Last Call

Looks like our friends the Invisible Teabaggers are back. Gateway Dipstick:

Glenn Beck announced, “I heard two estimates from the media. One was 300,000 and the other was 500,000. So, who knows just how many are actually here today.”

Wow, half a million is certainly an impressive number...if by "half a million" you mean less than a hundred thousand.

An estimated 87,000 people attended a rally organized by talk-radio host and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck Saturday in Washington, according to a crowd estimate commissioned by CBS News.

The company AirPhotosLive.com based the attendance on aerial pictures it took over the rally, which stretched from in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument. Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke at the rally.

Beck, who predicted that at least 100,000 people would show up, opened his comments with a joke: "I have just gotten word from the media that there is over 1,000 people here today."

AirPhotosLive.com gave its estimate a margin of error of 9,000, meaning between 78,000 and 96,000 people attended the rally. The photos used to make the estimate were taken at noon Saturday, which is when the company estimated was the rally's high point.

Yes I know, it's another massive left-wing conspiracy to hide the other 400,000-plus people just like last year, when they said 70,000 people was actually two million.

By that winger math anywhere from 2.28 million to 2.74 million wingers were really out there, it's just all the aerial photos are owned by George Soros, right?

At least they've kept their lies within an order of magnitude this time.

Follow The Money Trail

If you want to know why the Dems are in real trouble, you must glean the scene of Wall Street green.

At a black-tie dinner in April, a politically influential hedge fund manager named Paul Singer offered a blistering critique of the “terrible path” he said Washington politicians were charting on economic issues.

Mr. Singer, professorial and soft-spoken, used a gathering of business and government leaders at the conservative Manhattan Institute to lash out at “indiscriminate attacks by political leaders against anything that moves in the world of finance.” Government efforts to “take over and run” the economy through more regulations, he warned, threatened to ruin the United States’ standing as the world leader in finance.

As the head of a $17 billion hedge fund, Mr. Singer, a self-described Barry Goldwater conservative who is 66, is using his financial might to try to change those policies. He has become one of the biggest bankrollers of Republican causes, giving more than $4 million of his money and raising millions more through fund-raisers he hosts for like-minded candidates who often share his distaste for what they view as governmental over-meddling in the financial industry.

The same day in June that the House gave final approval to the sweeping overhaul of financial regulations, Mr. Singer had a fund-raiser at his Central Park West apartment, netting more than $1 million for seven Republican Senate candidates who had opposed the bill. His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is the biggest source of money to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

With economic problems weighing heavily as the November elections approach, the divide between Republicans and Democrats in their attitudes toward Wall Street and the economy promises to be a recurring point of attack for both parties, and Mr. Singer is using his money to push conservative causes. 

And thank to the Supreme Court, those donations are now unlimited.  Welcome to the gilded age of the Golden Rule:  he who has the gold, makes the rules.

We're about to end up with the best Congress money can buy.

Taibbi On The Summer Of Insanity

Do read the whole thing.

There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

 

The Fox/Rush/Savage crowd in the last 18 months has taken the anti-Muslim fervor that launched a phony war in Iraq, carried George Bush to re-election, and pushed through the Patriot Act, and re-directed that anger at a domestic nonwhite enemy. In doing so they’ve achieved a perfect storm of political cross-purposes: they’ve almost completely succeeded in distracting the public from the real causes of their economic misfortune (i.e. Wall Street corruption), they’ve re-energized a Republican party that was devastated by eight years of Bush-era corruption and incompetence, and, as usual, they’ve made Rupert Murdoch a shitload of money. 

And in the end that's all that matters. It's a brilliant plan, and it's working perfectly, to the point where the Republican party is poised to take back the House and very possibly even the Senate as well, and then unleash a never-ending Clinton-era storm of endless investigations and infinite-ring circuses to destroy what's left of liberalism in this country.

Taibbi certainly understands what's coming.  I don't think enough in the Obama administration do.

Keep The Home Fires Burning

President Obama dedicated his weekly address today to the fact he's brought 90,000 troops home from Iraq since he took office.  That's true...

