It’s always nice to see a hate-spewing, rich bigot getting called out, and it’s even better when the protesters do such a good job of using the bigot’s speech to shame him. (via)
Always the Cheerleader, Never the Candidate?
Dave Weigel at Slate reports from the Values Voters Summit straw poll, where Sarah Palin came in fifth (behind Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich):
… Politico’s Jonathan Martin asked [FCR president Tony Perkins] whether Palin’s weak showing in the presidential poll, and stronger showing in the VP poll, suggested that conservatives were more interested in Palin as a spokesperson than as a presidential candidate.
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“I think she is a great spokesman,” said Perkins. “I mean, I think that she challenges the status quo. She says what a lot of people think. But, you know, a lot of people sometimes realize we shouldn’t say everything we think. Maybe it is that she is more of a cheerleader and one who rallies conservatives together as opposed to being their top choice for president.… “
In a loopy-even-by-her-elastic-standards piece, Maureen Dowd spends half her column bashing Christine O’Donnell (before deciding that O’Donnell’s temporary elevation is all the fault of That Man In the White House):
Christine O’Donnell is in a fantasy world. Literally. The pretty Palin Mini-Me identifies with the women of Middle Earth…
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O’Donnell said she liked Tolkien’s outlook on gender: “On the one hand, there’s the attitude that’s normally on the conservative side — as a conservative woman, I feel I can say this — that stifles women. There’s almost the stereotypical attitude of, to be a true woman, you have to stay at home. And I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Why do you choose a career over marriage?’ Honestly, I’ve had only a few significant relationships, and they’ve broken up with me. And one of the things I’ve been told is, ‘If you weren’t so strong, you’d be married by now.’ ”…
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Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox, Karl Rove dismissed O’Donnell as an absurd choice with a sketchy background and dubious character. He alluded to facts in The Weekly Standard that chronicled her lawsuit against her former employer, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative nonprofit based in Delaware.
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Although O’Donnell said in 1998 that wives should “graciously submit” to their husbands, her 2005 suit charged that she suffered “mental anguish” after being demoted and fired because the institute’s conservative philosophy deemed that women must be subordinate.
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We the People in the Ruling Class Elites do think O’Donnell comes across as alarmingly loopy. But maybe she’s smart as a fox in doing a Single-White-Female, Fox anchor makeover to look more like her queen-maker, Sarah Palin…
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She might have gone a broom too far, though, when she once told Bill Maher that she had “dabbled into witchcraft” and went on a date with a witch that included “a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”…
And Vanity Fair reprints an email from “right-wing pastor and political activist” Lou Engle to Sarah Palin: “… I believe this is an Esther moment in your life. Esther hid her identity until Mordecai challenged her to risk everything for such a time as this. Your identity is “Sarah Barracuda”… I’ve been praying for five years for an Esther, with dreams of being a Mordecai to that Esther.” But the biblical Queen Esther was not a ruler in her own right; she was a young concubine, a beauty pageant winner, whose ‘triumph’ was orchestrated by her uncle Mordecai to successfuly enrich his own political career. Even Joan of Arc waited five hundred years for full acceptance from the Church hierarchy.
The self-proclaimed conservatives who have made Palin, and now O’Donnell, symbols of Heartland American Values(tm) are not, to phrase it politely, defenders of gender neutrality. Fundamentalists and authoritarians still loudly prefer their women to be decorative, and subservient. Whatever the mooted power of the PUMAs, it’s not going to be easy for the most hardcore “traditionalists” to accept a woman in a position of real authority.
It could be argued (probably has been) that the teabaggers’ willingness to promote female politicians (Palin, Angle, Bachman, O’Donnell) is inversely related to the possibility of a ‘Tea Party’ candidate actually achieving significant political power. Women are excellent figureheads, especially for a minority rump party fueled by nothing more significant than spite and nostalgia, but professionals don’t waste serious resources on figureheads. Especially since the last time they installed a former cheerleader as a sockpuppet, events went so badly awry.
Always the Cheerleader, Never the Candidate?Post + Comments (51)
Early Morning Open Thread
Max Read at Gawker points out that the Pentagon is holding onto its grudge against Michael Hastings:
Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan told reporters that freelance writer Michael Hastings was rebuffed when he asked to accompany, or “embed,” with American forces next month.
