases. The mission creep here is obvious, and it's true on national security letters and roving wiretaps as well.

I'd be willing to overlook the regular-grade racism and general ugliness of the tea party crowd if they'd actually take a look at these examples of government overreach, and work with civil libertarians on the left to roll them back. The combination could be potent. Of course, the teabaggers aren't libertarians, they're glibertarians, who adored this kind of stuff in the Bush years when they were fighting "terrism."

Dissecting The Lizard Brain

Two researchers have run the data on Jimmy Carter's contention that race is playing a role in the anger over health care. It's bookmark-worthy:

Our research favors Carter's interpretation and adds some hard data to the debate. In fact, the partisan divide today is even more troubling than if it was driven by race alone.

Americans' views of political issues and their partisan attachments are being increasingly shaped by gut-level worldviews. On one side of many issues are those who see the world in terms of hierarchy, think about problems in black and white terms, and struggle to tolerate difference. On the other are those who favor independence over hierarchy, shades of gray over black-white distinctions, and diversity over sameness.

We call this dividing line an authoritarian one, and we find that what side of the line people fall on explains their positions on a wide ranging set of issues, including race, immigration, gay rights, civil liberties, and terrorism. This is because what lies behind these preferences is a larger difference in worldview, where people understand reality in starkly different ways. This, in turn, leads to rancorous and irreconcilable-seeming political conflicts.

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

I would say that in general, opposition to any social insurance program for the less fortunate meets head-on with racial animus. Whether the presumed leader of this policy shift is white or black, a substantial portion of those with racial resentment pictures that leader as delivering their tax dollars to the undeserving other, which can be pictured in their minds as a black family, a Hispanic immigrant family, or really anyone who doesn't share the same features. It's no accident that opposition to Obama is clustered in the South, given such a reading.

What these professors are really probing is the lizard brain, the tribal identifiers that often bubble to the surface, in unguarded moments, as racism. It's almost too neat and simple to simply call it racial in intent. It goes much deeper to a visceral resentment, a put-upon persecution complex, this constant paranoia that someone else is getting a better deal, and that such inequity can form the basis of all the nation's problems. It's purely an emotional release to explain whatever personal failings or lack of compassion already exists. That this frequently codes racially is a symptom of the relationship between race and class, as well as the other longtime signifiers of identity that have been hard-wired into our brains for centuries.

I found this via DougJ last week, and it really summed up a lot of what I think animates modern conservatism, and it's not particularly or singularly racial:

“Those who have known him [Cheney] over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. ‘He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met,’ says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: ‘If I could ask Dick one question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.’”

There's an almost studied uncaring. And of course, Randian teaching gave those predisposed to uncaring a way to order their lack of compassion intellectually, to create virtue in selfishness and convince themselves that the less privileged are better off receiving no help from them. This anecdote from Rand (nee Alissa Rosenbaum)'s early life is fascinating and instructive:

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand's philosophy to an even earlier age. (Heller paints a more detailed and engaging portrait of Rand's interior life, while Burns more thoroughly analyzes her ideas.) Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

These children grew up to want to maintain that state of retarded adolescence, of a belief only in their own self-interest and greed, and Rand built a philosophy around it so they could justify their inhumanity and relieve the burden of their own consciences. They flipped morality on its head and built statues to the virtuous capitalist, and a drive for permanent growth that benefits only himself which is seen in this inverted pyramid as a glory to all mankind. In short, they have no compassion because they are told they have no need for it. It is a philosophy that served masters. And if taken to extremes, it can become profoundly sociopathic, as the desires of the individual trump social norms or conventions.

Is that racial in nature? It's certainly an argument that benefits the super-wealthy by relieving their guilt, makes it moral to hoard wealth and provides an element of superiority for anyone in the ruling class. That's definitely tribal. And class and race have become profoundly mixed in this culture. The teabaggers eat up Randian thought because they can easily justify their selfishness and identify a group with which they can hold some level of superiority. There's a comfort in a common enemy, in a tribal clustering against the other, armed with a philosophy that you can wield as armor to protect yourself from feeling any human emotion about that other's suffering. They may be the dreaded "populists" who Rand and her ilk would bar the door to the mansion to keep out in the rain; but they can internalize both halves of this at once, especially when they share the same enemies.

These thoughts have taken decades if not hundreds of years to wind through the American lizard brain. It will take perhaps as much time to wind them out. If race is what makes wingers uncomfortable with their own beliefs, then perhaps that's the proper line of attack. But it's much deeper than that.

