Archives for March 2009

While Carl is emailing Republican congress-critters to ask them if they really consider Rush Limbaugh to be the de facto leader of their party, it is amusing to look back on our homegrown R’s own sad history of right-wing talk sycophancy.  Indeed, after seizing control of the Washington State House during the Gingrich-inspired red tide of 1994, one of the first things the new Republican majority did was appease their god by sponsoring House Resolution 4684 in his honor:

WHEREAS, Rush Limbaugh has exercised dignity, decency, integrity, and wisdom in exposing the foibles of political correctness and other peculiar doctrines held dear by radical fringe wacko elitist kook nutcakes; and

WHEREAS, Rush Limbaugh has spent his life serving humanity as “the epitome of morality and virtue” while on the “cutting edge of societal evolution” performing “libosuction” on “young skulls full of mush” and firing lethal shots with devastating aim at the whole spectrum of liberal ideologies;

[…] NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives of the state of Washington honor Rush Limbaugh for the dedicated service that characterizes his life’s work, for the outstanding example of diligence, integrity, and excellence he has set for others, and for the hope that his future endeavors will bring him even greater levels of satisfaction and success…

Yup… after being swept to power by an angry electorate, this was what 30 Republican co-sponsors determined to be one of their top legislative priorities.  The subsequent collapse of the GOP over the next decade or so starts to make sense in hindsight.

Read the whole resolution.  It’s just as amusing as the excerpt.

Ted Van Dyk, who self-identifies as a life long Democrat, writing at Crosscut, has some concerns about the Obama administration. Which is fine, although I think it’s worth addressing.

As a lifelong Democrat, I am concerned that President Obama could come out of his first 100 days decidedly weaker than when they began. His November victory was not as strong as anticipated, given the unpopularity of the outgoing Bush administration, a weakening economy, and an often inept McCain-Palin Republican ticket. Yet Obama has proceeded as if he were a landslide winner, like Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and Reagan in 1980, and has pushed forward a costly and ambitious domestic agenda even though we remain in a severe economic downturn.

Obama’s audacity — I consider it politically dangerous overreach — has energized Republicans and, in particular, conservatives as they would not have been had Obama followed the bipartisan, consensus path he promised on taking office. The politically polarizing economic-stimulus package and his proposed federal budget have done it.

Well, Obama tried to reach out to the Limbaugh Party and was rewarded with zero votes in the House. Then three “moderates” in the Senate hijacked the entire process on behalf of Susan Collins. So that explains that. It’s not the Obama administration that is obstructing things, so I’m not quite sure what Van Dyk means.

You can’t be bi-partisan and work with a batshit insane party that doesn’t understand basic economics, and more to the point, defines itself almost solely on cultural and racial resentment. They have a great deal of fun hating the dirty fucking hippies, but that’s not much of a policy position. There’s no “there” there. It’s just tribalism, with all its venomous, spittle-spewing invective coursing through the diseased veins of AM radio. If they’re not hating the dirty hippies, it’s the gays, or the immigrants, or the ACORN (black people mainly, in their view,) or left-handed people who wear green socks.

Without hate there is no conservative movement. And just like FDR did, we should welcome their hate, because it means we are doing something right.

Conservatives today are not serious people, because if they were serious they would put forth policy proposals that match the challenges ahead and they would not wish for the failure of the president. “Bi-partisanship” has ceased to be a word with any concrete meaning in the real world. Now, knowing Obama the door is still open, but Republicans will have to choose to walk through that door, meaning they will have to possess the balls to stand up to the Joe McCarthy of our time. Not bloody likely in my estimation.

As for recovery, spending and the budget, the very strange thing is that a lot of people don’t seem to understand that the immediate threat is of intense deflation and world-wide collapse of the economic structure. To paraphrase the hell out of John Maynard Keynes, you could go around burying millions of bottles of money and it would help prevent Depression, because then the private sector would busily engage in massive efforts to dig up the bottles. Of course, if instead you wanted to do something that would also provide a longer term benefit, like building bridges or wind farms, that would be good too.

