Brilliant at Breakfast

Republican Hypocrisy Summed Up

I don't know why I've never really noticed this before, but isn't it interesting how a bunch of Republican politicians who have made their careers taking a government paycheck, in a job that has a guaranteed defined-benefit pension, and taxpayer-paid health care, want to keep everyone else from having the sweet deal they get? If they love the private sector so much, why aren't they working there?

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Was Eliot Spitzer Taken Out Because He Was Going to Bust AIG?

Eliot Spitzer is back and he's talking. The thought of this, no doubt, brings a small shiver to the boardrooms of some of the perps walking around trying to figure out how to hide the money this week. Today Edward Liddy testified that there have been death threats made to or about executives who received bonuses, so no names will be put on the record, but these anonymous players must know that the jig is up in the land of easy-money. Isn't what to do a no-brainer for these great Americans?

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And What If McCain Wins?

What if John McCain and his mindless, grinning pit bull manage to pull this thing out? Just suppose that their racism and their fearmongering and their pitting citizen against citizen and playing to the darkest fears of the American reptilian brain work. Suppose that enough canvassers are beaten, and enough college kids and elderly women and young aspiring urban hip-hop artists are removed from the voter rolls, and enough voting machines have their smartcards switched to change every "n"th vote for Barack Obama to a vote for John McCain.

What kind of a country will the campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin have left us with?

What Will it Say to Young People Like This if the Republicans Steal the Election Again?

I no longer expect elections to be fair. I no longer expect Republicans to respect people's right to vote. I no longer expect my vote to be counted. I no longer expect voting machines that accurately record the vote and that aggregate correctly. I now assume that the election taking place in less than a month will be stolen by John McCain and Sarah Palin with the help of the thugs they've whipped into a frenzy, the executives of the voting machine companies, and their shills in the media like Tom Brokaw, who has turned Press the Meat into a "Vote McCain" commercial.

But I am 53 and I am a cynic.

In 1968, another generation endured a year that saw its symbols of hope mowed down not at the ballot box but by bullets. Another generation wanted an end to the relentless feeding of the giant war machine. Another generation thought it could, through the ballot box, effect the changes that would end the Vietnam War. That generation saw its candidate of hope mowed down in the Ambassador Hotel, and the icon of the Civil Rights movement mowed down on a motel balcony. And it rioted in Chicago as a decent man who just happened to have the misfortune to be tied to the policies of an unpopular president nominated for the presidency -- and lose a close election to the hated Richard Nixon.

And for the next four years, there was unrest in this country, led by SDS, the Weathermen, and their ever-more-nihilistic brethren.

No wonder the McCain campaign is so obsessed with William Ayers. No wonder they want to tie Obama to him at the wrists and ankles.

Rachel Maddow Spanks Joe Scarborough

Joe Scarborough is already pissing and moaning about the promotion of Rachel Maddow. Oh, he's not using her name, but earlier this morning he was griping that he got only around fifteen seconds of face time during last night's convention coverage, and claimed it was because he ticked off "a certain person."

It's no secret who that "certain person" is, and why he's holding a grudge:

Grow the hell up, Joe. You were pwn3d, and you know it.

Pro-Choice Women Flee From McCain When They Discover His Positions

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate notes that as badly as John McCain is polling with women, it gets worse once they realize that he wants to do everything he can to make sure that women of reproductive age don't get to control what happens to their bodies; that government will:

A quick look at the polls reflects McCain's problem: He's running behind Obama with women voters. A poll released yesterday by Emily's List has Obama beating McCain by a 12-point margin among all registered female voters and by 30 points among registered female voters ages 18 to 27. A February Planned Parenthood poll of 1,205 women voters in 16 battleground states found that 49 percent of women who backed McCain did so despite being pro-choice, and 46 percent backing him also wanted Roe v. Wade to remain the law of the land. It's clear that once these voters find out McCain's real record on reproductive rights, they flee. The problem, as Sarah Blustain points out in this great piece, is that voters don't seem to be finding out.

