Two Dems, Nelson and Tester, voted with Republicans and Holy Joe Lieberman to kill the President’s jobs bill. This was not a vote on the bill itself, but a vote on whether the Senate would debate the bill. It needed 60 votes and only got 50, all Dems.

Conventional wisdom says Rick Perry’s presidential campaign is over. I had thought he probably would self-destruct before the nomination was settled, but I didn’t think it would be this fast.

What’s funny is that a lot of rightie bloggers are noticing that Perry is stupid. Yet you could line up the rest of the Seven Clowns and be hard pressed to find a measurable IQ in any of them. Mittens stands out mostly because he is less stupid than the rest of them, but he’s not exactly a rocket scientist, either.

The flavor du jour in rightieland is Herman Cain, who has an elaborate scheme to overhaul federal taxes so that the rich and corporations don’t have to pay so much. Bruce Bartlett explains why Cain’s plan is very, very stupid.

Following up the last post:Keep in mind —

More than two-thirds of all Americans back higher taxes on the rich and even larger numbers think Medicare and Social Security benefits should be left alone, according to a Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted Oct. 6-9.

Even more than half of Republicans think the rich should be paying more taxes, this poll says.

So we have a jobs bill that should do a lot to pump the economy, and the CBO says it should pay for itself and even reduce the deficit, and it can be funded by a surtax to the rich that is popular with a large majority of voters.

And there is real concern that enough Senate Dems will refuse to vote for it that it will get less than 50 votes.

According to Chis Good at The Atlantic, the Dems likely to vote no are:

• Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who asked on Sept. 17, “If spending money would solve our problems and crisis in America, we wouldn’t have a problem right now because we sure did our share of spending money in the last few years. It’s just common sense to me. If some of the recommendations that are out there hadn’t worked in the past, why would we do them over again?”
• Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who said last week he would filibuster the bill. His office told The Atlantic today that Nelson has not yet decided how he will vote.
• Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who said last week he will not support the bill unless it’s changed to include more infrastructure projects.
• Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who has not spoken publicly in favor of the bill after criticizing its deficit offsets initially, despite Reid’s changes.

Manchin is a flat-out idiot who should be drummed out of the party. I think we’ve all had it up to here with Nelson, too. I don’t know what to make of Tester, but this kind of grandstanding isn’t helpful. Looks like Webb is a question mark.

Also, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) probably will miss the vote, although she supports the bill. Thanks loads.

Now, I have to say that four or five our of 53 Senate Dems is a small minority, and perhaps I shouldn’t tar the whole party, but one does wonder what some Dems are using in place of brains sometimes.

See also If moderate Dems vote No on jobs bill, they’re only hurting themselves.

Recently the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of President Obama’s jobs bill. The CBO says the bill really would stimulate the economy, create jobs, and reduce the deficit. It could be fully paid for by a relatively painless 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires.

In a sane world, Congress would be tripping all over itself in a rush to get the bill passed.

However, we expect no Republican would vote for it, because the GOP is now the party of pathological plutocracy, and Republicans would rather send their own grandmothers to the Soylent Green factory than ask the wealthy to cough up so much as a tarnished silver spoon for the good of their country.

In a semi-sane world, Democrats would be tripping all over themselves in a rush to paint Republicans as obstructionist. We can fix the economy if Republicans would get out of the way! So vote them out in 2012!

In a semi-sane world, there would be headlines about Republicans scrambling to save face. Instead, the Hill tells us that Democrats are scrambling to save face on the jobs bill.

Democratic leaders in the Senate are scrambling to avoid defections on President Obama’s jobs package, which appears headed for defeat on Tuesday.

A lack of Democratic unity on the president’s bill would be embarrassing for the White House, which has been scolding House Republicans for refusing to vote on the measure.

It would be embarrassing to congressional Democrats, too, although apparently some are too thick-headed to see it.

Democrats who will vote no or are leaning no include Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Jon Tester (Mont.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.), who all hail from red states and are up for reelection next year. …

…If there are substantial Democratic defections, “Republicans will be able to point out in the media that this plan hasn’t got enough support on either side of the aisle and argue it wasn’t thought through,” according to Ron Bonjean, a former communications director to Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

I say again, if Franklin Roosevelt had had Barack Obama’s Congress, FDR would be remembered today as an ineffectual one-term president.