Three days before the official end of the US combat mission in Iraq, US President Barack Obama said on Saturday that the war in the country was "ending" and called Iraq a "sovereign" nation free to determine its own destiny.

"On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war," Obama said in his weekly radio address.

The president, who spends Saturday his last full vacation day at on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, will cover the issue of Iraq in a nationally-televised address from the Oval Office on Tuesday.

"As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war," Obama recalled in the address. "As president, that is what I am doing. We have brought home more than 90,000 troops since I took office."

US troop numbers in Iraq fell below 50,000 last Tuesday in line with Obama's instructions as part of a "responsible drawdown" of troops, seven years on from the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

...but how many of those 90,000 troops are now in Afghanistan as part of the "surge" there to fight that particular losing war?  Obama really, really should avoid making "Mission Accomplished!" type statements like this until he's brought all of our troops home from the Middle East...

...which of course will never happen.

Thoughts On Beckapalooza

As Glenn Beck helpfully reminds everyone today that the civil rights movement was really all about white people and what they contributed to help black folk ride buses (the same buses that 47 years later we should shut down for being tax-consuming parasites apparently) and drink from water fountains in parks (which 47 years later should also be shut down for being tax-consuming parasites) I can't help but think that maybe there's something that Glennsanity is overlooking just a bit.

Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald puts it brilliantly.

We're in an odd moment. Having opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century, some social conservatives seek, now that that movement stands vindicated and venerated, to arrogate unto themselves its language and heroes, to remake it in their image.

Thus, you get claims that "racism" is now what Shirley Sherrod said in a speech to the NAACP. And people calling Sarah Palin the new face of feminism. And conservatives touting the likelihood that King voted Republican — as if the party in 1957 bore any resemblance to the party now.

But even by those standards, Glenn Beck's effrontery is monumental. Even by those standards, he goes too far. Beck was part of the "we" who founded the civil rights movement!? "No." Here's who "we" is.

"We" is Emmett Till, tied to a cotton gin fan in the murky waters of the Tallahatchie River. "We" is Rosa Parks telling the bus driver no. "We" is Diane Nash on a sleepless night waiting for missing Freedom Riders to check in. "We" is Charles Sherrod, husband of Shirley, gingerly testing desegregation compliance in an Albany, Ga., bus station. "We" is a sharecropper making his X on a form held by a white college student from the North. "We" is celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando and Pernell Roberts of "Bonanza," lending their names, their wealth and their labor to the cause of freedom.

"We" is Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, Cynthia Wesley, Andrew Goodman, Denise McNair, James Chaney, Addie Mae Collins and Carole Robertson, shot, beaten and blown to death for that cause.

"We" is Lyndon Johnson, building a legislative coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat intransigent Southern Democratic conservatives and enshrine that cause into law.
And "we" is Martin Luther King, giving voice and moral clarity to the cause — and paying for it with his life.

The we to which Glenn Beck belongs is the we that said no, the we that cried "socialism!" "communism!" "tyranny!" whenever black people and their allies cried, freedom.

I'll boil it down to "screw you, Glenn Beck."   The man is trying to rewrite history to benefit himself.  He should be ashamed, but I don't think he's capable of it.  Up until now I thought Beck was a dangerously egomaniacal demagogue, but now the guy is borderline evil.

He opposes everything Dr. King stood for and died for, most of all social justice.

What kind of man would do something like this to the African-American community and sill be able to sleep at night, untroubled by the ghosts of people who died so he could exploit them?

Jesus really would have wept.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Pakistani officials say the death toll from this month's flooding could rise by hundreds or even thousands as the waters recede.
• A former State Department contractor is being charged with revealing top-secret information on North Korea to FOX News.
• Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington DC faces a civil rights counter-rally by Al Sharpton and others today.
• United Airlines and Continental Airlines are awaiting shareholder votes for the largest airline merger in US history.
• Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has brought a massive patent lawsuit for search technology against companies including Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, and Netflix.

Last Call

Just how big should the "exclusion zone" be that supposedly should prevent the Park51 project from being built?  Of all the outfits to actually ask people that question, it's the friggin' Daily Caller and the results are both hysterical and pathetically sad.