The biggest short term concern is not the amount of spending that we must engage in, but the failure to address the “too big to fail banks” and by extension, their “too big to fail” insurance company, AIG. Talk about wasting money. I’m always amazed how Americans will get their noses all bent out of shape regarding urban legends about “welfare queens in Cadillacs” but will be nonplussed at incredible waste and fraud in the corporate world. The people complaining about the stimulus package and the budget, which at least contain many measures that will provide real relief to regular Americans, do not generally express much concern about the way we’ve all been robbed by Wall Street.

The people who brought us this calamity are yet to be held accountable in a meaningful way, and are reaping high salaries and other rewards still, not to mention frequent contributions to their firms by taxpayers that will doubtless total in the hundreds of billions of dollars. You don’t really hear any talk of a “tea party” because of that, now, do you? The conservative-Republican opposition is the same old suspects spouting the same old bullshit, bitching that the wealthiest 2% of Americans might have to pay the same tax rate they did a decade ago. Poor babies.

The deficit hawks have a long-term point. But we’re sure in the hell not going to reduce the deficit or the debt if the global economy falls into Depression, and for now the political battle is essentially an extension of the last eight years: the malignancy of movement conservatism has to be defeated if we are to prosper.

As a follow up to Jon’s Deep Thought yesterday and post today, I’ve emailed the 3 Republican congresspeople what they think of Rush Limbaugh. Specifically:

Dear XX

I’m a blogger at HASeattle, and we were wondering what your thoughts were on Rush Limbaugh. Would you call him a leader of the Republican party?

Love,

Carl Ballard

If they want to stand up to the heroin addict who runs their party, I’ll post a response. I sent it to the addresses listed on the campaign websites, so I don’t know how staffed up they are at this point and they have no reason to respond, so we’ll see.

…Afternoon update, the email I sent Reichert’s campaign bounced back. Does anybody have a good email address for his campaign? I don’t want this to go to the Congressional staff. No word from the Eastern Washington Reps.

The de-facto leader of the GOP calls a CNN reporter “butt boy.”

You kind of wonder at what point legacy journalists, um, stop it with the pretending about just reporting what each side said. I mean, how exactly do you report, “Republicans responded that I am a ‘butt boy?'”

Is there even ONE Washington state Republican elected official with the guts to stand up to the psychopath Rush Limbaugh? Frankly I doubt it. The silence speaks volumes. They’re all too damn scared to stand up to this pathetic bully. And you wonder how Joe McCarthy got away with it for so long.

The news of Mexico’s drug war violence is finally starting to get the attention it deserves – primarily because it’s starting to affect American (and even Canadian) cities. Much of the response has even been positive, with a number of insightful editorials, and some initial attempts by politicians in border states to begin discussing the connection between drug prohibition and the violence. But not everyone gets it just yet.

At a website called investors.com comes the most confused editorial I’ve seen on the Mexican violence so far this year.

Now that Phoenix has become a kidnap capital, it’s official: Mexico’s drug war is spilling over into the U.S. The administration vows a strong response, but so far seems to be putting special interests first.

Trouble from Mexico is cropping up in the usual place: the border, a nexus of illegal immigration, human smuggling and drug trafficking, all of it interlinked. It’s all about illegal routes into the states. As they grow scarcer, traffickers’ war on the Mexican state intensifies.

The intensification of this war has had nothing to do with border routes. The intensification was a result of a massive effort by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to go after the cartel leaders. The resulting violence was an entirely predictable response to Calderon’s push, based upon the numerous times in the past that Mexico has tried to eliminate the cartel and seen violence skyrocket. The smuggling routes aren’t becoming scarcer, they’re being fought over.

The U.S. seems to recognize the gravity of the problem — or is at least paying it lip service. A recent Pentagon report cited a risk of a sudden collapse in Mexico if cartels win. A Homeland Security report vows to ready a response if Mexico’s war spreads here. Last Friday, the State Department’s global counternarcotics report called the cartels “a significant threat.”

