Connect:
Lee Fang, Think Progress: “US Chamber of Commerce Hosts Seminars With Chinese Government Officials to Teach American Firms How to Outsource.”
Related to above, and below, see Dana Milbank, “A Tea Party of Populist Posers”
Kate Zernike, New York Times: “Secretive Republican Donors Are Planning Ahead”
Related to above, by Lee Fang at Think Progress: “MEMO: Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election”
Early voting has begun in Harris County, Texas, and there are reports that voters in minority districts are being harassed and intimidated by wingnuts posing as poll watchers.
“We have a long way to go in this election, and we’re committed to having it done lawfully and successfully,” said Terry O’Rourke, first assistant Harris County attorney.
The complaints, he said, came from Kashmere Gardens, Moody Park, Sunnyside and other predominantly minority neighborhoods. The complaints included poll watchers “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters waiting to cast their ballots.
The “poll watchers,” who belong to a tea party-affiliated group called True the Vote, says its people are trained poll watchers who are following all guidelines. Some county officials speculate that the unusually high number of people who showed up to watch the polls caused some voters to feel intimidated and to file complaints. So at the moment we can’t say for sure that the True the Vote people were doing anything wrong.
However, the County Clerk’s office received 14 complaints from 11 precincts on Monday, which is way above the normal number of complaints received. The Texas Democratic Party, which has joined with other groups in a lawsuit against True the Vote’s parent organization, King Street Patriots, has promised to release a video within the next few days showing intimidating behavior by the poll watchers.
Weirdly, an attorney for King Street Patriots denies that the True the Vote poll watchers were registered poll watchers:
Hiram Sasser, an attorney for the King Street Patriots, denied the group was intimidating voters. “The King Street Patriots don’t have any registered poll watchers,” he said. “Registered poll watchers work for either a party or a candidate.”
True the Vote, Sasser said, is a project of the King Street Patriots, but it’s not in a position to assign poll watchers. The party or the candidate with whom poll watchers are affiliated would be responsible for their actions, he said.
It’s as if the attorney is laying the groundwork for an argument that poll watcher guidelines to apply to his people because they aren’t registered poll watchers.
Also, before the voting started True the Vote “had promised to verify voters’ credentials at polling places,” which sounds to me as if they were planning to actively challenge individual voters’ right to vote. And the Liberty Institute, which is providing legal representation to the True the Vote group, says the Texas Democratic Party filed suit “to try to bind and gag citizens from speaking out during an election.” But poll watching is not “speaking out.” My understanding is that poll watchers are not supposed to talk to voters, but just watch, and take any concerns to whoever is in charge of the polling place.
So, True the Vote’s own lawyers seem to be undermining the argument that they were just watching.
In other obnoxious news — Virginia Thomas, wife of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, actually called Anita Hill and asked for an apology. Um, it’s been 19 years has since Thomas’s confirmation hearings. And Virginia Thomas calls Anita Hill now? That’s quite bizarre. It’s also obnoxious.
Thomas has already become way more active in partisan political activities than would be ethical for the wife of a Supreme Court justice. One wonders what she is up to, or even if her head is screwed on straight. Calling Anita Hill and asking for an apology is not something a completely rational, emotionally stable person would do after 19 years.
Christine O’Donnell is so ignorant it’s actually painful to watch. That’s why I’m not going to post the video of her debate with Chris Coons at Widener School of Law. If you do watch it, you can hear occasional gasps of disbelief from the audience, whom I assume to be mostly law students.
I think what makes this video so unbearable for me is the way O’Donnell hammily mugs for the audience, as if she sincerely believes she is scoring points and that the audience must agree with her. But the audience more likely saw her as the mutant love child of Anita Bryant and Zippy the Pinhead.
The other bit of news of teh Stupid is from the New York Times. Reporter Michael Cooper prowled about at a Republican women’s club barbecue in Huntersville, North Carolina, to interview the guests. Apparently everyone there believed their federal income taxes had been increased during the Obama Administration. When informed their federal taxes actually had been reduced, at least a few admitted they hadn’t noticed what they were paying in federal taxes.
Yet, no doubt they were mad as hell about their taxes, anyway.
I don’t know whether Jack Conway’s “Aqua Buddha” attacks on Rand Paul are smart politics or stupid politics. We won’t know until election day, probably. However, I assume Conway knows his state better than I do.