McCain needs these pro-choice women, but every time he tries to reach out to them, he gets smacked upside the head by his base. When he floated the notion of naming a pro-choice vice president last week--either former Pennsylvania Gov. and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge or Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman--Rush Limbaugh snarled that "if the McCain camp does that, they will have effectively destroyed the Republican Party and put the conservative movement in the bleachers." Limbaugh also pledged that tapping Lieberman or Ridge would "ensure [McCain's] defeat." So McCain needs to keep his base happy--and the rest of us in the dark.

[snip]

John McCain is banking on his reputation as an independent maverick to snooker voters into thinking that his abortion views are centrist, no matter what he actually says. It's a risky strategy: Don't believe what I say. Believe what you used to believe before I opened my mouth. But that's where the Jessica Seinfeld trick comes in. Your kid eats the meatloaf because it looks like a meatloaf. And voters continue to think McCain is a maverick because he looks like one.

Voters, and especially women voters who want to make their own reproductive decisions, need to wake up and smell the asparagus.

If Obama Wants to Win He Needs to Give McCain a Taste of His Own Medicine

OK, can someone please explain to me how the fuck this happened?

Sen. Barack Obama goes to the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe largely in response to McCain attacking him for not going to Iraq. He takes the world by storm, the highlight of his trip delivering a rousing, if substanceless, speech in Berlin to 200,000 adoring fans. Germans held up placards begging for Obama to be their Chancellor. He actually makes Gordon Brown smile, a feat about as easy as Rush Limbaugh getting it up without someone else's Viagra.

McCain responds with sour ads accusing Obama of beingÃ¢â‚¬Â¦ semi-popular, a status conferred on him by what used to be almost half the nation.

Then, by the time Obama gets back from what was by all accounts a successful trip, during which he made not a single gaffe, his lead over McCain completely evaporated in the wake of the most mean-spirited attack ads this generation has ever seen?!

Hidden Unemployment Increasing

There's more than one way to push people out of the workforce and out of the mainstream. One of the most cost-effective ways is to move people from full-time to part-time work. These people don't inflate and enlarge the unemployment figures because they are at least marginally employed, and they tend not to cost employers too much money, because in many companies, part-time employees are ineligible for health insurance.

But as reported in the New York Times today, part-time employees aren't reliable consumers, and part-time work is often the first step down the slide into poverty:

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Cue the Wingnuts to Spin Environmental Disaster as a GOOD Thing

Even if you believe that homo sapiens is the only species that deserves to survive and that polar bears are expendable, the very real likelihood that the Arctic ice cap will be reduced by forty percent by 2050 and that seasonal polar ice may be nonexistent this summer ought to be cause for concern. Ecological consequences, ranging from the disappearance of coastal areas of Florida, Louisiana, and the Caribbean and an increase in predator species, combine with the possibility of land wars as passages between northern areas of Canada, Alaska, and Russia become more likely.

But today, watch for the gasbags of right-wing radio to declare the polar bear, the walrus, the seal, and the very life of the indigenous people in the northernmost areas of the world to be expendable in the name of Cheap GasÃ¢â€žÂ¢:

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Will Nobody Weep for Halliburton?

High oil prices mean record sales for the company paying Dick Cheney's pension, but spinning off KBR means lower profit:

Halliburton Co., the world's second- largest oilfield-services provider, said net income dropped 67 percent after the sale of the company's stake in engineering unit KBR inflated 2007 earnings.

Second-quarter profit fell to $507 million, or 55 cents a share, from $1.53 billion, or $1.62, a year earlier, Houston- based Halliburton said today in a statement. Excluding such items as the KBR gain, a legal settlement and a failed takeover bid, per-share profit rose to 68 cents from 63 cents, matching the average of 22 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Halliburton jettisoned KBR last year, tightening its focus on oilfield work as surging crude prices spurred demand for exploration and production services. The company opened a Middle East headquarters in Dubai and added technology centers in Russia and Asia to expand its presence overseas, where services providers are benefiting as producers ratchet up oil spending.

Why Do Free Markets Hate Our Troops?

For over two decades, we've heard that privatization is the way to go; that the private sector does everything better than the government ever can. This belief has persisted despite the success of federal programs like Head Start, and yes, even Social Security and Medicare.