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The rejection came as the Pentagon ramped up an internal investigation into the circumstances behind some of the most salacious material Hastings used in his article in Rolling Stone…
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The inspector general, an independent investigator, is considering whether officers were insubordinate and how far up the chain of command responsibility for decisions involving the Hastings interviews extended, officials said. Defense officials outlined the investigation on condition of anonymity because it is ongoing and has reached no conclusions.
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Hastings did not immediately reply to requests for comment Tuesday. He has said he did nothing wrong in chronicling the banter, profanity and jocular insults among McChrystal’s inner circle. In Twitter tweet late Tuesday, Hastings said he refused to participate in the army’s IG investigation.
In more cheerful news, Andy Kroll at Mother Jones reports that Pete Hoekstra, of “Hoekstroika” infamy, has lost his primary bid to become Governor of Michigan to venture capitalist/former CEO of Gateway Computers Rick Snyder. However pessimiticly one regards the prospect of another plutocrat buying his way into politics, anything that puts a roadblock in the path of Hoekstra’s ambitions cannot be a totally bad thing.
Barack & Hamid’s Excellent Adventure
Everybody should run out and buy a copy of the August Harper’s Magazine. I want to write a separate post about Dan Baum’s “Happiness Is A Worn Gun: My Concealed Weapon and Me”, but I can’t resist pimping the positively Menckenian David Samuels:
… The reporters practice their questions, as if this were still the old days and raising their hands meant that there was even a slight chance they might be called upon. In fact, Obama hasn’t had a real press conference in almost a year, which is the longest period of such abstinence since anyone began keeping track. The reporters who get to ask questions are selected weeks in advance by the White House. Still, pretending is helpful for morale.
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“How about negotiating with the Taliban? You still good with that?”
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“Is your brother a CIA agent?”
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The question refers to Hamid Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is regularly portrayed in the American press as a corrupt drug lord who charges huge fees for allowing trucks full of opium to cross the bridges over the Helmand River to Kandahar. Last fall, President Obama duly warned that he expected Karzai to establish tough new anti-corruption laws and remove his brother from the government of a country into which the United States would soon be sending 30,000 additional troops. Never mind that Afghanistan produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s supply of opium; and that the Taliban pays Wali Karzai to ship opium through the territories he governs; and that the U.S. Army, under the ill-fated General Stanley McChrystal, relies on Wali Karzai for logistical support and subcontracts special tasks, which include killing people, to gunmen under his direct control; and that as a courtesy we no longer destroy the poppy crop; and that Wali Karzai happens to be the CIA’s landlord in Kandahar, renting them Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s old villa. After a few months of back-and-forth, the message got through, and on March 30 the New York Times reported that “Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place,” quoting a senior NATO official as saying that Wali Karzai could be a big help to the ongoing American reconstruction effort. “One thing, he is a successful businessman,” the official said. “He can create jobs.”
Taitz’ed Love
Once I ran to you, now I’ll run from you: (careful, Politico link)
California Republicans optimistic about their prospects in November could find themselves with a bit of a problem after the votes are counted in Tuesday’s primaries — a statewide ticket with the so-called “Birther Queen” as one of their candidates.
Orly Taitz is an Israeli émigré who has spent the past two years filing lawsuits challenging President Barack Obama’s right to be president on the grounds that he was born in Kenya. In the process, she has earned herself $20,000 in court fines.
Now she’s running for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, and with her establishment-backed primary opponent mounting a less-than-stellar campaign against her, operatives say there’s a chance she could win.
“It’d be a disaster for the Republican party,” says James Lacy, a conservative GOP operative in the state. “Can you imagine if [gubernatorial candidate] Meg Whitman and [candidate for Lt. Gov.] Abel Maldonado — both of whom might have a chance to win in November — had to run with Orly Taitz as secretary of state, who would make her cockamamie issues about Obama’s birth certificate problems at the forefront of her activities?”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Someone pinch me and tell me this is real and could happen.
