Posts by Paul Rosenberg

Paul Rosenberg is a regular blogger for Open Left

Why the Congressional Dems' Attack on ACORN Is an Attack On Us All
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on September 21, 2009 at 6:00 AM.

When the congressional Democrats joined the Republicans in attacking ACORN and cutting off its funding--without even the pretense of an investigation to establish a rational basis for their actions--they clearly demonstrated the almost utter meaninglessness of electing a Democratic majority over the past two wave elections.  The elections were clearly important in terms of removing the GOP from direct power, so that it's worst abuses were either ended or toned down.

But clearly nothing remotely resembling actual Democratic governance has emerged to take it's place.  And this vote was a stark, harrowing reminder of how politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum: if you don't have a positive agenda, you will end up voting for any sort of stupid, evil shit that comes down the line, if the stampede factor is high enough. Or, to put it more bluntly: If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.  So here's a quick run-down on what I see as six of the principle evils involved in this heinous act.  I invite everyone to add to my list in comments.

(1) Screw The Poor, Part 1: The defunding directly takes money away from the leading organization involved in helping low and moderate income keep their homes.  ACORN's been getting around $3 million a year to do this kind of work--counseling low- and moderate-income families and individuals.

As Zach Roth reported for TPMMuckraker:

Whatever you think about ACORN, poor people and minorities may end up being hurt the most by Congress's sudden vendetta against the group....

According to Brian Kettenring, ACORN's deputy director of national operations, the group's voter-registration work is funded entirely through private sources -- primarily membership dues and foundation grants. So that work would be unaffected.

The same goes for ACORN's core operations -- the rent on its offices, for instance.

In recent years, ACORN has been getting around $2-3 million in federal funds annually, said Kettenring, stressing that this was a rough estimate. That's about 10 percent of its total budget for the year.

That money goes mostly to housing work: primarily fair housing programs, which fight housing discrimination; and foreclosure-prevention programs, which help low-income people obtain loan modifications so they don't lose their homes, and which educate people about preventing foreclosure.

Important work these days, you might say. Losing federal funds, said Kettenring, "would impact our ability to help people save their home."

In other words, ACORN itself, said Kettenring, won't be hurt much by Congress's action. It's the people who ACORN works with -- who tend to be among the neediest -- who will lose out.

To be sure, it's fair to question how effective those programs ultimately are....

But it's not as if the federal money will now go to a different group that does this work more effectively. So the ultimate result, of course, is less help for struggling Americans, in very difficult economic times. As members of both parties compete to express their outrage, that's worth keeping in mind.

In contrast, the top-tier financial firms have received more than $10 trillion in various forms of financial assistance from the government--a sum that's over 3 million times the annual $3 million that ACORN has received.  Any quetions?

(2) Screw The Poor, Part 2: Cutting back on voter registration for minority and low-income voters.  The federal funds have nothing to do with this, but as Roth also notes:

Late Update: A different ACORN spokesman tells the Wall Street Journal that the group is considering cutting its voter-registration work. That's not because of any funding issue. Rather, it's a desire to avoid "political attacks."

Of course, the GOP has been fighting to suppress minority voters for more than half a century.  So, way to go, congressional Democrats!  Of course, since they don't really care very much about passing legislation, it's really not a very big deal to them.  That's why they are the enemy every bit as much as the Republicans are.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Tom Ridge Shows Why the Republican Party Is Intellectually Bankrupt
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on September 7, 2009 at 7:00 AM.

Prelude

On Tuesday, Tom Ridge appeared on Rachel Maddow's show, and Maddow tried in vein to recruit Ridge for the position of Republican voice of reason on foreign affairs.  The problem was that, at bottom, Ridge is a conservative.  He's got better manners than Dick Cheney (as do pit bulls), but at bottom the belief structure is remarkably similar.  He dutifully stands by the lies used to get us to invade Iraq.  He blames bad intelligence, not the Bush Administration's determination to go to war.  He says that other governments were fooled, too.  And besides, he says, the Iraqi people are going to love their democracy so much some day, that all the people slaughtered along the way will be forgotten, and history will smile on George W. Bush, the Greatest President of All Time!

Okay, I made up that last bit about Bush.  But the rest of it Ridge actually said, and it's all the very same sort of stuff that Cheney believes.  There is no difference between the two aside from Cheney's lack of manners.  After everything else was said and done, Ridge's ultimate defense of the Bush Administration was framed in terms of personal honor--a typical conservative frame:

I think it's a pretty radical conclusion to suggest that men and women entrusted with the safety of this country would predicate a decision upon any other bases other than to keep America safe.  Later on, it may have proven that some of the information was inaccurate, but there were plenty of reasons to go into Iraq at the time; the foremost was weapons of mass destruction.  That obviously proven to be faulty.  But the fact of the matter is, at that time, given what they knew--and they knew more than you and I did--it seemed to be the right thing to do, and the decision was made in what they considered to be the best interests of our country.

