I just got a call from Newt Gingrich's organization.  I was told to listen to a message from "speaker Gingrich" (do you get to keep that title for ever, like president?) and then hold the line to talk to his assistant.  The recorded message was basic and unsurprising: the stimulus hasn't worked; Obama is giving power to bureaucrats, instead of businesses/people; Newt Gingrich was responsible for the economic boom under Clinton.

 

After the message was over, his "assistant" got back on the phone and asked whether I agreed that taxing and spending was not the solution.

 

I said:

 

"I think the Republicans have not offered any solutions, and even if they had, their style of politics has been so inflammatory, disingenuous, and disgusting that no-one was going to listen to their ideas because they've made it clear that they care less about America than about scoring points and winning elections."

 

She politely responded, "Well you need to go to our website, [blalbla.com], where you will see that he does list 12 solutions..."

 

I said, "Well, you know, if Newt Gingrich hadn't gone on TV and implied that Obama has a death panel designed to kill old people I might have cared about his ideas, but as it is, he has no credibility with me."

 

"Oh My!" she said, sounding genuinely suprised, and hung up. 

 

Ahh.

 

I know that message won't get back to him, but I hope at least that they are getting plenty of feedback along those lines.

I had been getting calls from the ACLJ every day for weeks.  Mostly, I just saw it logged on my caller ID history because I'm not usually home during the normal telemarket call hours.  But a few times, I was home and answered without looking at the caller ID.  Every time I answered, a (live) woman on the other end said, "Please take a moment to listen to this brief message from X*, about a literally life and death issue..."  Every time, I said something like "I can't talk right now," and they said they'd call back later. 

 

I confess didn't actually know who the ACLJ was.  Of course, the initials looked like the ACLU--of which I am a card-carrying member--and the name, "the American Center for Law & Justice" sounded like a liberal organization, possibly an innocence project, so I didn't want to be too rude (although I never actually listen to liberal telemarketers either--except during this last election).  Finally out of curiosity, I looked them up. Turns out, according to Wikipedia:

The American Center for Law & Justice was founded in 1990 by evangelical Pat Robertson as a nonprofit public interest law firm. It was conceived as a counterweight to the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization which Robertson maintains is "hostile to traditional American values," though the two groups have worked together on some cases[1]. Its initials were chosen to resemble those of the ACLU as much as possible.

The next time they called I said, "I'm sorry.  I dislike Pat Robertson.  I think he is dishonest and a bigot, and I am not interested in hearing any message from his organization."  There was silence at the other end of the line and then a "click" as she hung up.  Needless to say, they haven't called again.

Now, seeing the teabaggers sandbagging my congressman (Lloyd Doggett) I wish I had given her a chance to say her peace. 

I'm wondering if anyone else got a call from them, particularly in Austin, and what the calls were about.  The "literally life and death" line makes me think they were along the lines of "Obama wants to kill old people."  Anyone?

 

*I can't remember who X was, but I she said he was a former Solicitor General of the United States or something similar. 

 

I just listened to Josh Marshall on CSPAN and he got a call from a person who asked him whether he knew about Alex Jones and Infowars.com and then went into a semi-coherenet conspiracy rant about the media.  Josh said he was not familiar with Alex Jones.  I was a little surprised, but I guess that's because I'm from Austin and he is sort of an all-intrusive figure here.  It made me curious to find out how well known he is outside of Austin.

Alex Jones is an Austin cable TV/radio/internet personality and I've always believed he was the driving force behind Ron Paul's popularity among young and impressionable types, Paul being the most frequent guest on Jones' radio show.  I never listen to him, so I'm not an expert on the guy, but he deals entirely in conspiracy theories.  He got his start in the Clinton era, talking about the jack-booted government thugs of the ATF, but unlike Rush and others, he stayed anti-government during the Bush era, just transfering his venom to the Bush administration.   He is a 9-11 "Truther," who believes September 11 was an inside job.  In fact, I would say he is one of the main Truther's out there, having directed and produced several of the 9-11 conspiracy movies.

