Last Call

Recently released and formerly classified phone calls made by Lyndon Johnson show the remarkable depths to which Richard Nixon sunk to in order to sabotage the 1968 Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War.  Nixon effectively committed treason in order to destroy Johnson and his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, by assuring the Vietnam War would rage on for years. 

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.

Nixon sank those talks by saying the South Vietnamese would get a better deal under him, so they agreed to walk away from the table completely instead of brokering for peace.  Johnson knew about it, but realized that in order to reveal Nixon's treason, that he would have had to also reveal that the FBI was bugging the South Vietnamese Ambassador, which in and of itself could have threatened any peace deal.

In one call to Senator Richard Russell he says: "We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he has been doing it through rather subterranean sources. Mrs Chennault is warning the South Vietnamese not to get pulled into this Johnson move."

He orders the Nixon campaign to be placed under FBI surveillance and demands to know if Nixon is personally involved.

When he became convinced it was being orchestrated by the Republican candidate, the president called Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate to get a message to Nixon.

The president knew what was going on, Nixon should back off and the subterfuge amounted to treason.

Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

Johnson felt it was the ultimate expression of political hypocrisy but in calls recorded with Clifford they express the fear that going public would require revealing the FBI were bugging the ambassador's phone and the National Security Agency (NSA) was intercepting his communications with Saigon.

So they decided to say nothing.

In the end, Johnson and Humphrey decided that Humphrey could win the 1968 election without revealing Nixon's treason.

The rest, as they say, is history.  Nixon won a sharply divided country, taking 301 electoral votes, with the Democrats crippled and split by Johnson's handling of Vietnam and the rise of the Dixiecrats and George Wallace in the South.  The country elected "anti-war" candidate Nixon, who promptly made the war horrifically worse and got re-elected on that, then destroyed the country with Watergate.

If that sounds familiar, it echoes 2000 in my mind.  What would the country have been like if Humphrey or Johnson had been President and not Nixon? 

Funny how that works.

Taxing Your Imagination Yet Again

The non-partisan Tax Policy Center calls shenanigans on Paul Ryan's "balanced in ten years" budget, to the tune of adding $5.7 trillion to the national debt.

In its study, the center concludes that Ryan's budget would add $5.7 trillion to the deficit — because of proposals to simplify the income tax code to two levels of 10 and 25 percent, repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, repeal certain tax increases from the Affordable Care Act, and cut the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent.

It's "hard to imagine" Ryan's budget plan working out to be revenue neutral, the TPC's Howard Gleckman wrote in a blog post accompanying the study.

But if Ryan plans to implement those tax cuts and still make good on his promise to balance the budget, other taxes would have to be raised by $5.7 trillion. 

According to the study, the Ryan budget's tax cuts would also proportionately benefit upper-income earners. Here's a look at each income bracket's percent change in after-tax income looks in chart form:

To recap, the richest 1 percent would get a 17.4% tax cut, and the richest 0.1% would get a 20% tax cut, or about $1.2 million extra.  Meanwhile, in order to balance this budget, Ryan and his GOP friends are going to have to raise nearly $6 trillion in taxes over ten years on somebody.

Guess who?

If you've been paying attention, you already know the answer.

Republicans Love Wage Slaves

Gallup, earlier this month:

Seven in 10 Americans say they would vote "for" raising the minimum wage to $9 per hour if given the opportunity, while 27% would vote against such a bill. The proposal, made by President Barack Obama in his 2013 State of the Union speech, is backed by over 90% of Democrats and self-described liberals, and by over two-thirds of independents and moderates. Republicans are evenly split on the proposal, while conservatives tilt slightly in favor.

House of Representatives, yesterday:

House Republicans unanimously voted down a measure Friday that would have raised the federal minimum wage, from its current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 by 2015.

Huge businesses like McDonald's and Wal-Mart can't possibly afford to raise the minimum wage in this economy!  

Even as American corporations are raking in record profits, the largest among them are shifting larger amounts of money away from the United States and into offshore tax havens that allow them to pad their bottom lines even more, according to multiple analyses of legal filings made since the beginning of 2013.

The Wall Street Journal found that the 60 largest companies moved $166 billion offshore in 2012, shielding 40 percent of their earnings from American taxes and costing the U.S. billions in lost revenue.

American workers are overpaid and lazy anyway, right?

Real average hourly earnings were up 0.1% from February 2012 to February 2013, but the average workweek was down from a year ago, so average weekly real earnings were down 0.2% from a year ago.

In other words, workers have seen no wage growth over the past year, which again is one reason why so many people are down on the economy even as most of the major stock indexes all strike record highs.