Some Hidden Camera Investigations Are Bigger Than Others

Here's a Fox producer getting the crowd at the 9-12 protest to cheer on cue.



It's not all that unusual for a production staffer to goose a crowd with the intent to make a shot look good. And certainly, the people at that protest would have been inclined to cheer for a Fox News report anyway.

What's interesting is the network's comment about this.

The Huffington Post has confirmed that the woman in the below video — seen raising her arms to rally the crowd behind Griff Jenkins, who was reporting from the scene for Fox News — is Fox News producer Heidi Noonan.

"The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined," Bryan Boughton, Fox News Channel Washington Bureau Chief told the Huffington Post.

Just an inexperienced employee who made a mistake and was disciplined. It's not indicative of a large news organization and their hundreds of employees. Nothing to see here, everybody move along.

How is this at all different from the ACORN story?

(My point, if unclear, is not that everybody at Fox News is hopelessly corrupt and complicit at creating news events instead of reporting on them - that's just the province of top management - it's that they feel perfectly justified in blaming events on individual staffers and taking no responsibility, while not accepting the same stance from an organization with thousands of satellite offices like ACORN.)

...in the same vein - David Vitter complaining that criminal activity is the issue with ACORN, when he has pretty much admitted to his own criminal activity regarding prostitution, which is the same supposed sin "exposed" on those ACORN tapes.

Late-In-The-Game Czar Pushback

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.

If It Isn't On Page A1 Of The Washington Post It Didn't Happen

The spin cycle came out in force over the weekend, as a protest of conservatives on the Washington Mall either attracted 2 million people or 60,000, depending on whether or not you like to lie. This included such delights as a photo from a Promise Keepers rally in 1997 being passed off as one from Saturday.

Despite the falsehoods, the spin did its job, as it landed the teabaggers on Page One, a bit of a contrast to other protest rallies in the recent past.

Behold the media's glaring double standard. Today, the Post puts the "tens of thousands" of Obama-hating tea bagger protesters on A1; makes it the lead story as a matter of fact.

Back in 2002, when more than 100,000 anti-war protesters gathered in the nation's capitol to protest the Bush administration, the same WashPost did its best to ignore them:

The Washington Post put the story not on the front page, but in the Metro section with, as the paper's ombudsman later lamented, "a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements."

This simply proves again that when right-wing (and mostly white) conservatives get angry, it's big news. When liberals get angry, it's just annoying.

I would add that the anti-war protestors that day in Washington were buttressed by millions more around the nation and the world leading up to the invasion of Iraq, but still...nothing.

60 million Americans voted against Barack Obama in 2008. Of that number at least half viscerally hated him, as you could see from the various McCain/Palin rallies during the campaign. a small tranche of those 30 million-plus people got so worked up that they organized and brought out people to a rally in the capital. That's good news for the newfound ease of organizing thanks to the Internet, but not necessarily descriptive of the level of sentiment over Barack Obama in the country. These are the same people who hated him before the election, and they hate him just as much now, despite his Administration not having done very much of anything to inspire such hatred. Nobody's paid more in taxes, a Bush recession headed to depression has stalled. This is the same gang who would have been out on the Mall if Obama had provided $100,000 and a new puppy dog for every family (socialist puppy dogs!).

I like a protests as much as the next guy, which is to say, a little bit as long as the drum circle is kept to a minimum. However, although imperfect, the best indicator of support, and even intensity of support, on the issues facing the country remains polling. And the latest poll on health care has a number of contradictory points, with alternating support for a public option and support for a bill without one, as well as support for bipartisanship with an acknowledgment that Republicans have no interest in being bipartisan. The large mass of people seem to want their government to come up with this change in the health care market, which they can assess after the fact. Beyond that lies confusion. And so privileging the work of a lot of angry white men rather than offering a complete picture of public opinion is really a form of deception from the Washington Post.

...The teabaggers are a classy lot, too.

If It Screams, It Leads

I've attended a couple town halls out here in Southern California, and I found them all to be teabag-free. They were also invisible in the national debate. I wondered about, in those higher-profile cases of teabaggery, the utility of a random sample of screamers showing up at a meeting on a weeknight in terms of public opinion at large. Now, E.J. Dionne tells us that it was a sample within a sample - that the cable nets were looking for some action, and we all went right along with them. This is the most important column of the day.

Health-care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town-hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

I figured this to be the case, but confess to not being vocal enough about it. Dionne actually finds the smoking gun here:

Over the past week, I've spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television [...]