His main claim to fame is that he and someone from his staff snuck into the Bohemian Grove and videotaped the mock human sacrifice ritual that occurs in the opening ceremony.  That and the Skull and Bones thing helped fuel his belief that Democrats and Republicans are both conspiring to submit the united states to the will of the UN (or something like that). His paranoid rants focus on "One World Government" conspiracies, CIA mind control, Sept 11, the second ammendment under threat, etc.  But he also frequently showed up at  Austin City Council meetings to complain about some local sign of the apocalypse.  Fellow Austinite Richard Linklater cast Jones to play himself in "Scanner Darkly" and in "Slacker," in both cases spewing his conspiracies into a megaphone (in "Scanner Darkly" a black van pulls up next to Jones ranting on the street corner; some special ops types jump out; and they drag him, struggling, into the van before peeling away).

Like I said, I never listen to him, but back when I had cable, I used to stop and watch briefly, fascinated, whenever I happened to flip to his show.  I know a statistically aberrant number of bipolar people, but I have never seen someone so consistently hypomanic, every time I saw him, always just on the edge of fullblown mania. He obviously a bright guy, who does do real research, gathers real information which is often scary just on its face, and interprets it in the most paranoid fashion possible, taking it far beyond credibility. Unlike Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and even Ron Paul, I think Alex Jones really believes his own theories.

Anyway, I guess I thought Jones was more famous than he is, or maybe Josh Marshall just has better things to do than learn about 9-11 truthers, but I just wanted to take an informal poll and see who out in TPM-land had heard of him.

Last night I was up late reading the depositions in the wacky discrimination lawsuit against the Democratic Mayor of Kansas City, Mo, Mark Funkhouser, and his wife, Gloria Squitiro (the suit against the wife has apparently been settled).

The mayor was already in hot water with minority advocates for appointing a member of the Minuteman militia to city Parks Board, but the real problem in the office was apparently his wife. It seems the mayor's wife was constantly at the Mayor's office working as an unofficial "volunteer executive assistant."  But some (all) employees felt that Squitiro was an unwelcome and unhelpful presence and one filed a discrimination suit.  The allegations? 

• Squitiro "at least twice" called Ruth Bates, an African American female employee "Mammy;" and referred to her as "my token black." (Bates is the one filing the suit)
• Squitiro regularly called the other African American female employee, whose first name was Burnetta, "Bernie Mac."

More after the jump!

Read more »

I'm surprised that I couldn't find mention at TPM of Friday's WSJ editorial, by Karl Rove, praising Obama's economic team.  Unlike some of Rove's pre-election commentary, this is not just a few begrudging positive sentences about Obama amid a stream of fearmongering inuendo.  At first glance, in fact, the editorial, titled "Thanksgiving Cheer From Obama: He's assembled a first-rate economic team." seems to be a gushing endorsement of Obama's executive decisions and performance so far:

Mr. Obama's announcement of his economic team on Monday provided surprisingly positive clarity...

The National Economic Council director-designee, Larry Summers, is another solid pick...

Mr. Obama also named a respected monetary expert -- Christina Romer -- to head up his Council of Economic Advisors. On Tuesday he selected a first-rate thinker, Peter Orszag, to be director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget...

..with only mildly-worded criticisms:

The only troubling personnel note was Melody Barnes...

I imagine, however, that most people at TPM, knowing who wrote it, will see through to the nefarious intent behind the editorial.  It is only slightly more subtle than Rush Limbaugh's faux concern about the sexism displayed towards Hillary during the primary and to me it seems that Rove is among many rightwing mischief-makers making similar mischief since the election:  publically praising Obama and describing his cabinet picks as arch-conservatives to drive a wedge between Obama and the Left.  Along those same lines, the WSJ had another editorial last week "praising" Obama's decision to keep Gates as SecDef, calling it "an implicit endorsement of President Bush's 'surge' in Iraq" and claiming that Gates and Gen Jones "help Mr. Obama check the worst reflexes of his anti-antiterror base."  Strangely, they did not mention Gates' behind-the-scenes efforts to close Guantanamo. 