Even after WorldCom, Enron, Countrywide, and now the IndyMac bank failure, the myth of corporate competence always being superior to that of government persists. And even though Republicans have given lip service to being supportive of, even worshipful of, the military, they've done what they can to outsource that too.

But how is it possible to defend the profit motive when it bumps up against endangering the very troops that they've been using as political props for the last seven years?

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Another City Drowns and Bush Does Nothing

Another city. More images of men hauling sandbags. More families driven from their homes in boats to be deposited in emergency shelters with nothing but the clothes on their backs. More images of Michael Chertoff spouting platitudes like "When officials tell you to leave, leave."

The floods in the Midwest have been going on for a month, and the first steps in a disaster declaration began only yesterday.

It isn't just black people and the white poor being ignored by the Bush Administration anymore. These are the farmers growing the corn that's fed to cattle and used to make ethanol. These are the very white heartlanders that Republicans have been using as campaign props for a generation. And even they are seeing the government that's supposed to work for them turn its back on them.

This is what smaller government looks like. This is what happens when you leave everything to the states and the states are too overwhelmed to handle disasters on their own. This is what happens when you shovel money into the pockets of military contractors and the defense industry and run trillion-dollar defcits. This is what happens when you elect someone you think you'd like to have a beer with instead of someone with a half a brain in his head who's oriented towards problem-solving.

That John McCain, who promises more of what we've endured for the last eight years, is even competitive in this fall's presidential race shows how the Democrats have failed in demonstrating to the people now trying to rescue their belongings that programs like federal disaster assistance and Social Security and Medicare are the product of the very liberalism that Republicans have derided for a generation. With a wide swath of swing states now under water, and $4 gasoline, and skyrocketing food prices, and a dwindling job base, and foreclosures up 48% this year, it's hard to imagine Republican supply-side, feed-the-rich policies as being anything but completely discredited.

And yet, there's John McCain, with a tax plan that once again shovels even more cash into the pockets of the wealthy (when DOES that stuff start "trickling down", anyway?); a tax plan widely derided by economists as being -- dare I say it? -- McSame.

I would hope that by now American voters have begun to do the math. Meanwhile, the Cedar River is expected to crest today at 32 feet -- a full eight feet above yesterday's projections.

Had a C-Section? Good Luck Getting Insurance

Yes, Harriet Christian, I'm talking to you -- and to anyone else who's been expending energy for the last 40 years parsing sexism in language and more recently, painting Hillary Clinton as some kind of feminist warrior-princess. Because while you've spent the last 40 years raging over trivialities, and how many six-figure female lawyers are making partner, and about the corporate glass ceiling that means fewer women are able to get multimillion dollar packages for running companies into the ground, real women are bumping up against things like this:

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Banks Stop Lending to Community Colleges

You'd almost think it was all deliberate -- have banks get a bunch of people to buy homes they can't possibly afford by offering easy mortgages to lure them in, then hike the rates so that they are ruined financially when you pull the rug out from under them. Send the high-paying jobs overseas. And now, with politicians talking about education being the key to advancement in a globalized world (a dubious notion at best, with the highest-paying jobs being outsourced to lower-paying countries), make it tougher for anyone other than the wealthy to afford college:

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Missouri Nuns Fight Voter Disenfranchisement

Because Nuns. Kick. Ass.

Surely, our majority-Catholic Supreme Court should have known better than to get on the wrong side of the Sisters. As we wrote earlier, the first victims of the new ruling on Voter ID were elderly nuns in Indiana. This just in, in my emailbox: The nuns of Missouri rap the Supreme Court's knuckles with a great big ruler:

Nun of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary comments on Voter ID disenfranchisement

WHO: Missourians for Fair Elections

WHAT: Press Conference on the impact of legislation to require government-issued photo ID to vote

WHEN: 1:00 PM, Thursday, May 8, 2008

WHERE: League of Women Voters, 8706 Manchester, Jefferson City, MO 63144

JEFFERSON CITY, MO Ã¢â‚¬â€œ On Thursday, May 8, three Missouri voters who lack government-issued photo IDs as well as Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and community leaders will discuss the potential impacts of legislation currently being pushed through the Missouri General Assembly. The proposed legislation would make Missouri one of the toughest states in the country for eligible citizens who want to vote by requiring voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls. If passed, these changes could be in place by the November general election and could put the voting rights at risk for up to 240,000 registered Missouri voters.

