What else is going on?
Good-bye doesn’t mean we’ll never be together again
Steve Benen is leaving his Washington Monthly gig to be on MSNBC:
I have some news to share: after three-and-a-half years at the Washington Monthly, I’m moving on. My last post will be tomorrow and I’ll start my new career at MSNBC on Monday morning.
Working for the Monthly has been an amazing experience, but I’m thrilled about an extraordinary opportunity at MSNBC: I’m going to be a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and an MSNBC contributor. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging; I’ll just be writing at a new online home.
That Jonathan Bernstein guy who fills in for him sometimes does a good job, so I hope he takes over. WM has been my favorite blog, along with NoMoreMisterNiceBlog and Atrios, for the past two years.
Good-bye doesn’t mean we’ll never be together againPost + Comments (101)
Oh, stewardess, I speak wingnut
A simple google search could have taught America’s worst columnist that wingers talk about Saul Alinsky all the time. But no:
The Gingrich I seek is not the man above but the one of big ideas. The term gets thrown around a lot, and Gingrich himself is apt to think his every idea is BIG. His mind is always in the tumble cycle. And even when he is spouting boilerplate, he can distance himself from his worn verbiage to say something fresh or provocative or ugly — it’s all the same to him. Out of nowhere, he has exhumed Saul Alinsky, whose fame is limited to university sociology departments, and yet whose name is so perfectly evocative of old-style radicalism, vaguely European in sound, that it fits Gingrich’s recent formulation, “people who don’t like the classical America.” Who dat, Newt?
The reference, although a tad obscure, is nevertheless intriguing. It shows that Gingrich is familiar with the late father of community organizing who died in 1972, and who by occupation and residence (Chicago) is suggestive of Barack Obama.
So dumb, so lazy, so worthless. You’ve never going to convince me that American official discourse is all that different from North Korean official discourse.
Negotiations
I’ve written several times about our candidate for the state legislature. To recap:
He’s a Steelworker. He’s been married 32 years and has 4 children. He spent 2 years in the military. He worked 2nd shift his whole life, and only became politically active with the Steelworkers in 2002
I spent part of the morning riding around with him yesterday. We filed his financial disclosure form with the state ethics committee (mail), set up his campaign finance account (on-line), opened a bank account and stopped by the local Board of Elections to make sure he was square with them.
John, the candidate, has been voting for Democrats since 2002, and doing “casual” organizing with the Steelworkers since his conversion from Republican to Democrat. After spending some time with him and listening to him, I realize what he really needs right now is a crash course in “Democrats”.
His whole focus has been on labor and economic issues and while those are really, really important here, and will be the center of his campaign, we actually have a fairly diverse group of committed Democrats and liberals, locally, and they will be his base. We have labor, sure, but we also have teachers and nurses and college administrators and county employees and musicians and stay at home mothers and people who work at Wal Mart. It’s a very conservative area, he’s a long shot going in, so he’s going to need every single one of them.
Listening to him, I realized that outside labor and “paycheck” issues, he’s really only thought about his position on gun rights and abortion, but education and the environment, to pick two, are important issues to some Democrats here, and the active people are really well-informed.
We’re having an organizing event on Saturday afternoon in a room at a local diner, where we invited 40 local women to meet the candidate for the US House. I’m hoping 25 will turn out. I’ll take pictures, unless no one shows up, then I won’t. I’ve been negotiating a “plate price” with the (grown) son of the man who owns the diner, and we’re not quite there yet. In our last conversation, I told him I wanted pie included for the per plate price, and he told me I’m getting rice pudding or bread pudding. I told him “everyone knows” those are cheap desserts, and he told me “everyone DOES NOT know that.” But they do know that. I told him to think about it, because he will have to live with his decision on this. How can he sleep at night?
I asked John and his wife to stop by about an hour into the Saturday event, after the US House candidate leaves, not to speak but instead to just meet the local women and hear what they talk about. I think he should go and find out what Democrats talk about, apart from the union thugs he pals around with.
Mitch Daniels screws middle class working people in his state, before he heads off to give his speech to the pundits
Indiana took a big step toward becoming the 23rd state in the nation with the controversial “right to work” law on the books, as the Senate passed the measure late Monday.
The House could vote on an identical version of the bill today — if, that is, enough House Democrats are present to let a vote take place.
Democrats have repeatedly shut down the House this session, denying Republicans the quorum they need to do business, and they went behind closed doors again late Monday.When Republicans get to take votes on this bill, they have the numbers to win. They proved it in the House on Monday, as they rejected every amendment Democrats offered, including one proposal to let voters decide the issue in a referendum.
Thousands of labor union members packed the House and Senate galleries and filled the hallways outside both chambers Monday. About 110 union members from a Munster laborers union even went to the home of House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, to protest the bill.
“Mr. Bosma and the Republican Party have made it their intention to hit us at our dinner table, so that’s where we want to hit him,” said Kevin Roach, business manager of Laborers’ International Union Local 41.
