Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

When the time comes to make an endorsement, the pain of NYT editors will be palpable as they reluctantly whisper “Biden.”

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

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Steve M. cross-posted on Balloon Juice from 2011-13, from his own blog No More Mister Nice Blog.

Twitter: @nomoremister

Steve M.

Joe Olivo? Again?

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I’m grateful to all of you for your response to my recent post about Joe Olivo. He’s a member of the National Federation of Independent Business — the ALEC/Koch/Rove-affiliated group that was the lead plaintiff in the suit against the health care act that was just decided at the Supreme Court — but he also owns a printing company in New Jersey, and he makes frequent media appearances posing as a mere small businessman who just so happens to give good quote, in a Koch-y, pro-corporatist way. I posted because he appeared on NBC and NPR just hours after the health care ruling came down, each time identified as a guy who owns a printing company, with no mention of his NFIB ties.

I saw in comments and on Twitter that a number of you got in touch with NPR and other media outlets about the media’s constant use of Olivo without an acknowledgment of his NFIB affiliation. I would have hoped NPR, at least, got the message.

But there he was again, on NPR yesterday.

He was being interviewed by Guy Raz on All Things Considered on the subject of a bill championed by Senator Tom Harkin that would raise the minimum wage. (Needless to say, Olivo’s against the idea.) Here’s how this is presented in the online version of the story:

Opponents of Harkin’s minimum wage bill point to jobs, saying that with such high unemployment, an increase in the minimum wage will make a bad situation worse.

Joe Olivo owns a small printing press in New Jersey that employs 47 people. Olivo tells Raz that a higher minimum wage basically raises the whole wage scale and would force him to make cuts.

“What happens is the employee who’s been here for 3 years and has more experience than a person making an entry-level wage, they will rightfully want more for their seniority,” Olivo says. “So what it does to me as a business owner, by pushing up wage scale, it increases my expenses.”

Olivo says that means he either has to increase revenues — difficult in the current economy — or he must find ways to cut expenses: cutting employees, not hiring new employees or bring in new technology to decrease the number of employees he needs.

“So it really hurts my current employees and it also prevents me from bringing on new ones,” he says.

No mention of his NFIB ties — none. And there’s none in the audio version of the story. (Olivo comes in at about 7:06.)

What’s odd is that the Olivo interview is followed by a chat with Bill Dunkelberg, NFIB’s chief economist. He’s ID’d as an NFIB guy. (He also thinks that maybe we shouldn’t have a minimum wage at all.) But Olivo gets no such ID.

Now, granted, this story does give quite a bit of time (in fact, the majority) to proponents of a minimum wage increase — Senator Harkin and a mother of four from Chicago who’s trying to get by on the current minimum wage.

But Olivo is presented as that mother of four’s opposite number, a regular American who’s subject to the whims of an unfeeling government — and that’s not what he is. He’s an on-call surrogate for the corpocracy who gets almost as much media time as a minor Kardashian.

No responsible member of the press should ever interview Joe Olivo again. At the very least, Joe Olivo should never, ever be interviewed without being prominently identified as the NFIB operative he is.

Guy Raz, you should be ashamed of yourself.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

****

UPDATE: If you’re wondering, Olivo’s title, per the caption of one of the Olivo videos at the NFIB’s YouTube page, is “vice-chair of NFIB/New Jersey Leadership Council.” So he’s more than just a humble dues-paying member. (And NFIB posts a lot of Olivo videos.)

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Just a Humble Tradesman, Trapped in a World He Never Made

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This morning, NPR’s Yuki Noguchi wanted to know how an ordinary small business owner feels now that the Obama health care law has been upheld. So she turned to this guy:

The law will give some small businesses tax incentives to pay for employee health care. Starting in 2014, those with 50 or more employees will be required to provide it.

That requirement is bad news for businesses like Perfect Printing in Moorestown, N.J. The company’s president and CEO, Joe Olivo, says he now has 48 employees, for whom he pays some health care coverage.

But he’s intensely aware of crossing that 50-person threshold and will think very hard before hiring more people so he can avoid hitting government requirements that he says will raise his health care costs.