Rep. Frank Kratovil hails from a very conservative district that includes Maryland's Eastern Shore and says it didn't bother him that he was hung in effigy in July by a right-wing group. "As a former prosecutor, I consider that to be mild," he said with a chuckle. The episode, he added, was not at all typical of his town-hall meetings, where "most of the people were there to express legitimate concerns about the bill, wondering about how it was going to impact them" and wanting "to know the truth about some of the things that were being said about the bill."

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: "Your meeting doesn't get covered unless it blows up." As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No "news" there. (emphasis mine)

Dammit, dammit, dammit. And too much of the blogosphere fell for this, by the way.

Covering conflict is basically what cable news does, whether it's two talking heads in the studio or footage of a car chase. Their job is to sensationalize and titillate and draw eyeballs. In this case, they told a false narrative about a nation rising up against health care, and it led to a general impression that health care reform was becoming unpopular, which led to... polls showing reform becoming less popular. Keep this in mind when you hear the story about the bitten finger today on an endless loop.

The media will of course tell you they're bystanders, documenters, observers. Dionne's column puts the lie to that. They wrote a story for the month of August and then found the footage to justify it. And then people not engaged with the process watch a few selected soundbites from town hall meetings and figure something must be wrong with the policy if it inspires so much hatred.

Your liberal media. Watch the health industry ads skyrocket as a token of thanks for their attempt to kill health care reform.

Barney Frank v. The Teabaggers

Anyone who is aware of all Internet traditions has by now seen the footage of Barney Frank taking down the Larouchie who asked him if he would support a "Nazi policy" by asking her, "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" But Rep. Frank was in rare form that night, standing up to the uninformed shrieking of the right and offering a real lesson in how to argue with conservatives. Rep. Frank's office provided Crooks & Liars (I'm working with them now) with the tapes of that town hall meeting in Dartmouth from last week, and I put together a sort of greatest hits reel.

Frank explains what deficit hawks should concern themselves with:

"I am struck by those who say, well, you don't care about the deficit. No, I do. I do care about the deficit. That's one of the reasons, not the only one, why I voted against the single most wasteful expenditure in the history of America. The Iraq war. If we hadn't gone to the war in Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake and voted against, we would have had more than enough money to pay for health care."

He argues with a "tenther" who thinks that Congress isn't authorized to provide health care for their citizens:

Frank: Do you think Medicare is unconstitutional, sir?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: Do you think it's unconstitutional? You said that the Constitution doesn't give us the authority to do it, but Medicare was done. And, do you think Medicare is unconstitutional?

Teabagger: I think that Medicare needs to be reformed.

Frank: But you won't tell me whether you think it's unconstitutional, which you said--

Teabagger: I am not a Constitutional scholar-

Frank: Then why did you start off arguing about the Constitution?

That's really a fantastic exchange, where Frank digs an inch below the surface and finds nothing. He insists on having this questioner back up the rhetoric he cribbed off of Free Republic or wherever he got it, and the guy just couldn't do it.

And this is my favorite part:

Teabagger: Can you pledge to all of us here tonight, that if a new government single-payer system is instituted, that you will opt out of your Cadillac insurance?

Frank: Yes I am in favor of single payer, and that's why I like Medicare. (yelling) You act as if you people have discovered it is August. I have been a co-sponsor of the single payer bill, I think it would be better...

Teabagger #2: But we watch tapes of Obama and everyone else secretly say they're in favor of an eventual single pay system.

Frank: I haven't... sir, it's been 21 years since I've had a secret. (Laughter) And I don't have one now! You have discovered that I'm for single payer! I've been a sponsor of single payer for years!

What you see here is several things: 1) Rep. Frank is always in control; 2) he concedes nothing; 3) he allows his opponents to hang themselves with the outlandish logic of their own claims; 4) he knows when to throw in a well-timed bon mot. At one point, Frank says, "When you say things that people can't refute, they try to drown you out. That's understandable." That's someone who is confident in their beliefs. Democrats could learn something from that.

United Health Group Would Like You To Attend A Tea Party

United Health Care is one of the largest health insurers in America, covering 29.5 million individuals and over 70 million including employer-based coverage, according to recent securities filings. They are part of the cartel of insurance companies that hold regional dominance over the individual marketplace and restrict choice for consumers. But they claim to support health care reform. Right there in big bold letters on their own website.