"This may sound like a good idea at first," stated Sister Sandy Schwartz of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary regarding voter ID requirements, "but once you stop to think about who would really be affected, this is going to keep a lot of our loved ones from being able to vote." Yesterday in Indiana twelve nuns in their 80s and 90s were turned away from the polls because they lacked the needed IDs to vote. Sister Schwartz and others are concerned about the difficulties the policy change would create for elderly Missouri nuns, as well as other senior citizens, the poor, and minorities.

Awesome.

(h/t)

Editor's Note: The issue before the Missouri Legislature actually has two moving parts: a new photo ID requirement AND a proof of citizenship requirement for new voters. That second piece Ã¢â‚¬â€œ requiring that voters produce papers documenting their citizenship is nothing to sneeze at. In Arizona, where such a law has been in place since 2004, approximately 17 percent or some 30,000 voter registration forms have been rejected because of the failure to produce citizenship documents. And itÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s not just minorities who are affected. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School reported in November 2006 that slightly more than 50 percent of all married women lack birth certificates with their married names on it. Of course, poor people and the elderly also are disproportionately affected.

WeÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ll be watching Missouri next week, when the state Senate is slated to pick up the voter ID bill as it ends its legislative session. --Mike

The ANWR Myth

Reuters has a nice rundown of why George Bush's claim that gas prices are a result of Democrats' refusal to allow oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge is just so much horsepuckey:

President George W. Bush during his first year in office made giving energy companies access to the estimated 10 billion barrels of crude in the refuge the centerpiece of his national energy policy that sprouted from Vice President Dick Cheney's controversial and secretive energy task force.

With gasoline prices soaring to records in recent weeks, Bush has stepped up his argument that ANWR oil is a solution.

"We should have been exploring for oil and gas in ANWR," he said last week when asked about record pump costs. "But, no, we made the decision and our Congress kept preventing us from opening up new areas to explore in environmentally friendly ways and now we're becoming, as a result, more and more dependent on foreign sources of oil."

Congress has tried several times in Bush's two terms to pass legislation to finally open the refuge to energy exploration, but always fell a few votes short due in part to concern over what drilling would do to ANWR's wildlife.

"They've repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in ANWR," Bush complained to reporters on Tuesday at a Rose Garden press conference. He said oil supplies from the refuge "would likely mean lower gas prices."

The Energy Information Administration, which is the Energy Department's independent analytical arm, estimated that if Congress had cleared Bush's ANWR drilling plan the oil would have been available to refiners in 2011, but only at a small volume of 40,000 barrels a day -- a drop in the bucket compared with the 20.6 million barrels the U.S. consumes daily.

At peak production, ANWR could have potentially added 780,000 barrels a day to U.S. crude oil output by 2020, according to the EIA.

The extra supplies would have cut dependence on foreign oil, but only slightly. With ANWR crude, imports would have met 60 percent of U.S. oil demand in 2020, down from 62 percent without the refuge's supplies.

The Media Refuses To Keep Government Honest

This morning I turned on the TV to Morning Joe and was immediately struck by how the show has turned from relentless Clinton-bashing to hammering what they call Barack Obama's 10-point drop in a national poll since last Wednesday's debate.

It's no secret that the media do what they can to manipulate political thought in this country. Whether it's talking heads referring to "The Democrat Party" or newsreaders on WINS referring to "The Democrat primary tomorrow in Pennsylvania", or Tim Russert perpetuating the "Barack Obama didn't put his hand over his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance" meme when the event portrayed in That Infamous Photograph was the playing of the National Anthem, at which such a gesture is not required; or the unabashedly positive coverage given to John McCain, it's not voters who decide our elections, it's the media.

Television in particular has been living off the legacy of Edward R. Murrow for the last fifty years, even though that legacy has now been tarnished beyond redemption by talking heads who are an integral part of Beltway society and care more about access and schmoozing than actually providing information to the American people. But newspapers have hardly been immune.