I do think that many of the conservatives and Republicans who endorsed Obama were sincere; while others may have just been jumping on the winning bandwagon; but am I alone in thinking that this fake praise is the day's tactic in the Rove/Rush GOP recovery plan?

 

Where We Go From Here

Chances are if you donated money, volunteered, or even signed up on the Obama website you got the "Where we go from here" email from David Plouffe Tuesday with a link to a survey about your volunteer experience and whether you would be willing to continue to "volunteer in your community as part of an Obama organization."

The survey listed 4 possible goals for the volunteer organization (passing legislation, elections, training community organizers, and working local issues) and asked you to rank them by importance.  It provided a long list of possible issues that such an organization might focus on and asked you to check those you cared about.

It later asked the freeform question:

OPTIONAL: How would you like to see this organization move forward in the months and years ahead? And how would you like to be engaged as a volunteer and organizer? It has been clear that Obama has intended to call for a national spirit of service as president and it seemed obvious that they wouldn't just throw away the organization and momentum they had built once the election was over.  What remains unclear is how and into what they are going to transform their network of contacts and field organization for the sitting president. E.J. Dionne Jr. writes about the internal deliberations and the volunteer survey in the Washington Post today, questioning whether Obama's Network will merge with the Democratic party or stand as an independent but Dem-friendly activist group, and whether their activities will be strictly political or more civic minded.  And Marc Ambinder writes in the Atlantic that the Obama camp is holding conference calls with their field organizers about how they want to move the organization forward. I imagine there are a lot of opinions about this at TPM so I wanted to ask, what do y'all think?  What would you like to see happen with the Obama Network and in what kind of an organization would YOU be willing to play a part?

Most of the revelations about the Bush Administration's firing of U.S Attorneys have highlighted three basic motivations that may have been behind the firings:

1. To slow down or interfere with prosecutions of Republicans (Carol Lam,Paul Charlton )
2. To pursue bogus prosecutions of Democrats (Iglesias, John McKay)
3. To install Bush/Rove cronies ( Bradley Schlozman, Timothy Griffin)

But there is another commonality that was noted repeatedly, at least on this site--when TPMM and their readers first poured over those DOJ document dumps, looking for clues.  Several people noticed that almost all the fired USA's were on the Native American Issues Subcommittee(NAIS).  Minnesota USA, Thomas Heffelfinger even said it was the only reason he could think of why he might have been targeted: 

"The only thing I can think of is my advocacy on behalf of Native American issues," Heffelfinger said.  

This connection was mentioned and puzzled over here , but I never saw any real argument made why the Bush administration would want to be rid of them for that.  The most plausible I read was that they might be afraid of other GOP connections to Abramoff that the FBI might not yet know about.

However, there have been two recent investigative reports about the incredible crime wave that is taking place on Indian Reservations,  which have made me think of another possible motive.  In July 2007 and again in July 2008, NPR ran reports about the fact that it is estimated that 1 in 3 women on reservations will be raped in their lifetimes, in part, because predators know that rape and other violent crimes often go uninvestigated and unpunished in Indian Country.  The reason for that is that the Major Crimes Act of 1885 of  forbids tribal courts from trying any crime more serious than a misdemeanor.  All felonies fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice to prosecute and they lack the resources and the will to handle the workload.

Still no motivation for the Bush Administration to fire those attorneys unless they just didn't want them asking for more resources.

But I just saw a PBS Expose based on a Denver Post investigative piece about crime on the reservation called Lawless Lands.  And there was one piece of information that really caught my eye. 

Congress has doubled the amount of money allocated to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for tribal police. But that increase - to $200 million this year - has been largely spent on patrol officers and chasing misdemeanor crimes. Federal investigators and prosecutors have also received sizable boosts in their budgets for work in Indian Country, but those increases have failed to produce a perceptible rise in the number of investigations or prosecutions from reservations. [emphases mine]

This is my rampant speculation, based on nothing more than the evidence above, but what if the Bush administration had taken some of the budget Congress had designated for Indian law Enforcement and had moved it to something Congress had specifically de-funded like, say, Total Information Awareness, a la Iran-Contra?