So how many “steps away,” exactly, would a mosque need to be to avoid controversy?

It’s just not that simple, said Robert Spencer, author and editor of the website Jihad Watch, adding that it would be impossible to pin down an exact appropriate location for an Islamic center in the neighborhood.

The proximity to Ground Zero is just one component of a wide range of factors that ought to be considered, he said. These include “the historical connections of the new site to 9/11 and the buildings in the surrounding area.” Also, the site would need to be “as far away as would be necessary to take away the symbolic value that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Kahn have alluded to in saying that this mosque is intended to make a statement about 9/11.” With that in mind, he said, any answer with just a specific distance that did not provide for the other elements would be incomplete.

“I’m not going to give you an address. There is no way I could possibly do that or anybody could do that,” he replied when asked during a phone interview. “…You’re trying to trap me and I know it. You want to play the game? I know how to play this game. I’ve been doing this for many years, alright? I’ve talked to lots of reporters, I know the games you play. I ain’t playing. You’re trying to get me to give you an address and say ‘oh, if it’s one block over or one building over then it’s okay with Spencer, but one building over here, no then it’s a triumphal mosque.’ Well I’m not playing.”

Could it be because the argument is complete crap there, Rob, and that once you say "it's too close" then all of America has to qualify as too close, or your argument is exposed for the arbitrary hypocritical bull that it is when you actually do pin down a location?

Because without the veneer of "it's too close to Ground Zero" the actual problem is that you don't like Muslims, yes?

Baby Bust

The US birth rate numbers are looking rather low these days, here in the middle of the depression.

The U.S. birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century.

Births fell 2.7 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

"It's a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before," said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report. 

The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That's down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families. 

"It doesn't matter how you look at it—fertility has declined," Ventura said. 

Two observations:

1)  Kids are expensive.

2)  Cue the winger outrage that clearly this proves abortions are going to destroy America and must be outlawed now in 3...2...1...

Down In A Hole

Feeling so small...

How many House seats will the Republicans gain in 2010? To answer this question, we have run 1,000 simulations of the 2010 House elections. The simulations are based on information from past elections going back to 1946. Our methodology replicates that for our ultimately successful forecast of the 2006 midterm. Two weeks before Election Day in 2006, we posted a prediction that the Democrats would gain 32 seats and recapture the House majority. The Democrats gained 30 seats in 2006. Our current forecast for 2010 shows that the Republicans are likely to regain the House majority.

Our preliminary 2010 forecast will appear (with other forecasts by political scientists) in the October issue of PS: Political Science. By our reckoning, the most likely scenario is a Republican majority in the neighborhood of 229 seats versus 206 for the Democrats for a 50-seat loss for the Democrats. Taking into account the uncertainty in our model, the Republicans have a 79% chance of winning the House.

Good thing Dems backed down on jobs bills, additional stimulus, Wall Street reform, national immigration reform and climate legislation to accede to Republican demands in the name of bipartisan progress, because the voters sure are going to reward them for it...and what does that mean for America in 2011 with the GOP plan for "going forwards" and fixing the economy?

If President Barack Obama needed any more incentive to go all out for Democrats this fall, here it is: Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.

Everything from the microscopic — the New Black Panther party — to the massive –- think bailouts — is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO. 

Won't this be fun?  Remember folks, Clinton tacked hard to the right, gave the GOP everything they wanted, repealed Glass-Steagall and balanced the budget during one of the biggest peacetime economic booms in American history.

The GOP responded by impeaching him anyway.

Imagine what they're going to do to Obama with a 10% unemployment rate. 

Meanwhile In Pakistan

...It's still hell on earth.

Fresh flooding has sent a million people fleeing from their homes in the south in the past 48 hours, the United Nations said. 

The death toll from the floods, triggered by unusually heavy monsoon downpours over the upper Indus basin a month ago, was expected to rise significantly as more bodies were found while many people were missing, a disaster authority spokeswoman said.

Floodwaters are beginning to recede across most of the country as the water flows downstream, but high tides in the Arabian Sea meant they still posed a threat to towns in Sindh province such as Thatta, 70 km (45 miles) east of Karachi.