To recap, Republicans are complaining that there are too many jobless people who believe it's easier to not have a job and live off the government teat, and then turn around and say $10 an hour would destroy the economy, because it's too high an hourly wage.

To recap again, House Republicans say they believe in the dignity of hard work and the American dream of upward mobility.  And then every single one of them voted to keep Americans at $7.25 an hour.

Hey Republican voters, do you know anyone who makes less than $10 an hour?  Do you consider that person to be lazy, stupid, or parasitic?  Might want to think about that.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Rapper Lil' Wayne is recovering in an LA hospital after reportedly suffering a seizure.
• A federal judge has ruled unconstitutional the Obama administration's practice of issuing "national security letters" that include a gag order on the letter's subject.
• With the news that the new Violence Against Women Act's protections for Native Americans only extends only to those on tribal lands, many of Alaska's tribes are upset.
• California is currently the only state that enforces removing firearms from those deemed mentally unfit, a practice both controversial and dangerous.
• Federal officials have charged two California men with hacking point of sale terminals at Subway franchises to load gift cards and sell them for more than $40,000 in cash.

Last Call

The White House is moving quickly on President Obama's initiative to increase research and development spending on alternative energy sources that he mentioned in his State of the Union speech.  First up: a $2 billion federal energy trust fund in direct R&D spending, paid for by oil & gas lease revenues:

Obama first called for an Energy Trust Fund in his State of the Union address last month. Under his plan, the $2 billion would come from royalties for federal oil and gas leases. The proposal asks Congress to include this in their 2014 budget.

This is today's second bit of good news for environmental advocates. The administration is also expected to announce that it is directing all agencies to take emissions into account when approving new projects, which includes highways, pipelines, and drilling plans. The guidance is expected to direct agencies to consider climate when they make assessments under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act. The law was passed to look at more direct environmental risks, like the potential for oil spills or the destruction of habitat, but the White House Council on Environmental Quality is expected to tell the agencies to look at the potential impact on emissions now, too.

That's big news, especially given that the EPA has significant power to regulate emissions as a factor for public health risk.  This is definitely the right direction to head, as there's an environmental impact for all federal projects.

Republicans of course have their own energy plan, which is "drill baby drill" and screw any oversight.  now that the President has put a measure on the table, I'm sure the GOP will give it a fair shake (after pissing all over it).

Good Enough For My Son (But Not Yours)

Sen. Rob Portman has come around on same-sex marriage in part due to his son Will coming out as gay, and takes to the Columbus Dispatch to explain his evolution.

Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay. He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is. Jane and I were proud of him for his honesty and courage. We were surprised to learn he is gay but knew he was still the same person he’d always been. The only difference was that now we had a more complete picture of the son we love.

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

I wrestled with how to reconcile my Christian faith with my desire for Will to have the same opportunities to pursue happiness and fulfillment as his brother and sister. Ultimately, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.

On one hand, Portman's journey echoes that of President Obama's to an extent, and that of millions of Americans who have come to see their LGBTQ neighbors, friends, family members and loved ones as deserving of equality and happiness.  He gets credit for bending Dr. King's "long arc" a fraction closer to where it needs to be for all Americans, and he's in a position to actually do something about it as a United States Senator.

On the other hand, Portman's evolution should have been motivated by the other sons and daughters of his Ohio constituents, and not just his own.  I'll take it, but Portman still has a long way to go to even "moderate" Republican territory based on his dismal voting record.

The National Losers' Conference 2013

It's CPAC time again, and nobody's a bigger albatross around the neck of conservatives than "GOP Savior" Sen. Marco Rubio, who keep saying idiotic stuff like this:

I respect people who disagree with me on certain things, but that means they have to respect me too. Just because I believe states should have the right to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot. Just because we believe that life, all human life, all life, all human life is worthy of protection in every stage of its development doesn’t make you a chauvinist. In fact, the people who are actually close minded in American politics are people who love to preach about the certainty of science in regard to our climate, but ignore the absolute fact that life begins at conception.

You're never going to President, Marco.  Hell at this rate we may never have a Republican in the White house again.

Under no circumstances do I have to respect an ingnorant fool who says that denying same-sex marriage doesn't make him a bigot, who says life deserves protection at "every stage of its development" and then votes to slash pre-natal care, pre-school programs, K-12 education, student loans, health insurance, food assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and who calls scientific fact "closed minded" and spouts pseudo-science junk about life beginning at conception.

Go away, you awful, horrible idiot of a man.

StupidiNews!

• Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman has reversed his position against same-sex marriage, he now is supporting it upon learning his son Will is gay.
• Some 10 years later, a new study from British health journal The Lancet finds the Iraq War killed 116,000 Iraqi civilians, and 4,800 coalition troops.
• The UN is predicting a huge expansion of the global middle class in currently poverty-stricken countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by 2025.
• A proposed fix for batteries aboard Boeing 787 Dreamliners could have the planes back in the air by April 1st after being grounded by the government for two months.
• A deputy social media editor for Reuters has been indicted for allegedly helping hackers from Anonymous break into the LA Times' website.

Last Call

Have we finally found the Higgs boson?  The thorough analysis of a year's worth of data from CERN suggests that the missing piece of the subatomic particle puzzle has finally been found.

Last July, scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or some version of it. 

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data year and announced the results in a statement and at a physics conference in the Italian Alps. 

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN that each involve about 3,000 scientists. 

Its existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be. 

But, it remains an "open question," CERN said in a statement, whether this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation, or possibly the lightest of several predicted in some theories that go beyond that model. 

But for now, it said, there can be little doubt that a Higgs boson does exist, in some form. 

Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in the statement. The data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson," it said.

So now the question is "which Higgs boson have we found?"  Being able to work with the particle that grants mass would pretty much revolutionize physics as we know it, but for now just knowing that "Hey, this is how the universe works" is pretty humbling.

Science for the win.

Cat's Out Of The Bag

I missed this last week, but growing up as a die-hard Carolina Panthers fan from the franchise's inception, I'm pretty pissed off about owner Jerry Richardson's apparent bald-faced lies during the last contract dispute.  Deadspin's Tommy Craggs has the details (proving once again why Deadspin is the best sports site out there):

In 2010 and 2011, as the NFL prepared for and staged a lockout of its players, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson was among the hardest of the hardliners, urging his fellow owners to "take back our league" by demanding a more management-friendly collective-bargaining agreement.

Meanwhile, according to an audited financial statement obtained by Deadspin, Richardson's Panthers were making more than $100 million in profit over the fiscal years covering those two seasons. 

The statement is for the years ending March 31, 2011, and March 31, 2012. Over the first period, as Richardson argued that the NFL's business model was hopelessly broken and steered the owners toward a showdown to extract more money from the players, the Panthers recorded an operating profit of $78.7 million. The team had gone 2-14 on the field, but Richardson and his partners were able to pay themselves $12 million.

Over the following year, after the owners had won their lockout and reduced the players' share of league revenue from 50 percent to 47 percent, the Panthers brought in $33.3 million in operating profit. Richardson began lobbying for public subsidies to renovate his 17-year-old stadium. The team went 6-10.

The pro football business was very good in Carolina in those two years, even if the pro football wasn't. That much is evident from the document, which can be found at the bottom of the post and which offers a rare look inside an NFL club's books.

Team financials in all sports are closely guarded documents, particularly because so much league business—stadium deals with municipalities, negotiations with players unions—relies on obscuring the owners' financial picture. During collective bargaining in 2011, the NFL players union repeatedly asked owners to open their books. They were repeatedly denied.

So in the year before and after the lockout, the Panthers made $110 million for a team that went a dismal 8-24 over two years, but Charlotte taxpayers need to fork over $200 million for stadium renovations?

Ah, but new GOP Gov. (and former Charlotte Mayor) Pat McCrory is quite offended by that, and he's not giving in to Richardson's extortion.  I'm pretty sure the Deadspin article has killed the Bank of America Stadium renovation deal for good, and that means the Panthers may not be in Carolina much longer.

The proposal called for the state and the City of Charlotte to give the Carolina Panthers about $200 million in public money to upgrade Bank of America Stadium. In exchange the Panthers were going to stay in the Queen City for 15 years. 

But the Governor is refusing to fork over taxpayers' money, and lawmakers won't approve a 1% increase of the prepared foods tax.

"My fear is the Panthers stay in Charlotte is on life support" says Charlotte city council member Andy Dulin.

Charlotte already lost the NBA's Hornets to New Orleans a decade ago when owner George Shinn pulled the same stunt.  BET network CEO Bob Johnson stepped in with the Carolina Bobcats (and with New Orleans taking the Pelicans for their franchise name next season, there's a push to rename the Bobcats back to the Hornets.)   Johnson's had mixed success, but he hasn't tried to pull any of the same crap either.

But Richardson it seems is either going to get his money, or going to go to a city who will bankrupt their coffers to bring the Panthers there.  Where would they go?  Vegas?  Portland?  Maybe the first Canadian NFL team?  I'd certainly miss them, but not if Richardson is going to lie about having hundreds of millions in his pocket and plead poverty.