Of course, the common sense meaning implied here--that a rational, empirical decision was made just prior to invasion based on more data than critics had--is simply, factually false.  Not just the faultiness of the data, but it's fundamental irrelevance to the decisiomaking process were already known. We know this from the US Today story published on September 11, 2002, six months before the Iraq invasion, which reported that the decision to invade Iraq had been made within weeks of 9/11.  ("Iraq course set from tight White House circle"). It quoted Condi Rice saying that there wasn't even a decision process involved:

The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen -- that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward.

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Massacre in Peru Leads to Roll-Back of Free Trade "Development" Laws
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on June 15, 2009 at 7:32 AM.

A massacre of indigenous protesters in Peru last weekend has resulted in the temporary roll-back of development laws that were passed without proper consultation under international law.  They were part of a package of laws issued to comply with a free trade agreement with the US.  This is just the tip of the iceberg of the overseas impacts of free trade laws that we routinely hear nothing about.

Peaceful protesters were attacked by police, who killed at least 22 of them, according to their latest count--police claimed just nine.  Twenty-three police were killed in return.  Democracy Now! reported on the massacre on Tuesday (excerpts on the flip), and Al Jazeera filed this report.

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Twits On Twitter: The GOP Strikes Out
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on June 8, 2009 at 2:51 PM.

Week before last it was Newt Gingrich tweeting, "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."  A week later, on his website, Newt wrote:

The word "racist" should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person,

as if some stranger had done it, not Newt himself.

Today, it was Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, usually regarded as one of the few non-insane Republicans on Capitol Hill, making a fool of himself on Twitter:

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley... issued two angry "tweets" Sunday morning as the president wrapped up an overseas tour.

For months Obama had left the details of health care legislation to Congress, then inserted himself firmly into the debate in recent days, including using his weekly radio address Saturday to declare "it's time to deliver" on health reform.

Grassley's first tweet: "Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."

A short time later: "Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a 'hammer' u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL."

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Obama's Questionable Embrace of Mercenary Armies And Where It Might Lead
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on June 7, 2009 at 6:30 PM.

In "Why Not A Progressive Foreign Policy? Part 1: The Military ", I wrote about a better way of combatting terrorism than bringing war to Afghanistan, and continuing to kill innocent civilians--a way much more consistent with the main thrust of Obama's speech in Cairo. In the transition between laying out the problem, and presenting that better way, I wrote:

But before we turn to what that better way is, I just want to take note of former Democracy Now producer Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers Journal last night, sketching out some of what's going wrong right now. I'll be looking at what he talked about more closely in a followup diary, which will serve to underscore just how much is at stake if we don't get serious about crafting a progressive alternative.  Scahill discusses the continuation of military privatization under Obama, and the dangerous direction it threatens to lead us

It's now time to take a closer look at what's at stake, at what we risk if we do not adopt a more progressive military policy.  The future is never certain, of course.  But closing our eyes to foreseeable risks only makes it more uncertain, more threatening, more potentially dangerous.

In the discussion with Bill Moyers, Jeremy Scahill gives credit to Obama for recognizing the existence of a problem, if not really grasping its essential nature:

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George Will, Washington Post: Traitors To Humanity
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on March 2, 2009 at 6:54 AM.

George Will, "Dark Green Doomsayers", Feb 15:

"according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade"

U.N. World Meteorological Organization, "WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 2007" (pdf), p4:

January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.

Extended quote:

Global temperatures during 2007

The analyses made by leading climate centres rank the year 2007 amongst the ten warmest years on record. The Met Office Hadley Centre analyses showed that the global mean surface temperature in 2007 was 0.40°C (0.72°F) above the 1961-1990 annual average (14°C/57.2°F) and hence marks the seventh warmest year on record. According to the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the global mean surface temperature anomaly was 0.55°C (0.99°F) above the twentieth century average (1901-2000) of 13.9°C (56.9°F), which ranks 2007 the fifth warmest year in its record.

January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.

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The Bush Admin's Gone, But They're Still Lying Like Hell
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on February 14, 2009 at 9:56 AM.