What do y'all think?  Is that totally farfetched?

This is for HusseinTenaX, LauraJordan and other fellow Texas Dems out there.  On Newshour, as they called Texas for John McCain, Jim Leher pointed out that the Obama campaign had not made a serious effort for Texas in the general election (compared to their efforts in other red states).  Judy Woodruff agreed with that but said the Obama campaign told her that their dream is to target Texas in 2012 for Obama's re-election.

The latest poll NYT/CBS poll has Obama 14 points ahead of McCain nationally and the independents and white men who have recently shifted to Obama.

Voters who said their opinions of Mr. Obama had changed recently were twice as likely to say they had grown more favorable as to say they had worsened. And voters who said that their views of Mr. McCain had changed were three times more likely to say that they had worsened than to say they had improved.

The top reasons cited by those who said they thought less of Mr. McCain were his recent attacks and his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate.

McCain and his surrogates have been practically promising that he will bring up Ayers at the debate.  He upped his own stakes by misquoting Obama as saying McCain didn't have the guts to say it to his face.    He must be particularly bummed about this:

After several weeks in which the McCain campaign sought to tie Mr. Obama to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground terrorism group, 64 percent of voters said that they had either read or heard something about the subject. But a majority said they were not bothered by Mr. Obama's background or past associations. Several people said in follow-up interviews that they felt that Mr. McCain's attacks on Mr. Obama were too rooted in the past, or too unconnected to the nation's major problems.

So, to recap: 

• McCain's negatives are up 3 to 1 against his positives; Obama's positives are up  2 to 1 against his negatives since McCain started talking about Ayers and voters cite that as a major reason.
• 64% have already heard about Ayers and don't care.
• If McCain does bring it up to Obama's face Obama will have a chance to defend himself, to turn it on McCain by citing his own unsavory bedfellows, and to scold McCain for trying to distract voters from important issues.
• If  he doesn't bring it up, he's admitting he doesn't have the guts to say it to Obama's face.

 

I think someone should make an ad using this interview from Dec 2007, in which McCain admits he isn't smart enough to solve the subprime crisis; didn't see it coming; and doesn't even understand some of the terms involved.  Somebody should...so I have decided to try my hand. 

This is my first attempt at video editing, and I'm sure it could be punchier, and should probably be intermingled with what he's saying today--so your suggestions for improvement are requested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbtVOsjdeQA

(One of the best parts from that interview is McCain's reaction to the interviewer bringing up the S&L crisis)

I read a comment somewhere about how it didn't exactly instill confidence to hear McCain speak woodenly about "credit default swaps" when he sounded like it was the first time he'd heard the term. The economic crisis is the perfect time to put the nail in the coffin of the anti-intellectual propaganda of the right. I think most Americans are a little baffled by the nuances of the economy, but they're trying to understand it. And they probably are realizing that just bringing some random beauty queen off the slopes of Alaska to run the country has its risks. Rather than talk in broad generalities, Obama should take the time in each speech to explain the sources of the economic crisis in simple but accurate terms. He should demonstrate, as only he can, why we might want to put someone smart in the Whitehouse. Obama's surrogates should remind people that Obama is brilliant--bring out all the economists from UofC who can talk about how deep and broad his understanding is--and even remind people that he did work for a short time writing investment strategy advice to fortune 500 companies (even if it goes against his noble community organizer image). I also think he should mock McCain for his goofy faux-populism. "McCain says he's going to end greed on Wall Street. Well, I can't say that I'm going to change human nature, but I am going close the CMFA loophole, which Phil Gramm snuck into the 2000 appropriations bill, which encourages lenders to make risky loans and then compound that risk by betting on it, and this loophole, which Phil Gramm rammed through congress in 1999, which ended the protections put in after the depression and left sectors of the banking industry unregulated, and I'm going to put people in the regulatory agencies who actually believe in the mission of that agency...etc." And he should stop calling Gramm one of McCain's advisors--he should say Gramm wrote McCain's economic policy.

