Mario Piperni made this awesome image of Steve King, and I think it is just great:
He’s got a lot of great images he has made.
by John Cole| 21 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
Mario Piperni made this awesome image of Steve King, and I think it is just great:
He’s got a lot of great images he has made.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It)
(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)
From Professor Krugman’s column to the FSM’s noodly appendages…
Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.
Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.
And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass…
So will Republicans actually take us to the brink? If they do, it will be crucial to understand why they would do such a thing, when their own leaders have admitted that confrontations over the budget inflict substantial harm on the economy. It won’t be because they fear the budget deficit, which is coming down fast. Nor will it be because they sincerely believe that spending cuts produce prosperity.
No, Republicans may be willing to risk economic and financial crisis solely in order to deny essential health care and financial security to millions of their fellow Americans. Let’s hear it for their noble cause!
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Assholes
(Joel Pett via GoComics.com)
Via Billmon’s twitter feed, David Corn at Mother Jones introduces us to the latest GOP propaganda / money funnel:
Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington—including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner—has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell—including aides to congressional Republicans—cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders. They devise strategies for killing immigration reform, hyping the Benghazi controversy, and countering the impression that the GOP exploits racism. And the Groundswell gang is mounting a behind-the-scenes organized effort to eradicate the outsize influence of GOP über-strategist/pundit Karl Rove within Republican and conservative ranks. (For more on Groundswell’s “two front war” against Rove—a major clash on the right—click here.)
One of the influential conservatives guiding the group is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a columnist for the Daily Caller and a tea party consultant and lobbyist. Other Groundswell members include John Bolton, the former UN ambassador; Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy; Ken Blackwell and Jerry Boykin of the Family Research Council; Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch; Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum; Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote; Allen West, the former GOP House member; Sue Myrick, also a former House GOPer; Diana Banister of the influential Shirley and Banister PR firm; and Max Pappas, a top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)….
A certain amount of secrecy cloaks Groundswell’s efforts. Though members have been encouraged to zap out tweets with a #GSW hashtag, a message circulated to members of its Google group noted that the role of certain advocates should be kept “off of the Google group for OPSEC [operational security] reasons.” This “will avoid any potential for bad press for someone if a communication item is leaked,” the message explained. (The Groundswell documents were provided to Mother Jones by a source who had access to its Google group page and who has asked not to be identified.)…
At the March 27 meeting, Groundswell participants discussed one multipurpose theme they had been deploying for weeks to bash the president on a variety of fronts, including immigration reform and the sequester: Obama places “politics over public safety.” In a display of Groundswell’s message-syncing, members of the group repeatedly flogged this phrase in public. Frank Gaffney penned a Washington Times op-ed titled “Putting Politics Over Public Safety.” Tom Fitton headlined a Judicial Watch weekly update “Politics over Public Safety: More Illegal Alien Criminals Released by Obama Administration.” Peter List, editor of LaborUnionReport.com, authored a RedState.com post called “Obama’s Machiavellian Sequestration Pain Game: Putting Politics Over Public Safety.” Matthew Boyle used the phrase in an immigration-related article for Breitbart. And Dan Bongino promoted Boyle’s story on Twitter by tweeting, “Politics over public safety?” In a message to Groundswellers, Ginni Thomas awarded “brownie points” to Fitton, Gaffney, and other members for promoting the “politics over public safety” riff…
… Groundswellers constantly brainstorm via their Google group in search of a magic talking point, or a silver bullet of messaging. On April 24, Keli Carender, the national grassroots coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, posted a message to the Google group, writing, “We should have a unified name for the immigration bill so that as the other side is calling it ‘reform,’ we present a unified front against that notion. If we’re all calling it different things, their ‘reform’ message will win. We only combat the idea that it is reform if we hammer back with one different phrase/name.” She tossed out a few ideas: “Schumer-Rubio bill,” “anti-security bill,” and “amnesty bill.” Sheryl Kaufman, the communications director for Rep. Jim Bridenstine, chimed in that she was fond of a phrase derived by MonCreif: “‘OBAMAGRATION’—I love it!! Communicates the similarity with Obamacare.” …
Open Thread: Another “Massive” GOP SwellingPost + Comments (114)
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links, Movies, Open Threads, Security Theatre
Via NYMag:
Is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a traitor or a visionary? That’s the question posed by the new film The Fifth Estate, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, with Daniel Bruhl as Assange’s former partner Daniel Domscheit-Berg… [W]e also rang up Fifth Estate director Bill Condon to explain why he cast Cumberbatch, what he makes of the Edward Snowden case, and how he feels about Assange’s claim that the film is a “propaganda attack.”
Let’s talk about that title and tagline first. How did you arrive at The Fifth Estate? And what are we to make of a tagline that implicates the audience, saying, “You are the fifth estate”?