I got a kick out of this.

… it will continue to be worth pointing out that everyone hated Columbus. The men who worked for him wanted his head on a pike; his peers loathed him, his sponsors lost their trust in him, and his political superiors eventually arrested him and his two idiot brothers for being incompetent brutes. And that’s not even considering his reputation among the locals.

Do read it all.

Just one more old lady gripe about the kids on my lawn, and then I’ll find something else to write about — please do read this post by Ian Welsh, which I think is spot on.

For Occupy to be successful, on its own terms, will require shutting down Wall Street and probably all of NYC. There must be so many people on the street that it is impossible to arrest them all or to get rid of them without resorting to a lot more than a whiff of grapeshot. The elites must be be faced with a decision tree “negotiate or lose a ton of money and be massively inconvenienced or shoot hundreds of thousands of people and build mass detention camps.” That will require two or three million people occupying New York City. …

… If you want politicians to take out Wall Street for you, it has to be worth their while. Either the Koch Brothers have to pay them to take out one part of the elite on behalf of another part of the elite, or they have to know that not only will they lose their positions if they don’t do it (remember, the Soviet Politburo had more turnover than the Senate does) but that they will never have a good job afterwards, that whatever monied interests they have served either will not be able to give them a good life afterwards, or they will be unable to enjoy that good life.

OWS has gotten remarkably sympathetic press so far, but I’m still not seeing an indication that they know how to make a movement. People say “go down there and see for yourself,” but folks, 99 percent of Americans are not going to be able to see the protests for themselves. What they know of OWS they’re going to know through mass media. You can wrinkle your nose at media all you want, but we’re still not at a place that a smart Twitter campaign can override what gets on the TeeVee when it comes to affecting public opinion.

Many commenters have said they smell fear on Wall Street. I think Krugman is right –

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

The Powers That Be are going to crush OWS like a bug unless it gets too big to fail, and fast.

Stephen Zune:

Nevertheless, whether targeted at dictators or corporate greed, protests alone — however impressive in their numbers or disruptive in effect — do not make a movement. The revolutionary pretensions of a youthful counter-culture aside, Occupy Wall Street must become genuinely representative of the vast majority of Americans now struggling as a result of inordinate corporate power and political influence, reflecting also the legitimate aspirations of small business owners, small farmers, and working families of the poor and middle-class majority whose voices in the established political process are too often drowned out by powerful corporate interests.

The OWS declaration is a frustrating document. While I don’t specifically disagree with any of it, it reflects the biases and restricted views of the core group. It’s a self-indulgent mess that’s not going to mean squat to the small business owners, small farmers, and working families of the poor and middle-class majority.

Like it or not, if this thing is going to be too big too fail, it’s got to include people who are squeamish about gay rights, love the military, and support the death penalty. It’s got to include people who don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s going on overseas and who don’t see the big deal with confining calves to veal crates. That’s not what I want; that’s the reality of it.

No, the hard core baggers will not join, because they’d rather sell their children to David Koch than join anything that looks “liberal,” but there’s a vast pool of Americans who are not baggers, but neither are they all that liberal. And you can’t rightfully claim “we are the 99 percent” without the support of that pool.

On the other hand, it’s curious to me that reproductive rights aren’t in the soup anywhere. I’m not saying it should be, just that the document too obviously was mostly written by guys.

A couple of lines stand out –

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

True, but the Affordable Care Act addresses that. It’s supposed to stop in 2014. Keep up.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

The real issue is that the U.S. is the only industrialized country that doesn’t control the price of drugs, and the Medicare Part D program is basically a taxpayer-funded giveaway to Big Pharma.

Really, I want OWS to succeed. My fear is that if it fails, it’s going to be that much harder to start something else later.

Laugh or cry? A group of protesters — not all from Occupy DC — tried to push past security to enter the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. They wanted to protest the use of unmanned drones in overseas war.

Here’s the part to laugh at — one of the protesters was an infiltrator from the Right, the wingnut editor of the far-Right American Spectator. This loser claims he was the only one to make it into the museum, in fact. He simultaneously derides the danger and lawlessness of the group while calling them cowardly for stopping short of violence.