But for a threat this grave, the Obama administration places it below other priorities. Yes, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano calls the violence “a top priority.” But how does that jibe with her response to the Texas governor’s request for more border troops? “We do not want to militarize the border,” she said.

The Obama Administration has been far from perfect in how they’ve discussed what’s happening in Mexico, but this is a foolish criticism. Considering that Mexico doesn’t allow American military personnel on Mexican soil, there’s not much that an increased military presence on the border would do, other than to lead to actual warfare in cities like El Paso.

This editorial is still premised on the archaic belief that the only way to defeat cartels is by killing off the “bad guys.” We know now that this doesn’t work. The only way to defeat the cartels is to cut off their profits. Collectively, the Mexican cartels earn roughly $1 billion per week. Once you kill a “bad guy”, there will be a dozen people fighting each other to be the next “bad guy” and get a piece of that pie.

Human trafficking is a real and serious problem, but it’s one that we’ll never be successful at fighting as long as we continue to maintain a drug policy that helps these criminal organizations remain untouchable.

The editorial goes on to criticize Obama’s attempts at resurrecting gun control legislation, criticisms that I generally agree with, but then it goes off the deep end:

Other Obama officials also send mixed messages. The new drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, stresses “harm reduction” instead of tough action. Sounds humane, but it essentially expands cartel market bases by enabling users and expanding the buyer base for the cartels.

“Harm reduction” distributes new needles, legalizes medical marijuana and puts pot at the bottom of enforcement priorities. Legalization lobbies are happy. But cartels have one more reason to smuggle.

What? And this website gives investment advice?

First of all, if medical marijuana were fully legal, the cartels would easily be pushed out of the market by legal American growers. If marijuana were fully legalized for recreational use, you could massively reduce the amount of money being used to wage this war against Calderon’s government. And you could free up the resources to shut down human trafficking networks, which don’t have the same enormous level of demand that drugs do.

Second, this editorial is assuming that harm reduction techniques for dealing with hard drug addiction increases demand. That hasn’t been true anywhere in the world where it’s been tried. Not in Switzerland. Not in Australia. Not in Canada. Not in Holland. The idea that needle exchanges give cartels “one more reason to smuggle” is an idea so outdated that it would have been laughable a decade ago.

The choice of Gil Kerlikowski to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy has generally been positive among drug law reformers, but he will certainly find that various members of the media and the political elite will see no distinction between his moderate support of a public health approach to drug problems and the views of more outspoken legalization advocates. We’ve long been used to Drug Czars who never let anyone take a more authoritarian posture than them. Now that the country at our southern border is in real danger of succumbing to the downstream effects of that legacy, Kerlikowske should find it easier to advocate for a new direction.

The General reviews Joe the Plumber’s new book.

Scott Morgan writes about the dangers of getting hooked on anti-drug propaganda.

Our nation’s dumbest citizens are “threatening” to remove themselves from the nation’s workforce. More here. And some tangential silliness here.

Finally, it’s a sad day as WhackyNation is no more.

Please join us tonight for an evening of politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. We start at 8:00 pm at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Some folks will show up earlier for dinner.

Tonight’s special topic is cats in the news. Cats…you can’t live with ’em, and you can’t live without ’em. And then there’s this.

Of course we’ll take a little time to write letters of apology to Rush.

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for some 330 chapters of Drinking Liberally spread across the earth. Find one in a neighborhood near you.

Seattle Times editorial columnist Kate Riley once accused Darcy Burner of being “inauthentic” when in fact, the opposite is true: Darcy is perhaps too authentic, at least to be a successful politician, occasionally saying things she’d gain absolutely no advantage in saying, just because, you know, she believed them to be true.  It’s one of the traits that makes Darcy… Darcy.