In a rational world, making a campaign issue out of something that sounds like youthful, if stupid, hijinks when there are far more important issues going on would be stupid. For example, Rand Paul is in favor of the unrestricted mountaintop strip mining that has devastated much of eastern Kentucky. He is also for dismantling the mine safety regulations that have no doubt saved the lives of thousands of Kentucky coal miners over the years.
But I take a large percentage of the voters of Kentucky aren’t concerned about the ruined mountains and the lives and health of miners. I don’t know whether these voters don’t know about Paul’s stands on these issues, or whether they’ve bought the libertarian fantasy that mine owners would take loving care of the environment and their employees if only the federal government stopped regulating them.
There are legitimate reasons to be squeamish about making an issue of something that, in a sane world, wouldn’t register as an issue. But we’re not living in a sane world. The fact that certifiable loony tune Sharron Angle and flawed but at least not crazy Harry Reid are tied in Nevada tells us it’s not a sane world. If a candidate could win votes by dancing naked on an elephant while singing “I’m a Little Teapot,” might as well do it.
Nate Silver says Paul is still ahead of Conway in the polls, but also that there has been “a dearth of public polling of late” in Kentucky.
So the editor of the state news website Alaska Dispatch goes to a public campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller being held in a public school. And as the editor, Tony Hopfinger, tried to question Miller, Miller’s private security guards “arrested” Hopfinger and put him in handcuffs. They detained Hopfinger until real police showed up and had him released.
The security company claims Hopfinger was “trespassing” at a “private event.” The event was open to the public and being held on public property.
Hopfinger felt threatened as the thugs closed in on him and shoved one of them. The shoved security guard was unharmed, but naturally bloggers of the Right have seized the shove as proof that Hopfinger, not the security guys, was the real “thug.”
According to the “Gateway Pundit,” “A liberal reporter in Alaska was handcuffed and detained after he harassed Republican candidate Joe Miller after a town hall event. The reporter also assaulted a man.” The headline on the site Conservatives4Palin is “Joe Miller’s Security Reportedly Detained Blogger Who Physically Assaulted Another Individual.”
So in the wingnut’s version of events, the thugs detained Hopfinger because he assaulted them, leaving out the part about how the thugs were threatening Hopfinger.
When other reporters at the event tried to find out what was going on, Miller’s goons threatened to arrest them, too.
Hopfinger has been trying to get Miller to answer questions about alleged misconduct in a past job as a lawyer for a county government. Miller simply refuses to discuss the matter. Miller accused Hopfinger of trying to create a “confrontation.” I guess people running for office may not be confronted. The Miller campaign also called Hopfinger an “irrational blogger” who was overcome with anger.
According to a reporter from the Anchorage Daily News, Miller got testy with some of the audience questions. For example:
Another criticized Miller’s announcement last week that he would no longer answer questions about his character or his personal history. While his opponents have previous records in elective office, he does not, the woman said. “In this instance, you have no record, so it’s meaningful and it’s reasonable that we would want to examine your professional background and your military …”
Miller interrupted her and said he knew she was a supporter of his opponent, write-in candidate Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
And in the larger context, I can’t help but wonder: is this what the Tea Party crowd has in mind for America’s future? In their version of “limited government,” should we expect extremists candidates to hire private security forces with the power to detain reporters who ask candidates about their background?
Is this their vision of American “freedom”?
Why, yes it is, Steve. That’s exactly what their vision of “freedom” is. It’s a place where hard right-wing ideologues have absolute rule, and anyone who dissents will be labeled irrational and shipped away for “treatment,” just as Stalin did with dissidents back in the ol’ USSR.
Oh, and Steve also notes that the centerpiece of Miller’s platform is his love for the Constitution. This would be the Constitution as a tribal totem of the Right, not the Constitution as the charter of our government, the latter of which Miller clearly would like to shred. Keep that straight.
In this corner, Nobel prize-winning economist Joeph Stiglitz, who correctly predicted our current economic maladies a decade ago. In that corner, Dick Armey, bleating the stardard Republican zombie talking points about balanced budgets and the evils of government spending. But Andrew Leonard writes in “Unfair Fight“:
Dick Armey, of course, was House majority leader for the first two years of George Bush’s first term, during which the first round of the Bush tax cuts were passed, without any corresponding cuts in spending, with the result that the Clinton-era budget surplus was transformed almost immediately into annual deficits.