We all make mistakes, some more than others.  But Republicans prefer the sizzle to the steak.  And thus we have the inevitable:  GOP mis-sizzles.  Here's a good example from earlier this month.  On Feb. 4, Inside Edition reported: After a rough day at the office on Tuesday, 2/3, President Obama's fashion style is now coming under attack. Former George W. Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card says the Obama dress code is way too laid back. "There should be a dress code of respect," Card tells INSIDE EDITION. "I wish that he would wear a suit coat and tie." Card is the first member of the Bush administration to bash Obama, and he's going after him for forgoing a coat and tie. "The Oval Office symbolizes...the Constitution, the hopes and dreams, and I'm going to say democracy. And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it's appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the President." The clear implication here--it wouldn't make sense any other way--is that Bush would never have taken off his jacket in the Oval Office, mush less let anyone else do the same.  A Bush high official lecturing anyone about respecting anything is always good for a laugh.  Picture Al Capone lecturing Elliot Ness.  Bush, after all, turned the Oval Office into the central office of Lies, Inc., and millions of people are dead as a result.  Respect? So, of course, it's only fitting that Card's canard was quickly exposed by Huffington Post.  It was not just another GOP absurdity.  It was another Bush/GOP lie.

First, Huffington Post tracked the story, pointing out a NY Times revelation of a photo showing a jacketless George Tenet in the Oval Office with Bush.  Then they followed up with this photo of Bush himself with Harriet Meirs, just two days after taking office in 2001:

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'Red State America' Is No More
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on January 28, 2009 at 3:27 PM.

Gallup has just released "State of the States: Political Party Affiliation", the first in a four-part series to be released this week on Gallup.com,  based on Gallup Poll Daily tracking data collected throughout 2008.  And the results could not be clearer: GOP plurality states (including leaners) have been reduced to a mere handful: the Mormon mountain heartland, plus Alaska and Nebraska.  That's it:

This contrasts sharply with what Gallup found as recently as 2002:

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One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State: NYT Pictures Show How Things Are Changing
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on November 6, 2008 at 12:12 PM.

The New York Times has a set of maps and charts that add some dramatic detail to the nature of Obama's victory--particularly its set of county-level maps.  First up, a county-level map showing the whopping 22% of counties that became more Republican this election than they were in 2004:





One can't help but notice how intensely concentrated these counties are in the Scotch-Irish Appalachian uplands and the Ozarks, along with the nearby regions of Oklahoma, East Texas and Louisiana.   This is, by McPalin's account, the "real America".  It is also, not coincidentally, the most culturally isolated and technologically backward part of the country.  If any part of America is similar to Afghanistan, in its remoteness from the modern world, and resistance to integration with the dynamic swirl of history around it, it is these counties, which portend the future of the GOP as not just a regional party of the South, but a shrinking one even within that region.

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The GOP-Terrorism Connection: It's Not 'Just' Palin
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on October 26, 2008 at 5:29 AM.

Noxious though it may be, there's nothing aberrational about Palin's refusal to condemn anti-abortion violence as terrorism.  The right has a long, long history of inciting violence, and excusing it, rather than condemning it.  When Clinton was President, there were frequent examples of this.  After the Oklahoma City bombing, the GOP Congress held hearings during which the "Militia" leaders were treated with deference and respect.

Then, just last fall, while Ron Paul was ramping up his "insurgent" presidential campaign--and in full denial about his past racist publications--he praised a couple who then engaged in an armed stand-off with federal officials.  I wrote about it in a diary, "Ron Paul Equates Former Militia Wingnut Tax Evaders With Martin Luther King", which included this video, so there can be no mistaking Paul's position.  The principle tax-evader in question, Edward Lewis Brown, was convicted of armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon in 1960, and was imprisoned until 1965.  But Paul compared him not only to Martin Luther King, but to Ghandi as well:

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Pew: Democrats Crushing Republicans in Party Identification Advantage
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on August 25, 2008 at 12:14 PM.

Kicking off its "Convention Backgrounder" [PDF], the Pew Center for the People and the Press says:

As the 2008 conventions approach, the Democratic Party's advantage in party identification remains as large as it has been over the past two decades, and the Democratic Party's image remains substantially more positive than the GOP's. The Democrats have a 13-point lead in party affiliation (51% vs. 38%) among registered voters, when independents who "lean" to either party are included. Four years ago, the Democrats held only a slim 47% to 44% lead by this same measure.

Over the past four years, the Democrats' gains in party affiliation among younger voters have been particularly striking. In 2004, the Democrats had a 10-point lead among 18-29 year olds (50% to 40%); this more than doubled, to 22 points (55% to 33%), in polling conducted between January and August of 2008.

And while Democratic gains have occurred across all income and education groups, the change from 2004 is particularly notable among middleincome voters. In 2004, Americans with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 tilted Republican (48% Republican/lean Republican, 44% Democrat/lean Democrat). Today, the Democrats have built a substantial 14-point lead among these voters (53% to 39%).

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Andrew Bacevich: Hard Truths About America Gone Astray
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Bill Moyers Journal on August 19, 2008 at 1:49 PM.