Bosma, though, said later: “This isn’t my first time to be intimidated or bullied about. It’s not going to stop anything.”
That was clear in the Statehouse. For nearly two hours in the Senate, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle argued passionately, each side citing statistics crafted to back its views.
As union protesters chanted “You lie” outside the Senate chambers, bill author Sen. Carlin Yoder, R-Middlebury, said the legislation will lower unemployment and result in higher-paying jobs. “We’ve heard the argument that ‘right to work’ really means right to work for less,” he said, “and I respectfully disagree with that.”
But Democrats said the legislation is instead an escalator taking Indiana down to lower-paying jobs and unsafe working conditions. Senate Minority Leader Vi Simpson, D-Ellettsville, said lawmakers should legislate by evidence and not anecdote. There’s no solid data proving that “right to work” laws lead to economic development, she said. ‘Right to work’ is nothing more than a race to the bottom for the middle class of Indiana,” she said.
When you’re listening to Mitch Daniels tonight, and hearing pundits afterwards tell us how smart he is and how moderate he is and how he’s the future of principled conservatism, remember that he lied to these people in order to get elected governor. He told them he wouldn’t go after private sector union members. Then he did.
Oh, and just for the record?
Here’s the unemployment rate in Indiana again.
Indiana under Daniels gave away the store to business interests and they got absolutely nothing in return. Gutted business regulation, gutted environmental regulation, sold state assets, deregulated and privatized public schools, destroyed public sector unions, and the unemployment rate in Indiana is comparable to the midwest states around Indiana, states that didn’t make all the concessions demanded by the “job creators”. The promised jobs never arrived.
When John Boehner speaks of Mitch Daniels he has to claim that Daniels was working on “a climate for job creation.” Not jobs. A “climate” where jobs might blow in like the weather, maybe, sometime, depending. Boehner has to use that odd and abstract language because Boehner knows what the unemployment rate is in Indiana, and he also knows that Daniels is a two-term governor who had a free hand to put in place the whole conservative-libertarian wish list. For years. That’s all in place, but the job creators just keep on demanding more concessions from Indiana, and Mitch Daniels just keeps handing them over.
Mitt’s TPS Reports Always Have the New Cover Sheet
When I went to confession yesterday my priest told me to say 3 Hail Marys and watch the Republican debates as my penance, so I saw most of last night’s shitshow. I think that priest know what he was doing, because I’ve resolved to keep the boozing and sodomy down to a minimum so I just have to say an Act of Contrition next time. That said, I have a couple of observations.
Brian Williams was careful to phrase his 47 questions about the ark of the horse race covenant, “electability”, in a way that kept him from getting smacked down by Newt. Instead of asking direct questions about each candidate’s weak spot, he repeated one candidate’s attack ads to the another. He also stayed away from Newt’s 3 marriages and counting. This led to an awesome half hour of Romney and Gingrich pounding on each other, with no real clear winner, though it’s probably good news for Romney that he finally landed a couple of solid shots, including channeling Steve Benen by pointing out that Newt resigned in “disgrace”.
The man-on-man action was pretty entertaining, but what struck me is the exchange I embedded above, where Romney unveils the centerpiece of his immigration strategy, “self-deportation”. In other words, he expects undocumented immigrants to leave voluntarily because his administration will make their lives miserable. The questioner, Adam Smith of the Tampa Bay Times, asked the obvious follow-up question, “Isn’t that what we have now?” and Mitt replied with some earnest word salad about “e-verification”, which assumes that some magic card will reverse a 50 year national habit of hiring undocumented workers.
What struck me about that exchange is that it shows how much Mitt and his advisors think that careful corporate-style “message discipline” will paper over the awful parts of Mitt’s policies and resume. Here’s another example from Mitt’s tax return release:
Romney advisers stressed that the holdings in the Caymans — along with those in a Swiss bank account that was closed in 2010 after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney — were reported on tax returns and were not vehicles to avoid taxes.
I realize that the job of Romney’s advisors is to put lipstick on many pigs, but the apparent seriousness and earnestness that accompanies communication from Romney’s world makes me think they believe their bullshit will fly. I have to believe that’s because “enhanced messaging” works in business settings, where employees just have to nod and grit their teeth when corporate comes up with some new, stupid euphemism. But Mitt isn’t the CEO of the Republican primaries, and “self-deportation” and “we didn’t avoid taxes with our Cayman and Swiss bank accounts” just don’t cut it in the real world.
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Kristol Lite
All English-language software should be equipped with a mechanism that prevents these particular words from being presented in this sequence:
Users who stubbornly attempt to evade the safeguard should have their hard drive erased. Jesus. I get that the Republicans are in despair over their sucky presidential slate, as well they should be. But this constant caterwauling about a Douche ex Machina is getting embarrassing. Suck it up, crybabies!