The loser also was much taken with the number of attractive 20-year-old girls among the protesters. Charles Johnson:

Just imagine the reaction from the right wing if a left wing protester infiltrated a Tea Party demonstration as an agent provocateur.

Of course, there are no “attractive 20-year old girls” at Tea Party demonstrations, so there isn’t the same motivation.

Heh. However …

This is exactly the kind of crap that prevents the Left from building any kind of effective movement to accomplish anything. Since several of you don’t seem to understand what I’m complaining about, let’s go back to September 2005.

There were huge antiwar rallies September 24 in Washington and other cities. I went to the Washington DC march around the White House. It was one of the better ones, really big, with people of all ages and ethnicities joining in.

As usual, Code Pink tried to steal the show by holding a separate rally and march a few blocks away. I remember reading that some of them were arrested. In any event, none of the pinksters came anywhere close to the advertised rally and march.

Also meanwhile, as most people marched around the White House, International A.N.S.W.E.R. — one of the sponsors — held its own event on the Ellipse, covered by CSPAN. After the march I got back to my hotel, logged on the Web, and read Steve Gilliard’s review –

You know, it’s time for the campus radicals to go home and take ANSWER with them.

I watched an hour or so of the rally and I wanted to smash my screen.

Why can’t they have adults who can speak in words, not slogans.

Here’s a hint, Palestine is really unpopular in the US, even among liberals. You do not gain support for the Palestinians by having some campus clown talk about the injustices of the Palestinian people. You know, why not have a real Palestinian from Palestine who doesn’t speak in slogans. You know, but a human face on it. And leave the support of terrorists like FARC at home, after all, you can’t call Israelis terrorists when you’re praising drug dealing terrorists.

This is serious shit and I had to listen to someone say he was a communist. Now what in the fuck does that have to do with Iraq? Too many people on the left glom on to any protest and use it as their hobby horse. You know, the only people I wanted to express solidarity with were the families of the soldiers, the soldiers and the people of Iraq suffering from US occupation. It may be cute to have diversity, but it takes away from the seriousness. You have a rally where only soldiers and their families speak, with a few pols, and even Bush couldn’t ignore that.

One of the most effective protests of the Vietnam War was the Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit. They talked about the war and their role in it. That is something people need to see more than once a week on FX.

As long as you prattle on about anti-imperialism and other college campus radical causes, you don’t get taken seriously. ANSWER in their own way is as bad as the Chickenhawks. Both are amazingly selfish. The chickenhawks refuse to serve, the ANSWER crowd uses people like Cindy Sheehan to promote their own agenda. Mumia’s ass is in jail, and you couldn’t more than 10 minutes on black radio about him. And that’s a cause?

I just want to see a protest where there is only one topic, Iraq, the only speakers are talking about Iraq and all the signs are about Iraq. That anyone who mentions some nonsense like the “Popular Front” is shoved off the stage with a flying tackle. Talk about Iraq. But leave the other causes at home. I don’t really care about what a Israeli refusenik has to say if the topic isn’t Iraq.

Some of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s long list of speakers were from antiwar organizations, but they also had speakers from groups like the Women’s Anti-Imperialist League and the Socialist Front of Puerto Rico.

The A.N.S.W.E.R. program got more publicity than the march. I had no idea this was even going on until I got back to my hotel, and I can’t tell you how disgusted I was. It was the last demonstration I bothered to attend. There are less expensive ways to waste time.

There had been a number of demonstrations on the East Coast co-sponsored by United for Peace and Justice and International A.N.S.W.E.R. I have nothing bad to say about UfPJ, but it let IA push it around to get their sponsorship money, and those compromises reduced the effectiveness of the rallies. After this one I believe UfPJ had nothing more to do with IA, finally, but there were no more really big rallies on the East Coast after that. Smaller ones, yes. I wasn’t the only one who decided to sit the rest of them out.

A lot of us, including me, beginning in 2003 wrote many warnings about not allowing International A.N.S.W.E.R. to be the face of the antiwar movement, and I caught a lot of grief for it. But I was right.

Now, the Occupy Wall Street activists are on the edge of building a movement centered on economic populist issues that polls say most Americans support. And the slogan “we are the 99 percent” could be very effective IF most Americans come to understand it in the context of kitchen-table economic issues.