This summer will be a critical time in the debate over how to improve health care in the United States. As the nation’s leading health and wellbeing company, trusted by over 70 million Americans to fund and manage their care, we are actively and constructively engaged in this effort.

UnitedHealth Group has a responsibility to be actively contributing ideas and practical solutions to this debate. As citizens of this nation, we each have a responsibility to remain informed and engaged on a subject so important to us all.

We are pleased that you are here and we encourage you to take advantage of the resources and tools provided on this website to better educate yourself and to make your voice heard.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Responsibly and actively contributing ideas and solutions. That's the claim. How can that be reconciled with this?

Last week, UnitedHealth Group--the second largest health insurance company in the country--sent out a letter to its employees urging them to call UHG's United for Health Reform Advocacy Hotline to speak with an advocacy specialist about health care reform. The advocacy specialist, according to the letter, is there to help UHG employees write personalized messages to elected officials, and to arm them with talking points to use at local events in order to better oppose the public health insurance option.

TPM has obtained the letter, which you can read here, but a UHG advocacy specialist was not willing to provide TPM with a copy.

However, a source who's insured by UHG--and who also obtained the letter--called the hotline on Tuesday and says the company directed him to an events list hosted by the right wing America's Independent Party, and suggested he attend an anti-health care reform tea party sponsored by religious fundamentalist Dave Daubenmire, scheduled for today outside the office of Blue Dog Rep. Zack Space (D-OH).

Giant insurers like United Health Group see value in enabling right-wing shriek-fests. They'll either derail reform, and keep a status quo that earned the CEO $124.8 million in 2005, or get a workable, sham "reform" without a public option that would essentially funnel government subsidies to their company. They have a good racket going, and they want to keep it.

Thug Life

For all the conservatives trying to make some equivalence between Code Pink ralliers and lobbyist-supported teabagger groups on their side, please let me know the instances of left-wing protesters physically assaulting politicians:

As lobbyist-run groups encourage conservative activists to “rattle” members of Congress at local town hall events, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the president of the freshman Democratic class has revealed that “at least one freshman Democrat” has already been “physically assaulted at a local event” by right-wing activists. Connolly warned that conservative groups had taken things to a “dangerous level“:

“When you look at the fervor of some of these people who are all being whipped up by the right-wing talking heads on Fox, to me, you’re crossing a line,’ Connolly said. ‘They’re inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts. They think we’re going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over.”

I think Harold Meyerson has this right. We've become a Filibuster Nation, with the minority reduced to shouting down the majority, using procedural tricks and rage and in some cases violence to veto the popular will.

Health Care for America Now has a memo on how to counteract the right at these rallies. There are probably a range of options. Invoking the Larouchies would be a start. Just getting the teabaggers on camera spouting their inanities is probably enough for them to embarrass themselves. But shutting up a mob that has shown a propensity for physical assault is probably not going to be handled with reasonable techniques. I'm thinking back to my days as a comic, when I was heckled. I actually enjoyed hecklers, it meant people were paying attention, for one thing. And I found two techniques to be successful:

1) Go meta - you cannot just plow ahead with your presentation. You have to comment on what's happening in the room. And making clear what's happening, essentially speaking for those in the room who aren't shouting, gets that segment of the room on your side. Saying things like "this is a coordinated effort by people funded and directed by Washington lobbyists to deny 47 million people health care" is a start. "Where are you from?" is another.

2) You have a microphone and they don't: use it - people on the fence generally go with the side that they feel has the upper hand. A microphone can be a powerful tool to talk over, above, and through a heckler. It can also be wielded for shaming them, although a politician probably has to do this tactfully.

There probably aren't a lot of former comics among the Congress outside of Al Franken, but they should maybe take some advice from him. I mean, these people at the town halls aren't even belligerent drunks! They will, however, try to beat you up after the show, just like regular hecklers.

...TPM has a live news wire of events happening on the ground, which may be useful.

Waiting For The Daily Blast Fax So The President Can Tell Me What To Write

Phillip Klein of the far-right American Spectator has an amusing blog post out apparently accusing me of taking marching orders from the White House.

...those bloggers who get their marching orders from the White House and DNC have become part of the effort to attack ordinary Americans expressing their beliefs about an issue of great importance.

David Dayen of the blog D-Day was on the call. Yesterday, he wrote a post titled, "Top-Level Democrats Assault The Extremist Astroturfers." It began, "The White House took the lead on this, publicly calling the teabagger disruptions an example of astroturfing and citing conservative industry-backed groups taking credit for activating the rioters. Now other elements of the Democratic Party are taking up the baton. Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer blasted the clown show today..." [...]