Last night, Anne Thompson of NBC News wanted to know the same thing. So she turned to … the same guy:

ANNE THOMPSON: For small business owners like Joe Olivo, it is the unknown cost of the law that could impact his printing business….

Olivo offers health care to his 48 workers. If he goes to 50, he says the law would require him to provide more comprehensive and expensive care or pay a penalty. He says the penalty makes more sense.

JOE OLIVO: The penalty is far below my premiums. It’ll be cheaper for me to allow the employees to go and purchase insurance on the exchange by themselves.

Wow — two news organizations covering the same story scoured the nation for a random small business owner to comment on that story — and they both found the same one! How’d that happen? What are the odds?

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You’re Being Spun Every Time Condi Rice Is Mentioned as a Possible Running Mate

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Oh, please:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looked to downplay speculation that she could be inching up Mitt Romney’s short list for vice president after her widely regarded policy briefing last weekend at a meeting of his top donors.

“I didn’t run for student council president. I don’t see myself in any way in elective office,” Rice told “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday….

When “CBS This Morning” host Charlie Rose pressed Rice, noting she hadn’t technically said she wouldn’t accept the offer to be vice president, the former secretary of state was more definitive.

“It’s not going to happen — and no,” she said….

Charlie Rose is being a useful idiot. So is everyone who reports this without noting that the scenario is preposterous.

It used to be that every time a new Republican won the presidential nomination, the pro-choice Tom Ridge, from the delegate-rich state of Pennsylvania, was mentioned as a possible running mate. It happened in 2000. It happened in 2008. Funny thing — Ridge never got the #2 slot. Nor, famously, did the pro-choice Joe Lieberman in ’08, even though John McCain really wanted to run with him.

And that was before the 2010 GOP/Tea Party takeover of many statehouses and state legislatures, which led to this:

Condi Rice as running mate? In the GOP? In 2012? Even though she says she’s just “mildly pro-choice”? Are you crazy?

No, you’re not crazy. You’re just being spun. You’re being spun the way you’re being spun when Campbell Brown writes GOP-propaganda op-eds for The New York Times on women’s issues. You’re being spun the way you’re spun by every public appearance of Ann Romney. You’re being told that Mitt Romney is a really awesome candidate for women to vote for. And that’s all you’re being told. (And, yes, he respects a black woman. That too.)

I’m not even going to get to the rumors about Rice’s sexual orientation. The abortion issue is a 100% disqualifier before we even get there. Everyone in the elite media knows that. And yet Charlie Rose and others play along, happy to be spun.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Lock and Load! (Not You, Hippie)

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A major reason Scott Walker survived recall is that voters were persuaded that the recall was happening for illegitimate reasons:

So what happened? It’s actually quite simple if you look at the exit polls. The final question there was the key to the entire recall election. When asked “Do you think recall elections are appropriate” some 60% of Wisconsin voters said “Only for official misconduct” and another 10% said “never”….

Walker’s massive cash advantage painted the recall process itself as the bad guy here…

Funny, I don’t remember anything like that happening in 2003, when Gray Davis, a Democrat, was recalled and replaced as California’s governor by Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the time a hero to the Republican right. I remember that the recall process was portrayed as a circus. But I don’t remember the conversation centering on the argument that recalling Davis was an affront to common decency and an insult to democracy.

As I was Googling around to test my memory of those days, I was reminded that the phrase most commonly associated with the Davis recall — see it here and here and here and here and here — was “voter revolt.”

Revolt? Wow, that sounds scary and dangerous and violent. It sounds anti-democratic. Ahhh, but it was a voter revolt. That’s quite a packed phrase. You say “voter revolt” and you’re implying that somehow the guy who’s being recalled got there in defiance of the wishes of voters — even though, obviously, he won an election. The phrase implies that the election was the illegitimate part of the process and the recall is the legitimate part.

And notice that it’s a voter revolt and not a conservative or Republican or right-wing revolt. Everyone knows that the people who tried to oust Scott Walker were those dirty liberals. The people who ousted Gray Davis were voters.