"Concern continues to be the south," U.N. spokeswoman Stacey Winston told a news conference. "In the last 48 hours nearly one million people have been displaced."
The U.N. earlier said the floods had forced about six million people from their homes.

Millions of people now homeless in a flood-ravaged country and more water coming in some parts, in a place where government is barely holding on...a government with nukes and a serious domestic terrorism problem.  This disaster has been going on for weeks now with no real end in sight.

This will come back to haunt us.  Guaranteed.

Look For The Union Moose

The fight between Sarah Palin and AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka is getting really interesting, but I think Moose Lady might have bitten off more than she can chew. Palin's certainly picking a fight:

To my hardworking, patriotic brothers and sisters in the labor movement: you don't have to put up with the scare tactics and the big government agenda of the union bosses. There is a different home for you: the commonsense conservative movement. It cares about the same things you and I care about: a government that doesn't spend beyond its means, an economy focused on creating good jobs with good wages, and a leadership that is proud of America's achievements and doesn't go around apologizing to everyone for who we are. 

But after spending most of, oh, the last two years demonizing union employees, I doubt many are going to fall for it.  Trumka's response is classic:

Sarah Palin?

She used to have a job, your governor.... You knew her.... Or thought you did.... I know I thought I did. She seemed like a decent person, an outdoorswoman. Her husband's a steelworker. She seemed to take some OK stands for working families.

And then things got weird. After she tied herself to John McCain and they lost, she blew off Alaska. I guess she figured she'd trade up...shoot for a national stage. Alaska was too far from the FOX TV spotlight.

I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.

I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn't have to be accountable... so she wouldn't have a record that could be scrutinized...

Instead, she's hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his "death panels...." Talking about "the real America." Talking about building schools in "our neighboring country of Afghanistan." Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.

And he's not backing down from her, either.  It's good to remember that standing up to Palin's endless teenage tweet garbage and Facebook rants is actually the correct thing to do instead of slinking away from her, hoping she'll leave you alone.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

This is rich.

Nevadans would like a do-over.

Two-thirds of voters who say they back Sharron Angle wish another Republican had won the nomination, according to a poll for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and 8NewsNow that shows deep dissatisfaction with both the Tea Party pick and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid.

Nearly eight of 10 voters who remain undecided or who don't like Angle or Reid say they, too, would have preferred if the staunch conservative hadn't won the June 8 primary over her more moderate foes. And 58 percent of such nonaligned voters say they wish Reid hadn't won the Democratic nomination, suggesting a majority of Nevadans are unhappy with their choices.

Oh well, nobody ever accused Republican primary voters of being anything other than angry.  You know, like "attentive to issues of their candidate".

The Kentucky Waltz

Over at Down With Tyranny, Howie has an pretty thorough run-down of the House race in my own backyard: KY-4 and Republican Geoff Davis vs Democrat John Waltz.

In primary after primary, Republican incumbents have found themselves in real peril from an angry group of right-leaning voters who resent the budget-busting policies that helped bring the economy to its knees. There is a growing divide between the Mitch McConnell machine and the grassroots movement that lifted Rand Paul to notoriety. What will happen when the choice moves to the general election? Can a left-leaning candidate that shares the fundamental frustrations and fiscal concerns of the Tea Party carry more appeal than a follower of Mitch McConnell?

This is a real possibility in a place like Kentucky where the voters typically choose Democrats for state office, but lean Republican in federal elections. The state is not as red as it may initially appear and populism is a winning message in a state that fell in love with the Clintons.

Enter John Waltz, a progressive-minded, populist, blue-collar Democrat running a stronger than expected campaign against one of the least accomplished McConnell loyalists in Congress, Geoff Davis. Waltz's policy positions are progressive, and his style and populist message are ones that Kentucky Tea Partiers could almost certainly learn to appreciate.

Waltz served in the Navy in Iraq and Afghanistan and when he returned home from the wars, he suffered serious health problems and went to Geoff Davis for help. “I figured he was a veteran and a Congressman and he would help me. I was wrong,” Waltz says. As a veteran advocate, Davis brought him to fundraisers and used him as a prop to talk about taking care of America’s heroes, yet he did nothing to actually help. Waltz worked with other veterans as well and had the same experience. Waltz says he is telling his story to show that if Davis can’t even bother to find the time to help disabled veterans, we know what he’s going to do when you give his office a call.