So just to sum up, Obama enlists the aid of a small group of liberal bloggers in the health care fight, and then those same bloggers write posts echoing White House and DNC talking points -- and in the very process of doing that, accuse their political opponents of astroturfing!

I seem to remember the call going like this: I asked a fairly pointed question about the negative consequences of those deals with industry groups, and Obama gave an answer based in his conception of realism that I called "deeply unsatisfying." Weeks later, I identify in multiple posts over a series of days an organized effort by corporate lobbying groups to bus around, distribute instructions to and in some cases fund so-called "ordinary Americans" who are hanging Congressmembers in effigy and wishing death upon them. The White House comes to the party a few days late, and I notice that as well.

Who's taking marching orders from whom?

I think the right wing is just a bit upset because their code has been cracked and pretty much every element of the Democratic side of the aisle has managed to notice.



Those aren't "marching orders," it's "recognizing what's plainly visible in front of your face." Which admittedly isn't always a simple task for a conservative.

By the way, when the insurance company lobby is trying to distance themselves from these tactics, you know the worm is starting to turn. The teabaggers are hurting nobody but themselves.

Gibbs Invokes The Brooks Brothers Riots

We now have Robert Gibbs openly calling this the Brooks Brothers Brigade. That's a start.

Q: Are you concerned at what appears to be well-orchestrated protesting of health care reform at town halls as derailing your message?

GIBBS: NO, I get asked every day about the myriad of things that could be derailing our message. I would point out that I don't know what all those guys were doing, what were they called, the Brooks Brothers Brigade in Florida in 2000, appear to have rented a similar bus and are appearing together at town hall meetings throughout the country

Q: They seem to be pretty widespread.

GIBBS: I seem to see some commonality in who pops up in some of these things.
Q: Like individuals?

GIBBS: Yeah.

Q: Really?

GIBBS: Yeah.

Q: Can you discuss names or ....

GIBBS: I don't have names but I think you can see quite a bit of similarity between who shows up where.

He's clearly trying to lead the horses of the press corps to water, not that they'll drink. But the industry groups are admitting their role in activating the protests.

...incidentally, if you want to follow these riots yourself, and maybe even produce a macaca moment, I've posted an embed of FDL's widget of upcoming town hall meetings all over the country. Check the right-hand column.

The K Street Lynch Mobs

Jane has the deets on Freedomworks, the lobbyist-funded group activating the teabag rallies at health care town halls across the country. Somehow CBS, with its large cadre of producers and researchers, put a Freedom Works spokesman on its air last night without disclosing their ties, but a blogger with virtually no staff can uncover all this useful information about the organization.

Freedomworks isn't some "organic grassroots" outfit. It's run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey -- corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladie's man. The President and CEO of Freedomworks is Matt Kibbee, who was trained by Lee Atwater. Kibbe was behind the attempt to get Ralph Nader put on the ballot in Oregon in 2004, prompting a complaint to the FEC of illegal collusion with the GOP.

Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

Freedomworks has a long history of skunk works. In 2004, a woman who identified herself as a "single mother" in Iowa, Sandra Jacques, appeared at a George Bush town hall and gushed about his plan to privatize Social Security. She left out the part about being an employee of Freedomworks, who were lobbying on the issue at the time.

David Koch is also Chairman of the other major outfit heavily involved in these "organic" uprisings, Americans for Prosperity, whose members lynched Democrat Frank Kratovil in effigy. Koch is the 19th richest man in the world. They recently renamed the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center the David H. Koch Theater.

These aren't just some organizations that these guys gave money to. They run them.

Americans for Prosperity, incidentally, are on the record about busing their people to rally against reform in 13 states.

Brian Beutler of TPMDC - again, with resources not nearly as large as CBS - has a lot more. He notes the role of Conservatives for Patients Rights, founded and funded by Rick Scott, a disgraced former head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company who paid the largest fine in US history, $1.7 billion dollars, for overcharging state and federal health plans. This guy has sunk millions of dollars of health industry money into anti-reform ads, and if you read Beutler's piece, they are clearly orchestrating this "organic" uprising among the teabaggers.

The people on the ground may have their own extremist, anti-government beliefs. But they are being activated by corporate lobbyist-backed astroturf groups.