Here's one of the most amazing programs  in the history of Bill Moyers Journal.  Really, one of most amazing programs Moyers has done, period, in all his years on television.  His guest for the hour was Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, retired colonel with 23 years in the Army, and author of several books, including The Limits Of Power: The End Of American Exceptionalism, just released this week. Here's a distillation of their conversation.

As I suggested in my diary, "We're So Lame", the Democrats would be much better off scrapping their "national security" lineup full of disgraced Iraq War hawks, and replacing the whole lot with Bacevich.  More reasons why on the flip--and a suggestion about how we might change the direction of our country.

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"Map-Changing" Elections: A Look at Realignments Past
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on August 3, 2008 at 11:42 AM.

The term "map-changing" has become one of those buzzwords this election cycle.  It was, like most buzzwords, high on sizzle, low on steak.  Why?  Because candidates don't change maps-map-changing conditions change candidates-at least, successful ones.  Which means, in effect, that any Democrat who won the nomination this time had a decent shot at becoming a map-changing candidate.  To see why this is so, I've assembled a series of maps showing all the presidential elections from 1896 to date, so that the the progression of changes can readily be seen.   At the end, I'll return to the current election, and dove-tail with the analysis in the previous diary, looking at what sort of map-change we can expect if all the swing states looked at go the Democrat's way.  Of course, there's no guarantee that will happen-but that's what real map-changing elections are all about-sailing with the flood of a rising tide, and taking all the credit for the work of the elements.

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Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Charge Bush with Murder
Posted by Paul Rosenberg, Open Left on July 28, 2008 at 10:42 AM.

On Tuesday, July 15, the House of Representatives voted 238 to 180 to send an article of impeachment, introduced by Congressman Dennis Kucinich, to the Judiciary Committee for a hearing-but not to lead to impeachment. The hearing, scheduled for July 25, will cover Bush's abuse of power-a topic that strangely continues to frighten House Democratic leadership, even as Bush's approval levels have plunged to just 15 percent in a recent New Jersey poll-a level significantly below that of Richard Nixon when he resigned from office.

Over the past several years, a number of different experts-as well as a sizeable percentage of the American people-have come out in favor of impeaching President Bush for a number of different reasons, chief among which is taking our country to war with Iraq under false pretenses-resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, including over 4,000 American troops.

"To leave impeachment as a rusty sword really jeopardizes the structure of the rule of law in the country," said former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzmann, a leading figure in the Watergate hearings, and co-author of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens

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2008: The Making of A Landslide -- A Progress Report
Posted by Paul Rosenberg on June 8, 2008 at 9:48 PM.

Reprinted from Open Left:

I just want to do a brief review here of some of the recent signs pointing to an ever-more-likely landslide victory scenario this November, with special emphasis on the House.


I'm combining information from three sources: Rasmussen, Democracy Corps and Cook Political Report.
First, there's the latest information on Partisan ID from Rasmussen, based on their daily tracking polls.  Here's the chart I generated from their data. It shows how Democratic Party identification jumped sharply from the beginning of the primary season, after falling into the doldrums during 2007, when the Democratic Congress basically failed to deliver much of anything. It's remained fairly steady the last few months, but at record high levels:

A bit explanation and the table the chart is based on can be found on the flip, along the goods from Democracy Corps and Cook Political Report.

Democracy Corps:  Battleground Disticts Extremely Promising

First, Democracy Corps makes it clear that their battleground polling is increasingly focused deep into Repubican territory:

Even as we modified our sample design to include more hard-to-reach Republican-held districts, Democrats have significantly expanded their lead in this totally Republican battleground that Bush won by 12 points in 2004 and Republican members won by the same margin in 2006. You have to remind yourself that this is not a national poll but a poll in Republican-held seats where Democrats have moved to a 7-point lead (50 to 43 percent). Further, Republican incumbents have a very weak standing to be reelected while Democratic challengers enjoy a larger pool of winnable voters to approach in this election, win the issue debates and prove to be resilient to the most vicious Republican attacks. The underlying dynamics of the race show that the battleground could expand even further into Republican territory as more voters are open to vote Democratic in November.1
Will there be a second wave election in a row? Obviously, Democrats will not win all of
these competitive seats but there is no reason to think they cannot win a majority of these seats in an environment that is increasingly Democratic.
[T]he structure of the race as well as Democrats' advantage across the board show that 2008 can be another wave election for Democrats. To take advantage of this opportunity Democrats will have to expand the playing field further into Republican territory.

The Democratic Party maintained its huge edge in party identification during the month of May. Barack Obama's Party now has the largest partisan advantage over the Republicans since Rasmussen Reports began tracking this data on a monthly basis nearly six years ago (see history from January 2004 to present).

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