The Republicans have spent the last couple of years doing everything they could to feed this kind of nutbaggery in the shadows while “respectable Conservatives” pretended to not know anything about it. The very first thing the Republicans did when Obama won the nomination was to court frothers and birthers in the PUMA movement and court the lunatic fringe with attempts to “otherize” Obama. Whisper campaigns about him not saying the Pledge or refusing to swear on a bible or not wearing enough USA #1 bling on his suit led to “underground” email campaigns that led to the continued existence of birthers and other nutjobs who insist Obama is a socialist Muslim Kenyan. You thought that rhetoric from Sarah Palin was a mistake when she said “He doesn’t look at America the way we do” and he “pals around with terrorists?” They knew what they were and are doing. They teased and teased, introducing citizenship bills and hinting he might not be American, and now Orly is one of them
But somehow or another, they lost control of the freak show and the teabaggers and the frothers are now running things, and now this is going to come back and bite them on the ass.
And it’s fucking awesome.
*** Update ***
Similar thoughts from Mario Piperni (and a fun graphic!).
Without Me, There Wouldn’t Be a Senate
Lindsey Graham on immigration reform:
“What bill are we going to take up?” he asked in an interview. “What are we going to do? I mean, you’ve done nothing to lay the groundwork for this, we’ve spent all of our time on health care. What bill are we going to take up? Do you expect me to write a bill? Am I going to write every bill in this Congress?”
Tightening Their Own Noose
- And when you lose control, you’ll reap the harvest you have sown.
And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.
And it’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw
around.
So have a good drown, as you go down, all alone,
Dragged down by the stone.
Pink Floyd- Dogs
Via Barry Ritholtz, this bit by Sam Antar about how Goldman’s reaction to the SEC complaint filed Friday may have made their situation worse is a pretty interesting read. I won’t be the only one who would be thrilled if their ginormous egos and their feelings of invincibility caused them to react rashly and hurt themselves even more.
As a side note, I found it pretty interesting that Antar is a convicted felon and has managed to turn that into a marketing scheme in and of itself. He discloses that at the end of this post, on his about page, and clearly uses it to give himself street cred for his new job- teaching people how to catch folks like himself, which reminded me of this post I read the other day at the Epicurean Dealmaker:
Now Dick Fuld, at least in his prime, was a forceful and scary man. It takes a certain kind of personality to tell such a man to go fuck himself to his face. Fortunately, we just happen to have a substantial supply of brass-balled, take-no-prisoners, kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out people ready to hand. By happy coincidence, these individuals also happen to be intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the global financial system, the nature and construction of the myriad securities and engineered products polluting financial markets, and the numberless tricks and stratagems large financial institutions use to end-run rules and regulations designed to keep them in check.
These people are called investment bankers.
That’s right, boys and girls: It’s time for the chickens to band together and hire themselves some foxes to guard the chicken coop.
***The answer, of course, is obvious, if politically difficult to put into effect. Staff the SEC, or whatever “Super Regulator” the government decides to deputize to oversee this mess, with a bunch of highly-paid, tough-as-nails, sonofabitch investment bankers. You will have to pay them millions, just like regular bankers. (You can tie their incentive pay to improvements in the value of securities held under TARP and TALF, if you like.) Pay them well, and investment bankers won’t be able to treat them like second-class citizens at the negotiating table. Pay them like bankers, and your regulators won’t hesitate to read Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein the riot act, because they won’t give a shit about getting a job from them later.
Trust me, these are the kind of people you will need on your team: highly educated, financially sophisticated, psychotically hard-working, experienced professionals who know or can figure out CDOs, SIVs, balance sheet leverage, and credit default derivatives just as easily as the idiots who created and trade this shit. Leading your enforcement and supervision teams you need a bunch of smooth, smart, plausible, grandiosely self-confident senior bankers who will not hesitate to tell Vikram Pandit to go fuck himself, his mother, and the cow she rode in on if he ever tries to fuck with the United States government, the US taxpayer, or the pizza delivery boy again. You know: psychopaths.
This is not a new idea. For yonks, the Brits have known that the best person to hire as gamekeeper on your ancestral estate is a former poacher, someone who knows what they know, how they think, and where to punch them in the genitals to get maximum negotiating effect.
Not all folks that get caught up in wrongdoing are as willing to turn to the other side- Henry Blodgett has spent the last three days at Clusterstock furiously spinning for Goldman. My favorite line from Henry- that Goldman will get off because they were only screwing savvy investors (Hey- they only robbed the smart and rich folks!).
Personally, I’d give Elliot Spitzer a billion dollars to fund the staff he wants along with the jurisdiction he needs, a box of condoms and permanent immunity for any future callgirl scandals, and then unleash the mean bastard on Wall Street.