UPDATE: This is a very, very good point from Ezra, and I've noticed this too at most of the meetings I've attended:

I've been attending health-care panels and events on a pretty regular basis for four or five years now. Each event, of course, is its own precious snowflake, with its own set of graphs and bullet points and dweebish jokes. But one thing is perfectly predictable: The Q&A session will be dominated by single-payer activists asking about HR 676.

There's not a mystery as to why this happens: Single-payer activists are very well organized, and they make a point to dispatch their people to these events and get their members to the microphone and ensure that their perspective is heard. But as the bills under consideration suggest, politicians have had no problem ignoring the single-payer grassroots. Max Baucus ruled out their participation on day one. The media hasn't shown the slightest inclination to cover their presence at event after event after event.

To extend this a bit, 15 million people protested the Iraq war and the coverage was virtually nil. Lobbyists bus 100 people into a Congressional town hall and the media hypes the "Tehran-like" atmosphere of them. Groups of people at town hall meetings are not perfect indicators of the overall attitudes of a population, and even among the town halls, traditional media highlights and politicians respond to very selective segments of those groups.

Rope. Tree. Justice.

A peek into the minds of the teabaggers.

From Burt Prelutsky's August 3 Townhall.com column:

When it comes to our national security, keeping the likes of Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and John Kerry in the loop would be the height of insanity. The only loop appropriate for most of the ninnies in Congress is one hanging from the branch of a very tall tree.

So far as I can tell, the only real difference between members of Congress and cockroaches is that one of the two species has a few more legs than the other.

Every Republican officeholder should be asked the question: are you with civil discourse, or with those advocating the lynching of Democratic politicians?

Health care will not be won by putting out bullet-pointed debunks. It will be won by calling attention to lobbyist-supported and -funded lynch mobs.

...we know where these riots will take place. They can be documented. The ringleaders can be questioned. They can be asked about Obama's birth certificate. They can be asked about Democrats (with the expected answer something like the call for lynching above). They can discredit themselves with their own words.

I Love A Good Republicans In Disarray Story

In the past, when the Republican Party was riding high, the idea that they had a three-legged stool, with economic conservatives, national security conservatives and social conservatives together in a mutually beneficial truce of sorts, was seen as a positive. I always viewed it as a ticking time bomb. It's basically like having Terrell Owens, Randy Moss, Stephon Marbury, Ron Artest and a malcontent to be named later on your sports team. When you're winning, everyone's happy. When you're losing, forget about it. That accurately describes the chaos we see in the modern GOP. Any time they try to emphasize one leg of the stool, those who inhabit the other issue silos get angry. Here's a perfect example - values voters are angry that the Republican rebranding effort doesn't include their views.

The [NCNA's] priorities, which were unveiled at a pizza parlor press conference, include the economy, health care, education, energy, and national security. Notice anything conspicuously absent? Former Gov. Jeb Bush explained the values void by saying it was time for the GOP to give up its "nostalgia" for Reagan-era ideas and look forward to new "relevant" ideas. (Yes, because that worked so well for Republicans in 2006 and 2008!) Bush ignored the fact that abandoning the array of principles that Reagan espoused is exactly what got the GOP into this mess. [...]

Too many Republicans leaders are running scared on the claims of the Left and the media that social conservatism is a dead-end for the GOP. If that were the case, why are pro-family leaders like Mike Huckabee creating such excitement in the conservative base? The Republican establishment doesn't draw a crowd. Governor Sarah Palin does. Also, take a look at the recent Pew Research poll, which showed overall support for abortion in America has dropped eight percentage points in the last year and support for it among moderate and liberal Republicans has dropped a whopping 24%. Based on that, how can the GOP suggest that life is a losing issue? If there were a road sign for the GOP on this new journey, it would read: Welcome to the wilderness. You're going to be there for awhile.

Another example is this self-pitying, gobbledygook letter from one of the teabaggers describing their "movement" as in a "very disconcerting position at the moment."

Ultimately, what happens with malcontents in sports is that the team finds themselves unable to co-exist with them, and they are either released or traded. Get ready for an explosion of hard-right third parties. The Joe the Plumber Party - coming to a stump near you.

The Line Of Secession

With all the talk of secession in the air, Rasmussen polled Texans about it, and they found that 31% thought that " individual states have the right to leave the United States and form an independent country," and 18% answered yes to "If you could vote on the issue, would you vote for Texas to remain in the United States or to secede from the United States and form an independent country of Texas?"

Roughly one out of every five people in the state of Texas think they should go ahead and form an independent country. If you're in line at the bank with five people, one of them believes this.

