February 12, 2011 · 9:56 am

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Has Firm To Investigate Opponents’ Families, Children | | AlterNet

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is getting scarier….

Earlier today, ThinkProgress published an exclusive report that the law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing trade association representing big business, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress. According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Attorneys for the firm solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop a sabotage campaign against progressive groups and labor unions, including ThinkProgress, the labor coalition Change to Win, SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

New emails reveal that the private spy company investigated the families and children of the Chamber’s political opponents. The apparent spearhead of this project was Aaron Barr, an executive at HB Gary. Barr circulated numerous emails and documents detailing information about political opponents’ children, spouses, and personal lives.

One of the targets was Mike Gehrke, a former staffer with Change to Win. Among the information circulated about Gehrke was the specific “Jewish church” he attended and a link to pictures of his wife and two children (sensitive information was redacted by ThinkProgress):

via US Chamber’s Lobbyists Has Firm To Investigate Opponents’ Families, Children | | AlterNet.

1 Comment

Filed under Politics

February 11, 2011 · 5:20 pm

The GOP Says They’re All About Creating Jobs. So Why Do They Want to Cut $2 Billion From Job Training? | AlterNet

More from one of my new favorite websites, Alternet:

The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so real. Yesterday the House Committee on Appropriations released its proposed budget cuts and, as expected, it completely slaughters a profound number of social programs, yet leaves the engorged defense budget untouched. There’s much in there to scorn, including the continuation of their war against women by cutting maternal and child health care grants and family planning But nothing is more telling than the juxtaposition of Hal Rogers’ statement with one program in particular to be bloodlet:

“Make no mistake, these cuts are not low-hanging fruit.  These cuts are real and will impact every District across the country – including my own.  As I have often said, every dollar we cut has a constituency, an industry, an association, and individual citizens who will disagree with us. But with this CR, we will respond to the millions of Americans who have called on this Congress to rein in spending to help our economy grow and our businesses create jobs.”

Yet in the ensuing list of programs whose budgets are proposed to be slashed–$2 billion from Job Training Programs, which in general help our nation’s poor with job-readiness with programs stemming from the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services. This is, of course, consistent with how their job creation plan is wan to non-existent. But when the latest unemployment rates are at 9.8 percent, details such as these are hard to ignore.

Read the full list of proposed budget cuts here. It’s special.

via The GOP Says They’re All About Creating Jobs. So Why Do They Want to Cut $2 Billion From Job Training? | AlterNet.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, The Economy

February 11, 2011 · 5:17 pm

Fox News Poll Finds Obama Beating All of the Top GOP Challengers in 2012 | AlterNet

From Alternet:

A new poll from Fox News shows President Obama beating all the possible Republican challengers they polled in next year’s election. This includes Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Obama performs the best against Palin, defeating her 56% to 35%.

Run, Sarah, Run.

via Fox News Poll Finds Obama Beating All of the Top GOP Challengers in 2012 | AlterNet.

Leave a comment

Filed under Media, Politics

February 11, 2011 · 5:00 pm

Vision: Across the Country, People Are Rising Up to Fight for Change | | AlterNet

This is so true…

The small, overly-vocal Tea Party is as much a media creation as anything else…

Over the years, Milwaukee Labor Press editor Dominique Paul North has covered a “heck of a lot of protests” in Wisconsin. Last summer, a peace rally in Wisconsin’s inner city drew about 100 people calling for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan. “There was no media coverage,” he says. “I was the only reporter there.”

The next day, 40 people attended a tea party event in Wisconsin and every local media outlet was there to cover it. “This is what we’ve been seeing over the past year. If there’s a peace rally or a worker’s rights rally, it’s ho hum. You might find a reporter or two. The tea party would gather five people on the corner and there would be coverage.”

via Vision: Across the Country, People Are Rising Up to Fight for Change | | AlterNet.

Leave a comment

Filed under Media, Politics, Tea Party

February 11, 2011 · 4:58 pm

10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe | | AlterNet

This is definitely worth reading…

As you may have noticed by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani reduced abortions in New York City (though, um, not really) because he cut crime, which is one of “the spiritual causes of abortion.”

Yeah, deadline pressure’s a bitch. But there are some bizarre notions of American history in which conservatives have become so invested they’ve adopted them into their worldview. The best-known example is probably Jonah Goldberg’s notion of “Liberal Fascism”; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They don’t even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at “Springtime for Hitler” — it’s part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

There are plenty of others. I’ve picked out 10 such ideas that are widespread enough to qualify. (In the nomenclature I have treated “Republican” and “conservative” as synonyms because, come on.)

MORE:   10 Historical ‘Facts’ Only a Right-Winger Could Believe | | AlterNet.