We’re trying very hard to make a movie that raises all the questions without providing all the answers. Even recently, when you saw what happened with the Snowden case, I think it’s hard to come down cleanly on one side because this is all just unbelievably complicated; only by getting involved and understanding the issues can people come to an informed decision of their own. I don’t want to make it sound like a history lesson, but I think the movie does show, in an exciting way, just how complicated these issues are. And the tagline, it has to do with the idea of citizen journalism, the great wild west of the internet. It’s a true revolution that we’re just coming to terms with…
Much more at the link. Since I loved The Conversation and Enemy of the State, this may be one of the rare films I actually pay to see on a wide screen.
Open Thread: Benedict Cumberbatch As Julian AssangePost + Comments (70)
by John Cole| 66 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links
This post is in: #OWS, Don't Mourn, Organize, Excellent Links, Open Threads
A little uplift for your morning. Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick explain their latest “short, opinionated documentary” for the NYTImes, “Occupy Bakery”:
We first met Mahoma López, the subject of this Op-Doc video, in April 2012 at a secret meeting in a McDonald’s on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We’d spent the previous autumn documenting the Occupy Wall Street protests. Mr. López had reached out to the Occupy movement for help with his struggle to improve conditions at his workplace — the original Hot & Crusty bakery and cafe at 63rd Street and Second Avenue. At first he seemed a quiet, humble worker — the kind customers often overlook as they wait in line for sandwiches and coffee. But Mr. López would not be invisible for long…
In the early 20th century, immigrants were at the forefront of the labor movement that helped build our middle class. Today, when the fastest growing job sectors are retail and food preparation, the struggles of low-income workers and their families matter more than ever. Turning these jobs into living-wage jobs while fixing our broken immigration system would lift millions out of poverty and benefit our entire economy by increasing consumption and tax revenue. Mr. López’s story is part of a growing wave of low-wage and immigrant workers organizing across New York City and around the country that has the potential to spark this kind of change.
It’s time we admit it: America runs on the labor of the undocumented. Their struggle for rights, inside and outside the workplace, is an inseparable part of our democratic project.
Well worth the seven minutes, take my word.
Open Thread: “There Is No Justice, Unless You Make Your Own”Post + Comments (12)
This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Excellent Links, Food, Open Threads
Via Corby Kummer at the Atlantic, who says that after “House Republicans split food stamps off the main package, it’s time to revisit a devastating documentary about hunger in America“:
… The idea of the split makes intuitive sense. Anyone who looks at the farm bill for a few minutes–or, like Dan Imhoff, devotes a book to it, or, like Marion Nestle, an entire semester’s course to it–sees what a chimera or, more to the point, a monster it is. It has next to nothing to do with the farms most people think of–the ones growing mixed crops, the ones that supply farmer’s markets. It doesn’t mention environmental protection or land conservation, though some of the country’s most important safeguards are in it. And it doesn’t mention nutrition assistance or hunger, though fully four-fifths of it are food stamps. Why not keep the agricultural parts, even if they benefit only industrial agriculture, in what’s called the farm bill, and call the food-assistance portion what it is? That would get the farm bill back on the rails, and stop letting SNAP debates hijack every vote.
Here’s why not: because that means, as anyone in the anti-hunger community recognizes, pushing the 47 million Americans on food stamps onto an ice floe. The last time Republicans tried to saw off food stamps from the bill, as Jerry Hagstrom recounts in an excellent overview of the most recent farm bill failure, it set back food assistance efforts for more than a decade…
I met Bradley in May at a leadership conference of Share Our Strength, the country’s leading anti-hunger organization certainly as it involves cooks and members of the restaurant community. The official star speaker of the conference was Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, who resoundingly reminded the audience, and the Republicans who weren’t listening, that 92 percent of the 47 million on SNAP are children, the elderly, and the disabled. “If people understood just how vulnerable this population is at a time of economic struggle,” Billy Shore, the founder with his sister Debbie of SOS, told me this morning, “people would understand [that separating off SNAP from the farm bill] makes no sense. This is politics at the expense of kids.”
But the real star was Bradley, who was ostensibly there to speak about her work teaching children how to cook as part of Cooking Matters, a national education program SOS runs. What silenced the crowd was her talking about her educated, proud family needing food stamps, and what that was like for her. It’s quick, and sincere, and un-self-pitying. Watch the short clip and see what you think of Cantor’s victory.
Paul Krugman talks about “Hunger Games, U.S.A.”:
… So what’s going on here? Is it just racism? No doubt the old racist canards — like Ronald Reagan’s image of the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak — still have some traction. But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites; in Tennessee, home of the Bible-quoting Mr. Fincher, the number is 63 percent. So it’s not all about race.
What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.” If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
Monday Morning Open Thread: No Place At the TablePost + Comments (101)