Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

T R E 4 5 O N

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The words do not have to be perfect.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

The revolution will be supervised.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

This fight is for everything.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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Archives for July 2011

Collusion

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Mike J sends this piece from the Guardian, detailing the way the UK government worked with the nuclear industry to reassure citizens that nuclear power is safe in the wake of Fukushima. Also in the Guardian: Japanese children from the Fukushima area have radioactive isotopes of cesium in their urine.

Meanwhile, back home, the media I’ve seen on the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska, which is surrounded by flood waters, has been generally better than expected. Even though the plant is in cold shutdown, the new acknowledgement of the issues with stored fuel has led to coverage like this that acknowledges the danger of station blackout even in cold shutdown.

“The question is, ‘Do you still have power?’ ” said Andrew C. Kadak, a former professor of nuclear engineering at M.I.T. “If they’ve got that, the plant can sit there until the water recedes. The Fukushima lesson is really that you’ve got to have electricity.”

Last year, the NRC required Fort Calhoun to beef up their flood defenses, and the NRC is doing additional analysis to determine the effect of failure of the upstream dams on the plant. My question is why they approved building a plant so close to a major, flood-prone river in the first place.

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They’re Coming For Your Pension

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I simply don’t understand how this is legal:

Judges in Colorado and Minnesota have dismissed court challenges by retired public workers whose pensions had been cut — developments that may embolden other states and cities to use pension reductions as a tool to help balance their budgets.

The two lawsuits sought to reverse reductions in the cost-of-living adjustments that Colorado and Minnesota had previously promised to retired public workers. Generally speaking, once lawmakers have agreed to provide certain pension benefits to public workers, it is difficult, if not impossible, to roll them back because of protective language in state laws and constitutions and years of court interpretations.

Public pensions are considered so bulletproof that when the city of Vallejo, Calif., recently restructured its finances in bankruptcy, it cut other costs but left worker pensions intact.

The two court decisions, issued Wednesday, suggest that the legal tide may be changing for public pensioners. The political tide has already turned in some places — in addition to Colorado and Minnesota, South Dakota and New Jersey have also cut cost-of-living benefits for current retirees, and other states have been awaiting legal guidance before doing the same.

In their court filings, retirees in Colorado and Minnesota had argued that their benefits were contractual in nature, and therefore protected by state and federal constitutional language barring the impairment of contracts.

However, in his ruling dismissing the Minnesota case, Judge Gregg E. Johnson of the state’s Second Judicial District Court wrote that the retirees in that state “have not met their burden to show unconstitutionality beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Look, I am very sensitive to the argument that some of the pensions promised to people were unreasonable- we have all heard the stories of people retiring at 50 and drawing ridiculous pensions for 20-30 years. The solution to that, though, is to not make those promises to current and new workers. But it is simply beyond my understanding how you can agree to a contract, the worker defers salary and income for the promise of a pension that both parties agree upon, and then, after the worker has fulfilled his end of the bargain, you simply say “Fuck it, your pension costs too much and we can’t get our house in order and our Galtian overlords don’t want to pay taxes. Eat a bag of dicks, old man.” Because that is what is happening.

What are these retirees, who made financial decisions their entire lives, supposed to do? If you thought for 40 years as you worked that you had X amount of money coming in retirement, it would substantially change your investment strategy and portfolio. You can’t recover when the government just yanks it all away. You don’t get a do-over to go back and invest more.

This is just insane.

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Land Of 10,000 Furloughed

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And so Minnesota’s government and a number of “non-critical” state services are shut down until further notice as of today.

Visitors won’t be able to go to the state parks or the zoo, and travelers will find the highway rest stops shuttered. Road construction projects will cease, as will licensing for teachers and businesses.

Many social service agencies will lose their funding, cutting state support for programs such as job training and homelessness prevention. Those that don’t have reserves will likely close their doors.

And up to 23,000 state workers are scheduled to be laid off, though they will continue to get health benefits and can return to their jobs when the budget impasse is resolved.

Basic health and safety services will continue, a judge ruled on Wednesday. The state must continue funding custodial care for residents in prisons, treatment centers and nursing homes. The state troopers will continue to patrol. The state universities will also remain open.