Leave a comment

Filed under History, Politics, Tea Party

February 11, 2011 · 4:53 pm

Former Fox News employee: ‘Stuff is just made up’ | Raw Story

This isn’t news to most of us…

A former employee of Fox News called the company a “propaganda outfit” that is determined to undermine the Obama administration and Democrats.

“I don’t think people would believe it’s as concocted as it is; that stuff is just made up,” the employee, whose name was kept anonymous, told the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters.

“They say one thing and do another,” the former employee said. “They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they’re balanced or that they’re not right-wing extreme propagandist.”

“You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks,” the former employee added. “And God help you if you don’t because sooner or later you’re going to get burned.”

The former employee’s comments did not come as a surprise to many critics of Fox News, who have long suggested the channel is biased in favor of conservatives. The 2004 documentary film “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism” criticized the channel and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for skewing its reporting of events to promote conservative viewpoints.

via Former Fox News employee: ‘Stuff is just made up’ | Raw Story.

Leave a comment

Filed under Media, Politics, Television

February 11, 2011 · 4:51 pm

Kochs brothers’ plan for 2012: raise $88 million – Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith – POLITICO.com

This is an under-reported story by the Corporate Press…

Our best hope is the Koch’s cause Civil War in the GOP…

In an expansion of their political footprint, the billionaire Koch brothers plan to contribute and steer a total of $88 million to conservative causes during the 2012 election cycle, according to sources, funding a new voter micro-targeting initiative, grass-roots organizing efforts and television advertising campaigns.

In fact, as the annual Conservative Political Action Conference meets this week in Washington and conservatives assess the state of their movement, the Koch network of nonprofit groups, once centered on sleepy free-enterprise think tanks, seems to be emerging as a more ideological counterweight to the independent Republican political machine conceived by Bush-era GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie before the 2010 midterm elections.

The aggressive embrace of political activism by the Koch brothers, Charles and David, has cheered fiscal conservatives, who hope they will reorient the conservative political apparatus around free-market, small government principles and candidates, and away from the electability-over-principles approach they see Rove and Gillespie as embodying.

But not everyone on the right is happy about the brothers’ increasing political profile. Some conservatives complain that the political operatives who work for the Kochs don’t play well with others in the movement and worry that their efforts to steer big money to favored groups undermines other, potentially valuable conservative efforts.

via Kochs brothers’ plan for 2012: raise $88 million – Kenneth P. Vogel and Ben Smith – POLITICO.com.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, Tea Party

February 11, 2011 · 7:46 am

Standing Up to Glenn Beck

Great article from Kevin Drum at MotherJones.com…

I’m convinced watching Fox News and Glenn Beck sped up the deterioration of my Mother’s mental capabilities….

I really think Glenn Beck is employed by the Assisted Living Industry to help make older people so crazy their children have to spend a fortune to put them in their facilities.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t get a kickback….

 

Glenn Beck is, for a liberal like me, far more entertaining to watch than, say, Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. The latter are garden variety blowhards and their subject matter is predictable. But Beck? He’s crazy! He thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is going to take over the entire Mediterranean! Fabian socialists are a fifth column working to subvert everything that makes America great! (But slowly. Sneakily.) The Tides Foundation is on a mission to “warp your children’s brains”! And Obama the secret Marxist is behind it all! It all fits together!

This is actually sort of entertaining in small doses. But in bigger doses, not so much. Conor Friedersdorf:

“As I’ve said before, lots of Glenn Beck listeners aren’t in on the joke. Unlike Roger Ailes, Jonah Goldberg, and every staffer at the Heritage Foundation happy hour, they don’t realize that the Fox News Channel puts this man on the air fully understanding that large parts of his program are uninformed nonsense mixed with brazen bullshit.”

….Conjure in your mind a retired grandfather. He served in World War II, voted twice for Ronald Reagan, and supports the Tea Party. Awhile back, he started watching Glenn Beck….

Actually, we don’t have to conjure this. Richmond Ramsey has done it for us. I’ve mentioned before that lots of Fox viewers have the channel on all day long, basically as background noise, and Ramsey says he’s noticed this too. His piece is called “Fox Geezer Syndrome”:

“Over the past couple of years, I’ve been keeping track of a trend among friends around my age (late thirties to mid-forties). Eight of us (so far) share something in common besides our conservatism: a deep frustration over how our parents have become impossible to take on the subject of politics. Without fail, it turns out that our folks have all been sitting at home watching Fox News Channel all day — especially Glenn Beck’s program.”

“….I asked my father privately why Mom, who as far as I know never before had a political thought, was so worked up about Obama all the time. “She’s been like that ever since she started watching Glenn Beck,” Dad said.”

“….Then I flew out for a visit, and observed that their television was on all day long, even if no one was watching it. What channel was playing? Fox. Spending a few days in the company of the channel—especially Glenn Beck—it all became clear to me. If Fox was the window through which I saw the wider world, for hours every day, I’d be perpetually pissed off too.”