This is a fantastic new line from Obama, in my opinion.  I hope everyone of his surrogates starts using it as the shorthand for McCain's lies. 

Here's the story at Huffington (linked to Dkos):

"if you think those lobbyists are working day and night for John McCain just to put themselves out of business, well then I've got a bridge to sell you up in Alaska."

On April 3, 2008, Michael Greenberger explained on Fresh Air (starting at about 4:19) how a little noticed or understood bill called the Commodity Futures Moderinization Act, introduced by Phil Gramm and ushered through congress as it was recessing for Christmas in Dec 2000, allowed banks to place bets on their own mortgages and credit lines and then list the bets themselves as assets. 

Instead of these bets being placed through a regular hedge fund, however, the law allowed them to use "offbook" entities called structured investment vehicles.  So, when the banks started losing money not only from their mortgage investments, but from the bets they had made on them, they could postpone posting the full extent of their losses on their accounting sheets.  Greenberger thinks that when these losses do finally start appearing on the books it will cause a cascading financial crisis bigger than the mortgage crisis itself.

Last week when the Feds took over Freddie and Fannie, they cited vague anomolies in their accounting practices as the trigger that caused the takeover.  I immediately thought of this loophole provided by Phil Gramm's bill.

I'm hoping that someone can dig into this and see whether these offbook transactions, made possible by Phil Gramm, were the accounting practices that alarmed the Feds and triggered the Freddie/Fannie takeover.  Anyone want to call up Michael Greenberger and ask?  He's a law professor at University of Maryland School of Law.

(This post inspired by the discussion on this thread)

Dan Eggen at the Washington Post elaborates on the trend that Josh has been flagging for a while now:  Bush taking up Obama's foreign policy positions that McCain had criticized.

He cites: diplomatic talks with North Korea; timeline for withdrawal from Iraq; moving troops to Afganistan; and formally approving cross-border raids into Pakistan without that country's explicit permission.  He also mentions that the Bush administration just gave 1 billion in aid to Georgia, which Biden had proposed.

But the killer line is from Obama supporter Randy Beers: 

"The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don't think is the way he conceived of his campaign."

If done right this could be a great commercial:

Obama said we needed to do X. McCain said no way, but Obama was right and now we're doing X and Y has happened....Obama's ideas are already moving our nation forwards.   McCain  would move us backwards.

I blogged about this earlier in a semi-joking way, but the more I think about it the more serious I am. 

Obama's campaign has always been about change from the bottom up; about the power of the American people when they work together in the face of adversity; about the shared responsibility of the American people for the fate of our country. 

And yet, here on this site, and on liberal blogs everywhere, I see constant complaining : When is Obama gonna do X?When is Obama gonna say Y?  I see brilliant ideas for lines of attack, but I also see passive defeatism and despair (and I feel it myself).

Obama's campaign is constrained in the ways that it can attack.  It  is a political reality that a black male politician, trying to win over white voters cannot get too angry or aggressive--something the GOP is fully prepared to exploit--using their white woman as a human shield.  It would also tarnish his "brand". The big 527's are slow to get off the ground, and ads with the name Moveon or Planned Parenthood associated with them may do more harm than good.

So I have a question for the blogosphere: How can small groups of individuals produce and finance their own 527-type advertising in swing districts ?  I'm not talking about primetime television ads in a metropolitan market.  I'm about talking radio, newspaper, classifieds, and paid web ads. And yes, maybe in some cases, harnessing the best of youtube creativity and putting it on the airwaves.  What are the legal requirements?  What are the districts to focus on?  How do you coordinate, without coordinating through the Obama campaign?

Is anyone with me?  Or are we going to wait helplessly for Obama to save us from above and then criticize him when we discover he really meant it when he said, "This election is not about me.  It's about you."