So while it was sad to see her lose the November election, it is strangely good to see she hasn’t “learned her lesson,” as evidenced by this video of Darcy over the weekend, speaking out on behalf of the Employee Free Choice Act, and challenging recently appointed US Sen. Mike Bennett to do the same.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPwnZu7_u4I[/youtube]

Of course, this is the kind of spur-of-the-moment, grassroots video that drove her political consultants batty, and prompted media establishment types like Riley to brand Darcy as some kind of wacky, nutroots lefty.  Perhaps it’s not advisable to always speak her mind, if she has any aspirations of running for office again.  Professional politicians just don’t make videos like this.

But then, Darcy has never been a professional politican.

UPDATE:
To sign the petition mentioned in the video, click here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOM0AMUqviY[/youtube]

Norm Coleman attorney James Langdon, in a letter to judges hearing the Minnesota election contest:

Some courts have held that when the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin between the candidates — and it cannot be determined for which candidate those illegal votes were cast — the most appropriate remedy is to set aside the election. In that regard, the Court may wish to review the following cases addressing situations in which the number of illegal votes is large and the margin of victory is small…

So, first Coleman’s attorney’s argue for proportionate reduction, and now they argue that if the number of illegal votes exceeds the margin of victory, the entire election has to be set aside and redone.  Sounds familiar, no?

There are in fact rare grounds for setting aside the results of an election, but as we learned in WA in 2004, closeness sure as hell ain’t one of them.  Of course, what happened here holds no legal precedence for MN, but dollars to donuts the judges there will be looking at Judge Bridge’s decision before writing their own.

I wonder what Washington state Republican elected officials think about Rush Limbaugh?

Don’t miss Kos’s front pager on the hilarious spectacle of Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh engaging each other for control of the GOP. As Markos says about Steele:

When you have to proclaim that “I’m the leader of the Republican Party”, then you are not.

Limbaugh is apparently going to respond to Steele on the radio, which should be hilarious. While most of the news these days ranges from terrible to awful, the Republican Party base genuflecting to Rush Limbaugh is awesomely awesome.

Limbaugh may be the king of AM conservative radio, but that’s not exactly a winning coalition. In fact, it’s not even a coalition, it’s just the tattered remnants of the “angry white male” devotees from twenty years ago. The country has moved on, and normal people want to confront the economic crisis in a meaningful way.

My crystal ball is at the Teletype office having new, lower stock ticker numbers installed, but could this be the true beginning of the end for the Republicans? Hard to see how any “moderates,” meaning in the case of the GOP anyone who isn’t certifiable, can survive in the Limbaugh Party.

UPDATE–Kos points to this post at The Plum Line, where Greg Sargent has some of Limbaugh’s response. Oh, and make sure you’re not drinking hot coffee. Like with this bit:

I’m not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don’t want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I’m in charge of the Republican Party in a sad-sack state that it’s in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it’s in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife…

I usually don’t give much thought to the spam that makes it through my filter, and most of it is also boring and predictable (whoever knew there were so many dead people with unclaimed millions running around Africa and Asia?). But one that popped in today, sent with malicious intent and undoubtably toxic attachment by someone in the Eastern Hemisphere, is both pretty clever and unintentionally hilarious:

From: Delta Air Lines

Thanks for the purchase!

Booking number: 3LSMXK

You will find attached to this letter PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT of your electronic ticket.
It verifies that you paid the ticket in full and confirms your right for air travel and luggage transportation by the indicated flight Delta Air Lines.

On board you will be offered:
– beverages;
– food;
– daily press.
You are guaranteed top-quality services and attention on the part of our benevolent personnel.

We recommend you to print PASSENGER ITINERARY RECEIPT and take it alone to the airport. It will help you to pass control and registration procedures faster.

See you on board!
Best regards,

Delta Air Lines

Aside from the telltale misuses of American English (“daily press,” “control and registration procedures”), it’s pretty clear the author is not only not a Delta employee, but has never experienced domestic American air travel (and probably can’t even imagine it). I mean, really: Food? Top-quality services? Benevolent personnel?