Dem Gov. Mark Dayton wants to close the state’s $3.6 billion shortfall with a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes on the wealthiest 2%.  Republicans vowed that zero tax hikes will be acceptable and want to take out every bit of the shortfall on the working class, the elderly, and the poor after passing a $200 million tax cut on businesses.  They then shut down the government in response.  Sound familiar?

Now we go to the “Who will the voters blame?” stage of the negotiations.  Meanwhile, thousands of state workers don’t know when they are going to go back to work again.  Best irony?  The state’s unemployment and job force workers are as of today out of a job to go to.

If they can’t get 100% of what they want, Republicans blow up the whole thing.  As goes Minnesota, so goes the nation?

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Early Morning Open Thread

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Happy thought to start the day: EventheNoLiberalHe Dave Weigel at Slate reports from this week’s MoTU Snoglobe on “What the rich guys and corporate types in Aspen think of Obama“:

… The people on the Aspen campus this week pay attention to politics, but they have slightly different attitudes. The first is boundless optimism. Think-tankers and sustainability pioneers and representatives talk up the investors they’ve got and the interest they’re generating. Panels on “green jobs” and education reform and food policy are packed…
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And then there’s the second view of politics in Aspen: Despair. The crowd here is not monolithically liberal, but it is monolithically disappointed in Obama. The disappointments change from subject to subject. Phil Beck, a Republican lawyer from Chicago, says Obama “squandered an opportunity to pass some really effective legislation” and “handed it off to Reid and Pelosi.” Martha Jackson, whose husband’s company develops oil deals in South America, says Obama has prolonged the war in Afghanistan more than she would have liked.
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How can he turn things around?
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“He can win a second term,” she says.
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This was the tenor of a lot of Obama critiques. On Tuesday afternoon, David Axelrod took a friendly shellacking from Time’s Joe Klein about all the opportunities Obama had missed. The attendees agreed with Klein—to a point. Their questions, about Obama’s economic appointments and about his messaging problems, all began with some variation of “I’m going to vote for Obama again, and work for him, but …”
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There’s desperation where there used to be hope. No one here still believes Obama can engineer great change. He’s what we’ve got; he’s offering more than the Republicans. The most realistic ideas about what can be done politically are predicated on what Washington will be forced to do by crisis.

So, even the sort of people who are willing to let the Atlantic-based Libertarians wine, dine, transport & schmooze them have publicly given up on the Republican Party and its loons. I suspect David Axelrod will be perfectly happy to accept the votes (and donations) of people with “Obama 2012: Where Else Are You Gonna Go?” bumperstickers on their luxury SUVs…

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Send in the drones

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That is a photo of some of America’s leading public intellectuals dressed in Renaissance costumes and reciting Shakespeare. The woman on the far right is Sandra Day O’Connor; next to her is former Congressman Mickey Edwards. Somewhat obscured and/or poorly lit — Jane Harman, Joe Klein, Diane Ravitch, John Negroponte, Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam, Stumbling on Happiness author Dan Gilbert, and Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of the mayor of Chicago and bete noire for opponents of “ObamaCare.” Emanuel brandished a sword — and later, a chain mail helmet — as he recited the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. O’Connor went for laughs — twice — by taking the “first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” line from Henry VI.

The whole affair was put on by Ken and Carol Adelman. Ken, eschewing the Shakespearean garb for jeans, a western-style shirt, and a brown jacket, led the crowd in lusty cries of “Hussah!” whenever someone really nailed a line delivery.

Adelman helped popularize the term “cakewalk” to describe the Glorious Victory in Iraq. There we have it, a prominent Iraq War cheerleader leading a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, the justice who gave us George W. Bush, an AIPCAC double agent, a war criminal, and other assorted rogues in a cheerful celebration…as they all plot to destroy the social safety net and turn teachers into wage slaves. (EDIT: actually, Ravitch doesn’t sound that bad, I assumed she was an educational rightie because Bobo likes her.)

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Roger Ailes, Dogging the Wags

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Actual journalist John Cook at Gawker has a jaw-dropping report on “Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News“:

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.
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The memo—called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes’ work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.
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The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about “indoctrination” when Obama did it more than 30 years later….

Seriously: Even if Denton’s iPad-friendly formatting makes your teeth hurt, it’s worth clicking over and reading the whole piece. No matter how cynical we bloggers think we are, it’s… instructive... to find out just how much the current GOP regards voters as nothing more than an audience, and “governing” as something that bears the same resemblance to government as a Pringles chip does to a potato.

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