Instead of just giving up, John decided to challenge the powerful northern Kentucky incumbent. With no money and no political experience, Waltz’s biggest asset has been tenacity. He outraised Geoff Davis in the most recent fundraising reports filed with the FEC and he did it the hard way. Waltz raised slightly more than Davis in small donations from more than 400 people. Davis on the other hand collected 98% of his money from big PAC checks. Only 8 people actually donated to Davis’ campaign, a point that Waltz makes with zeal.

Howie's logic is that John Waltz can turn the Kentucky Tea Party anger against Mitch McConnell and incumbents in general against Davis, and that Waltz can ride that wave to the House.  He's an Iraq vet and his story of deciding to run against Davis when Davis was refusing to do anything to help Iraq/Afghanistan vets is a strongly moving tale.  He talks a solid budgetary game and is actually preaching fiscal responsibility, and his issue page is definitely stuff I agree with:  health care, jobs, reducing foreign debt to improve the jobs picture (smart guy, this Waltz) and green energy.

Will anti-incumbent anger at Davis be enough to give Waltz a win?  Howie thinks so.

Davis ran afoul of the Tea Party movement early on. The Kentucky Club for Growth publicly took him to task for ridiculing and dismissing those that were fighting back against the fiscal mess created by Republicans. An excerpt from the group’s website:

“In the interview, Davis calls the ideas of the Tea Parties, that bailouts and reckless spending is bad and the expansion of liberty is good, as "Pie in the Sky," then proceeds to criticize the Club for Growth, saying as David Adams transcribes:

"A lot of conservative groups like Club for Growth and others unfortunately spend all their time going after Republicans. As I've shared, it would be nice if they tried to defeat a liberal now and then."

Mr. Davis, just because someone has an "R" next to their name doesn't mean that that person is voting to uphold conservative principles.”

Davis has been backtracking ever since and attempting to reach out to Tea Party voters. It is not an easy sell for a three-term incumbent who has proved more of a machine politician than a reformer. Especially one who insulted the Club for Growth by saying they were wasting their money attacking elected “RINO” Republicans. Davis dodges questions about whether Obama has a legitimate birth certificate, possibly because he himself was born in Quebec Canada.

Davis really is a terrible politician and Northern Kentucky deserves better.  I've given my own reasons why I'm supporting John Waltz for the House as well.  I think Waltz has a legitimate shot.

Those Poor Put-Upon White Conservative Republicans

Won't anyone in America stand up for them?  Charles Krauthammer dares to dream!

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes? 

Well, it would be a little different if the racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes didn't have the filibuster, frankly.

I like how Krauthammer describes those who hold the wingnut positions that define blacks as "lazy welfare queens", Latinos as "drug-smuggling killers", gays as "morally destructive deviants" and Muslims as "America-hating terrorists" as all being victims of a giant misunderstanding, a product of "incorrect thinking", as if Obama is personally leading the thought police to round up those of us who consider blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims as less than real Americans or even less than human.

It's just "incorrect thinking".  Free speech!  Free speech!

Here's some free speech for you:  Krauthammer's a mendacious, mean-spirited hack who is looking for someone to project all his considerable anger on, and this week he's decided on "liberals" in general.

Krauthammer has his right to his opinion, I have my right to agree or disagree with it, that's how it works.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

The 2nd quarter GDP revision is in at 1.6%, a downward revision but...better than expected! (of course).

U.S. economic growth slowed more sharply than initially thought in the second quarter, held back by the largest increase in imports in 26 years, a government report showed on Friday.

Gross domestic product expanded at a 1.6 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said, instead of the 2.4 percent pace it had estimated last month.

However, the reading was a touch better than market expectations. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast GDP, which measures total goods and services output within U.S. borders, revised down to a 1.4 percent growth rate. The economy grew at a 3.7 percent pace in the first three months of the year.

Pretty good racket, this "better than expected" thing.