That’s the message. It’s similar to the framing of recent protest movements: the angry members of Occupy Wall Street are a bunch of hippies, but the members of the tea party movement who shouted down members of Congress at 2009 town meetings and revolted at the ballot box in 2010 were righteously angry Americans.

That’s how we look at right-wing revolts — especially when millions of right-wing dollars are available to shape our perceptions.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Breitbartico Whines About “Vetting”

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Politico’s lead story right now:

To GOP, blatant bias in vetting

On the front page of its Sunday edition, the New York Times gave a big spread to Ann Romney spending lots of time and tons of money on an exotic genre of horse-riding. The clear implication: The Romneys are silly rich, move in rarefied and exotic circles, and are perhaps a tad shady.

Only days earlier, news surfaced that author David Maraniss had unearthed new details about Barack Obama’s prolific, college-age dope-smoking for his new book, “Barack Obama: The Story” — and the Times made it a brief on A15.

No wonder Republicans are livid with the early coverage of the 2012 general election campaign. To them, reporters are scaring up stories to undermine the introduction of Mitt Romney to the general election audience — and once again downplaying ones that could hurt the president….

Here’s the difference, Politico: Maybe if Mitt Romney had written candidly about dressage in a book seventeen years ago, the Times wouldn’t have considered it a big news story now. Maybe if the Romney had answered questions about the dressage issue in the last primary season — perhaps even as early as 2006 — the Times wouldn’t be putting it on the front page now. Maybe if Romney, in the last primary season, had joked about dressage, including on national television, the Times wouldn’t be making a big deal of it today. Maybe if Romney had weathered attacks on his dressage habits four years ago from a campaign surrogate of a primary opponent, there would be little press interest now.

Do we really have to explain these things to Romney and his enablers?

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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What He Said

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Brad DeLong has posted six questions he asked Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, authors of the new book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which says that our political main problem is the appalling extremism of the Republican Party.

DeLong also posted one question he didn’t ask Mann and Ornstein, and I’ve been trying to figure out something clever to say about it, but all I can say is that it sums up practically everything I feel about politics in America right now, so here it is:

Look. You two are expecting normal politics to rein in a Republican Party gone bonkers extreme. But it will not work. The press corps will continue to say “he said, she said, yadda yadda yadda” either because they are gutless cowards or because they are bought. In a world of low-information voters, the bonkers extremism and sheer total meanness of the Republican Party will not get through. The only way it could get through would be if moderate Republican barons were to announce that they had had enough and were crossing t’he aisle, and if they did so in a way that they brought their affinities with them. But I don’t see Brent Scowcroft doing that, I don’t see Colin Powell doing that, I don’t see Greg Mankiw doing that, I don’t see Marty Feldstein doing that, I don’t see Gail Wilensky doing that, I don’t see Bob Dole doing that, I don’t see Jack Danforth doing that, I don’t see Richard Lugar doing that–and I don’t see you doing that, Mr. Ornstein. I don’t see you calling for the defeat of every single Republican candidate this fall and every fall until the party comes back to reality.

And since all of you moderate Republicans are unwilling to take the only step that might fix the situation on your side, we have to take the only step open to us: We have to stop bringing a set of policy proposals and briefing papers to what the Republican Party has made a thermonuclear exchange. We have to oppose their noise, slime, and lie machine with a noise, disinfectant, and truth machine of our own–and at the same intensity.

That means you moderates need to pick a side and fasten your seat belts, rather than wringing your hands about how the Republicans are being so mean, and you wish they would be less so.”

What can I add to that?

The other six question are pretty good, too, particularly #1 and #6.

(Via Jonathan Bernstein. X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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Oh, for Crissake

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The video report at the link isn’t objectionable, but check out the headline for a story about a rich right-wing guy’s attempt to bring Jeremiah Wright into the 2012 race:

The right engages in 24/7 back-alley thuggery, then piously declares, over and over and over again, that Team Obama is the real criminal gang in politics, using precisely this term, “Chicago-style politics.” And minds at “liberal” NBC News have been so colonized that they just cough up the right-wing meme without thinking.

(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

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