Now, Rick Perry, the king of the 18 percenters, wants us to believe he wasn't calling for secession, just asserting the sovereignty of the state of Texas under the 10th Amendment. This is classic Overton window stuff, putting secession on the extreme while making this assertion of sovereignty - and by extension the belief that the President is violating the Constitution - seem banal and reasonable. But of course, this is ridiculous. The President in the stimulus package offers the states the ability to accept federal funds, with certain qualifying guidelines. States can comply to the guidelines and accept the funds, or refuse the funds. That actually is the very definition of the 10th Amendment. It's not the President's fault that, during a recession, it would be deeply unpopular not to change the guidelines. Indeed, Secessionist Perry's own legislature in Texas voted to accept stimulus money for unemployment by changing their guidelines. Which I guess makes King Richard want to secede from the Texas legislature.

Now, back to that 18% number. 18% of the voting public from the last election would be around 20 million people. Which puts the 250,000 or so teabaggers in perspective, doesn't it? Basically, that was a collection of people so angered by losing power that they want to either create their own country or forcibly take back this one. In other words, nutters.



By the way, you'll surely be shocked to know that Tom DeLay lied on national television when talking about this.

...By the way, if any Democratic elected official ever even dipped their toe in the secession water, they'd be the second coming of Ward Churchill and forced to resign. Just sayin'.

At the Heart, Hate

Actually, I would say that 250,000 Americans showing up to teabag events across the country is a pretty big number. This talk from liberals minimizing the amount of people sounds an awful lot to me like conservatives talking about anti-war protests. So I won't deride the raw numbers. Clearly there is anger and frustration, mainly from the bailout, that has been pushed together into a ball and shaped into some kind of anti-spending, anti-tax rallying cry. The real question is not the presence of that grievance, but the recommendations for how to best handle this economic downturn. And when you see the disturbing amount of anti-government sentiment, when you hear comments like "On 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building" coming from the participants, you realize that these were just mini-versions of those ugly Sarah Palin rallies during the election, with all the hate talk and anti-Obama sentiment baked inside. Some would spin this out to say that Obama is a polarizing figure, but that's nonsense. The overriding sentiment at these tea parties was sour grapes, a "deeply neurotic reaction to the enormity of their own cockups in office," as Joe Klein puts it. They were an expression of anger from people who see the world passing them by, stoked on in their hatred by movement conservative groups.

We can talk about how the average American's tax burden was the lowest in decades, we can talk about all of the tax cuts for the middle class the President has already authored, we can talk about the fact that taxes are primarily used to finance the debt, defense, Social Security and Medicare, and so talking about lowering taxes means receiving less of those and other services. Some people even did this right to the faces of the teabaggers.



But while the chorus of boos reacting to those factual claims were revealing, that's honestly besides the point. These rallies were a chance for the people normally at the end of the bar to rant about the black Muslim in the White House.

Picture Gallery

To the great benefit of my sanity, I decided to be too lazy to teabag locally, so I can only get my intel on it from the Intertubez, which informs me that they were shouting "Obama is Hitler" here in Santa Monica. Nice.

It looks like a lot of people decided to be lazy like me, as in comparison to the 2003 antiwar protests these rallies are ridiculously puny, and only "epic" in terms of the outsized attention from TV cameras.

Here's a sampling of some of my favorite pictures that I'll be sure to pull out for the next year or so. This is a photo gallery of a political movement in a death spiral. And you'll note that most of them are violent.









And who could forget...



...UPDATE: I noticed this too. The "grassroots" organizer of the Chicago tea party is a guy from a right-wing think tank called the Heartland Institute. And Mike Barnicle let that fly right by.

You Are Now Allowed To Compare Obama To Hitler

See Digby on this one. And also Judd Legum.

Apparently, violating Godwin's Law only matters if it's a random Democrat with a sign doing it. Everyone else is OK.

Gotta love our media.

A Stroll Through The Teabags

This isn't turning out entirely well for the right. Even the roundup piece on the AP includes this balloon-puncturing nugget.

The tea parties were promoted by FreedomWorks, a conservative nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington and led by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, a lobbyist whose corporate clients including Verizon, Raytheon, liquor maker Diageo, CarMax and drug company Sanofi Pasteur.

The group's federal tax returns show its educational and charitable arms received more than $6 million in donations in 2007, the most recent year for which returns are available.

Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich have no possible claim to leading a grassroots movement, though Armey did helpfully explain to the protesters what teabagging is, which at least should help their sex lives. This is corporate underwriting to harness populist sentiment. And the results have been ugly, like with this Fox News reporter exhorting his charges to "wake up and fight the fascism."



Or this.



"He's a fascist." "Why?" "Because he is."

I still haven't figured out what this protest is all about, but it sure is entertaining. Elsewhere, teabaggers threw tea over the White House gate, causing a lockdown while protesters shouted "Death to the President." This is an echo of teabaggers sending tea bags to Congressional offices and having them mistaken for hazardous materials. And here are some pictures - my favorite being "cut taxes, not defense," which just shows no recognition of how government or money or really anything works. Oh yeah, and this.

Robert Gibbs could only sigh and remark that the White House just passed the largest middle-class tax cut in American history, which is true and about all they really should say at this point, given their position of authority. I think Thomas Frank put it best:

Unless it rains today, thousands of average people will stand up across the land, declare their mad-as-hell-ness. Look for folks to holler for lower estate taxes and a replacement for Sarbanes-Oxley. They will put on three-cornered hats, wave "don't tread on me" flags, and imagine that they are channeling the spirit of Tom Paine as they do their part to ease the troubles of the economy's winners.

And Fox News, which plans to cover the tea parties, will no doubt hail this plastic populism as the realest kind of social uprising, a movement that is the rightful expression of this year's discontents [...]

The conservative movement, too, has long been a master of this maneuver. From the days of Richard Nixon to those of Sarah Palin it has described itself as a rebellion of Middle America against elitist liberals; as a nation of Joe the Plumbers rising against interfering bureaucrats.

It has little patience with traditional populism of the anti-big-business sort. Looking around on the Web site of the D.C. pressure group FreedomWorks, for example, I came across a denunciation of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's "small-minded populism" written in January 2008 by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now FreedomWorks's chairman. Mr. Huckabee's offense was his claim to favor "Main Street, not Wall Street," thereby implying, Mr. Armey sputtered, "that the interests of the two are not in alignment. . . ."

As the mad-as-hell come together to proclaim their outrage, all the well-known earmarks of right-wing populism will no doubt be present. Leadership, in certain instances, will probably be furnished by one of the many well-known, well-funded Washington pressure groups. The ideology will be strictly Manichean: "government" and "freedom" in a zero-sum cage match, light versus darkness, with a victory for one being automatically a setback for the other.

Other than that, the tea partiers' stance on the issues is a little mysterious. But outrage is outrage, the party organizers probably figure; who will know the difference?

Great stuff.

...not that numbers are everything, but the biggest claim I've seen is that 60,000 people have turned out nationwide for this thing. 500,000 people rallied for immigration reform just in LA, and without any right-wing money or infrastructure, besides. Of course, I saw very little coverage of those rallies compared to the teabagging. And the disconnect from the traditional media is sadly predictable.

...Go Nancy!

PELOSI: What they want is a continuation of the failed economic policies of President George Bush which got us in the situation we are in now. What we want is a new direction. … This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end — we call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.

Campaign Update: CA-50, CA-10

A couple brief updates:

• CA-50: Francine Busby, who has competed in this district a couple times, in 2004 and 2006, never breaking 44%, will announce another run, challenging Rep. Brian Bilbray. This is an "Obama Republican" district, where Bilbray only beat Nick Leibham by 50-46 in 2008. And voter registration is trending in our favor. And Busby is kicking things off by hitting Bilbray over his "Party of No" rejection of President Obama's policies, which makes sense in a district he carried.

Busby says, "Voters called for change in 2008 when they elected Barack Obama. (Incumbent Congressman) Bilbray didn't heed the message. He played a reckless, cruel game of politics with the lives of struggling San Diegans when he voted no on Recovery and Reimbursement Act that would bring millions of federal stimulus dollars into our economy.

My sense is that CA-50 is something of a tease of a district, with a Democratic ceiling around 46%, but I think Busby is taking the right line to win, and she does have some name ID, which could help. Stay tuned.

• CA-10: I hate to even give space to the Adriel Hampton "boomlet," but after calling for the legalization and taxation of marijuana, today the Congressional candidate is actually promoting and endorsing the right-wing, corporate-funded and Fox News-promoted "tea parties." No lie. You know, this guy is more faddish than a junior-high Jonas Brothers fan. Anything with a hashtag is good, I guess. Even if it enables corporate-friendly drowning of government in the bathtub. What a Web 2.0 genius!