“….Back home, I mentioned to a friend over beers how much Fox my mom and dad watched, and how angry they now were about politics. “Yours too?!” he said. “I’ve noticed the same thing with mine. They weren’t always like this, but since they retired, they’ve gotten into Fox, and you can’t even talk to them anymore without hearing them read the riot act about Obama.”

And that’s from a conservative. It’s all entertaining enough until you come face to face with the consequences. Sure, Beck’s audience is relatively small: a few million, probably no more than one or two percent of the adult population of the country. But that’s misleading. These are the shock troops, the true believers, the ones who have turned our politics so toxic. And worse, they’re being deliberately conned by Roger Ailes and his pals, who know perfectly well that this stuff is nonsense. And it’s all in the service of selling yet another con, getting the geezers to invest their money in endless gold scams.

I know this is whistling into the wind, but it’s long past time for the adults in the Republican Party to speak up about this. Glenn Beck is the Father Coughlin and the Robert Welch of his generation rolled into one, and his brand of noxious conspiracy theorizing isn’t something to be tolerated just because it produces a few useful idiots. It’s time for this to end.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/02/standing-glenn-beck

Leave a comment

Filed under Media, Politics, Tea Party, Television

February 10, 2011 · 11:03 pm

Remembering “The Great Gatsby”

Since Mia Farrow is 66 years old today, it seems a good time to look back to the early 1970’s re-make of “The Great Gatsby” where she played Daisy.

It was a beautiful, but flawed film.  Mia Farrow was gorgeous and Robert Redford was at his peak.  The art direction was impeccable.

And Nick Carraway, the character I always related to, was beautifully played by Sam Waterson.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has always been my favorite American writer.  I’ve had many Nick Carraway nights in my life and I always think of Fitzgerald’s beautiful prose and elegant observations.

Here are a few quotes from “Gatsby”…

  • “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
  • “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age…”
  • “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.”
  • “Can’t repeat the past?… Why of course you can!”
  • “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.”
  • “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
  • “I hope she’ll be a fool–that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool… You see, I think everything’s terrible anyhow… And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
  • “He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
  • “I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
  • “It takes two to make an accident.”
And my two favorite non-Gatsby Fitzgerald quotes:
  • “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”  (From “The Rich Boy” in the “Sad Young Men” collection.
  • “There are no second acts in American lives.”
There sadly wasn’t for Scott Fitzgerald- at least while he was alive….all his books were out of print by the time he was 40.  His beautiful, destructive wife Zelda was mad and institutionalized.
He died of a heart attack at 44 in Hollywood trying to churn out film scripts for a living…
Anyway, time for a glimpse of the beautiful, flawed film of the one perfect novel Fitzgerald wrote in his beautiful, flawed life….

Leave a comment

Filed under Books, Entertainment, Movies, Scott's Commentary

February 10, 2011 · 7:41 pm

Cruel and Unequal, Sojourners Magazine/February 2011

Another great article…

Do you think if Lindsey Lohan had been a poor African-American girl she would still be walking around free?  Or Paris Hilton?

See the key paragraph- with my emphasis in bold blue….

A vast new racial undercaste now exists in America, though their plight is rarely mentioned. Obama won’t mention it; the Tea Party won’t mention it; media pundits would rather talk about anything else. The members of the undercaste are largely invisible to those of us who have jobs, live in decent neighborhoods, and zoom around on freeways, passing by the virtual and literal prisons in which they live.

But here are the facts: There are more African-American adults under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. In major urban areas such as Chicago, Oama’s hometown, the majority of working-age African-American men have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. Millions of people in the United States, primarily poor people of color, are denied the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement: the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. Branded “criminals” and “felons,” such people now find themselves relegated to a permanent second-class status. They live in a parallel social universe: the other America, where they will stay for the rest of their lives.

We, as a nation, are in deep denial about how this came to pass. On the rare occasions when the existence of “them” — the others, the ghetto dwellers, those locked up and locked out — is publicly acknowledged, standard excuses are trotted out. We’re told black culture, bad schools, poverty, and broken homes are to blame. Almost no one admits: We declared war. We declared a war on the most vulnerable people in our society and then blamed them for the wreckage.

And yet that is precisely what we did. The so-called War on Drugs has driven the quintupling of our prison population in a few short decades. The vast majority of the startling increase in incarceration in America is traceable to the arrest and imprisonment of poor people of color for nonviolent, drug-related offenses. Families have been torn apart, and young lives shattered, as parents grieve the loss of loved ones to the system, often hiding their grief under a cloak of shame.

Politicians claim that the enemy in this war is a thing — drugs — not a group of people. The facts prove otherwise.

Studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates, yet in some states African-American men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than white men. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African Americans. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.

 

 

 

 

 

via Cruel and Unequal, Sojourners Magazine/February 2011.

Leave a comment

Filed under Politics, Race, Social Justice, The Economy