That cat don't hunt.

The Mask Slips Again...

...And Republicans accidentally tell the truth.

Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) made a startling admission on CNN’s Starting Point on Wednesday morning, telling host Soledad O’Brien that Republicans are not concerned about how they cut spending — or the millions of people who suffer as a result — so long as they achieve a balanced budget.

Of course they don't.  The austerity fetish is really simple, actually.  We elected Obama, therefore we must learn our place.  If the people are made to suffer, then they will be humble.  More importantly, if the electorate comes to understand that prosperity for the 99% will never be allowed to happen under a Democrat, then all will be right.

REP. PRICE: We believe it’s important to balance not the how of ‘how you balance,’ but the ‘why’, why is it important to balance. well it’s important to get our budget in balance, so that means that Washington doesn’t spend more money than it takes in, just like families can’t, just like businesses across this country can’t. 

Of course Tom Price understands nothing about macroeconomics.  He is a charlatan, a moron, and a fool.  Countries have been deficit-spending for decades now.  Reagan exploded deficits and the national debt, as did Poppy Bush, as did Dubya.  It was Clinton who balanced the budget last.

But Republicans have now finally admitted that austerity for austerity's sake was always the plan.   Americans have to suffer now.  You, your loved ones, your community, your friends, you will be made to suffer by rich white men who demand fealty.  You must be punished for your defiance.  It doesn't matter what is cut, as long as it's cut.

It's for your own good.

StupidiNews!

• Vice President Joe Biden, the first Roman Catholic to serve as VP, will lead the US delegation to the Vatican to attend the inaugural mass of the newly named Pope Francis.
• Several pro-firearms measures have made it into the Senaate version of the continuing resolution funding the government for another six months, buried inside the Justice Department's budget.
• President Obama has tapped veteran diplomat Deborah K. Jones as the next envoy to Libya, to replace the slain Chris Stevens killed in last year's Benghazi consulate raid.
• As austerity continues to drive the Eurozone into recession, EU leaders will hold a two-day summit in Brussels in order to try to loosen strict budget requirements.
• Google has announced that the end of Google Reader, its RSS feed system, will be July 1st.

Last Call

David Corn tells the story of the man who taped Mitt Romney's fundraising speech with the infamous "47%" comments, a man who has chosen to reveal himself as a Florida bartender named Scott Prouty.

The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney's now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as "victims" unwilling to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives"—to embed in two articles. We had blurred these clips, at the source's request, to make it difficult to tell where Romney had uttered these revealing comments, while clearly showing that it was Romney speaking. The goal was to afford the source a modicum of protection.

The source was justifiably worried about repercussions. Once the video was posted, he might lose his job. He might face criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. Months earlier, he had anonymously posted a snippet from the video, in which Romney nonchalantly described the work-camp-like living conditions at a Chinese factory he had visited. The source, offended by these comments, had hoped that the short clip would catch fire in the political-media world. But it hadn't, partly because its context and origins were unknown. The source's desire to remain in the shadows had hindered his ability to bring the story to the public.

And Prouty was right (and remains right) on his healthy fear of the Right Wing Noise Machine.  It's guaranteed now that they will try very hard to destroy him, his loved ones, and his entire life.   It takes real courage to stand up to the evil and speak out into the night.

Then James Carter IV, a freelance researcher (and, though I didn't know it then, the grandson of Jimmy Carter) who had been sending me public documents regarding Romney's prior business investments, had, at my request, tracked the anonymous poster down. I subsequently persuaded him to send me the full video of the fundraiser and to allow me to release portions of it, under the strict condition that I'd do whatever was possible to keep his identity hidden. He did not want to become the story. He hoped the public would focus only on Romney's words. And through all this, he had not told me who he was, though he disclosed that he had worked at the fundraiser and insisted that he was no political partisan and had filmed Romney more out of curiosity than as part of a plan to trap the GOP candidate.

I respected his desire for privacy. He was about to commit a courageous and unprecedented act of whistle-blowing. But as we neared publication, I said I had to know his name. Do you really need it? he asked. Yes, I replied, explaining I could not publish the stories without knowing his identity. I vowed I would keep it a secret.

And to David Corn's real credit, he did.   Scott Prouty told his story this evening on MSNBC's The Ed Show, with an hour;long interview with Ed Schultz.   I wish the man luck, because he's going to need it.  The Breitbart crew will go straight for him now, because that's what happens to people who stand up and do the right thing around America.

Godspeed, sir.

Aye Big Papi

OK HuffPo, you win.



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