Leonard calls this exchange an “unfair fight,” but in spite of the fact that Joseph Stiglitz has facts, credentials, and a track record of correct predictions his side, and Dick Armey is a gasbag, whose view will the American people adopt as conventional wisdom? Do I really have to tell you?
Thers at Whiskey Fire compares the economic wisdom of Paul Krugman, another Nobel Prize-winning economist whose predictions going back many years about the fruits of the Bush tax cuts and an unregulated financial system were almost all spot on, versus that of Chuck Norris. Um, yeah, Chuck Norris. As Thers says, Norris’s economic credentials are that “he made action movies and got hit on the head a lot, and also he loves Jesus.”
Krugman and Norris present polar opposite views regarding what economic policies the U.S. ought to pursue. So which view is winning — nay, has won — the argument in national media and most likely in the minds of most Americans?
I don’t blame the American people too much; for the most part, they only ever hear the Armey-Norris side of the argument. The Stiglitz-Krugman view is very well buried beneath a dense layer of media noise paid for by the likes of the Koch brothers.
At the Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg explains to British readers why the U.S. is bleeped:
US campaign laws make it easy for political interest groups and their corporate backers to hide their spending in elections. “This is a world of shadows,” said Taki Oldham, an Australian documentary maker who spent months following Tea Party activists.
Oldham’s documentary is called “(astro)Turf Wars,” and it can be viewed online. Here is the trailer, in which Dick Armey makes a brief appearance:
One gentleman appearing in the trailer that I don’t recognize says that America is drowning in propaganda, making real democracy all but impossible. Yeah, pretty much.
And, of course, the money that is buying America and burying democracy isn’t just coming from the Koch brothers and the other wealthy family trusts that fund the think tanks and media infrastructure burying us. In this election cycle, at least $885,000 is coming from overseas.
First, I want to thank everyone for your expressions of sympathy. I’m sad, but I’m not stressed about being sad. This is the stuff life is made of.
Anyway — here are some things to read while I catch up on other things.
Sean Wilentz, “Cofounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots,” in the New Yorker.
“Blockage of Nobel prizewinner exposes Senate’s dysfunction,” editorial, Boston Globe.
Remember Veronique de Rugy, the genius who declared last April that Democratic districts got more stimulus money than Republican ones? And a quickie analysis by Nate Silver showed that the “Democratic districts” nearly all were state capitals? Stimulus money to the states went to agencies of the state governments, which were nearly always located in the same district as the state capital, and for some reason districts surrounding state capitals tend to vote Democratic. Well, she’s back, and now she’s arguing that President Bush was far stronger at job creation that is President Obama. “There were more jobs created monthly under President Bush than under President Obama,” she says.
If that’s not how you remember things, you are not alone; see Joe Weisenthal and especially Ezra Klein. I’ll let you try to sort out where Veronique went off the rails, if you wish, but the best rebuttal to her column is the first comment: “I hope you’re pretending not to understand this.”
On the other blog, I am taking on a part of the Academic Establishment that is making a name for itself by slandering Buddhism; see “Murderous Mahayana?” and “Where Religion Ends and Sociopathy Begins.” This may not interest all of you, but the second post in particular is more about Assholes of Academia than Buddhism.
In the New York Times, economist Gregory Mankiw writes that if the Bush tax cuts on upper income taxpayers are not extended, he probably will not work so much. That’s because for every $1,000 of “extra” income he earns, he would only bank $523. And compounded over 30 years, that $523 would barely buy his children a hamburger, given the projected value of 2040 dollars.
OK, I made up the part about the hamburger, but not the rest of it. And that $523 is hardly worth the effort. He has everything he really needs, mind you, but he just wants us all to know that if he doesn’t write as many articles or textbooks we’d be deprived of the enjoyment of his economic wisdom.
Well, y’know, as much as that would stress me out, on the list of sacrifices I’m willing to make for the greater good, not reading Mankiw is right up there with giving up Bridezillas. Maybe even haggis. Life is hard. Kevin Drum thinks so, too.
In other news, Carl “Mr. Furious” Paladino made anti-gay remarks in Brooklyn today. Deep down, Carl enjoys being a slumlord way too much to be happy as governor.
The DNC is making a major ad buy accusing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of stealing the election with foreign money. Sic ’em.
Finally — I believe Miss Lucy may be in her final hours now. I need to spend some time with her, and I also am behind other work I should be doing, so if I’m a bit scarce in the next couple of days that’s why. I hope y’all can find stuff to talk about.