A broad swatch of Americans feel Washington pays no attention to their problems and caters instead to the rich and Wall Street. Big nationwide marches filled with middle-class, working people could actually get the attention of politicians in Washington. This would be a good thing.

But most of that broad swatch will not join in if they whiff a bunch of leftish issues they are not ready to embrace, and I suspect unmanned drones on foreign soil is one of those issues. And if the “movement” never goes beyond the usual vocational protesters, it’s pissing in the wind.

Update: See also “The Inkblot Protests”

Sorry I’ve been scarce lately; I’ve been up to my elbows in Tibetan history. BTW, if you want to read an amazing story that cries out to be made into a major motion picture, check this out.

Anyway — if the Occupy Wall Street movement still exists six months from now, and hasn’t managed to evoke a massive anti-leftist backlash, everyone should send a fruit basket to the NYPD with a thank you card. Without the police overreaction, it would all be over already.

I’m irritated at the number of comments and editorials I’ve read saying “at least somebody has started something.” “Something” was started in Wisconsin last winter. But on top of that, the unions and Moveon and other groups have done quite a lot of startings of somethings since 2008, including marches and rallies. They’ve all failed to “catch on” to something bigger, mostly due to lack of media attention.

And the fact is, clumps of scruffy people carrying signs or handing our leaflets are pretty much part of the landscape in Manhattan, although not so much in the financial district. It’s rare to go by Union Square without seeing some kind of leftist activist demonstration going on, though.

Further, sugar-coating to the contrary, there is plenty of eyewitness testimony even from sympathetic eyewitnesses saying that the crew in lower Manhattan is mostly made up of the same losers who got in the way of forming a cohesive antiwar movement during the Bush Administration — “But come on—legalize marijuana, Free Palestine, anti-fracking—how about, for once, just advocating for economic justice when you’re at a march for economic justice?” Or marching against the war at an antiwar march?

The hopeful thing is that, thanks to the NYPD, these particular demonstrations, unlike the vast number of similar demonstrations that have gone before, got the attention of media. And I understand the groups that have formed in other cities are far more focused on bread-and-butter, economic justice issues — genuinely representative of the 99 percent.

Without a shared vision of something to be accomplished this movement will just march in circles and tire itself out. As the civil rights movement said, “keep your eyes on the prize.” So, OWS, what’s the prize? What will success look like?

There’s some pup who continues to proclaim that the movement has already had many “successes,” but this reminds me of the guy back in the spring of 2003 who sent me multiple photos of Saddam Hussein’s statue being torn down with the words, “Bush was right!” Um, time will tell.

With unions getting involved, however, hopefully there will be enough discipline and direction to put the energy to good use.

I’m taking some trains to Brooklyn today, and if my tricky back will let me I’ll stop by the financial district on my way home to see the thing for myself.

At The Guardian, a group of activists/authors comment on OWS. IMO the last guy, Rushkoff, if s flake, and those who imagine the Tea Party and OWS will join forces against the Man are demented. Eric Alterman sounds several notes of caution that need to be heeded, however.

See also The four habits of highly successful social movements.

Senate rules are not quite as difficult to understand as quantum mechanics, but they come close. So I’m going to have to send you to Alexander Bolton at The Hill for an explanation of Harry Reid’s “nuclear” maneuver last night:

The Democratic leader had become fed up with Republican demands for votes on motions to suspend the rules after the Senate had voted to limit debate earlier in the day.

McConnell had threatened such a motion to force a vote on the original version of President Obama’s jobs package, which many Democrats don’t like because it would limit tax deductions for families earning over $250,000. The jobs package would have been considered as an amendment.

McConnell wanted to embarrass the president by demonstrating how few Democrats are willing to support his jobs plan as first drafted. (Senate Democrats have since rewritten the jobs package to pay for its stimulus provisions with a 5.6 surtax on income over $1 million.)

Reid’s move strips the minority of the power of forcing politically-charged procedural votes after the Senate has voted to cut off a potential filibuster and move to a final vote, which the Senate did on the China measure Tuesday morning, 62-38.

Ryan Grim and Michael McAuliffe at Huffington Post provide more detail.

The usual candyass rightie bloggers are screaming about “tyranny” this morning. How dare the Senate Majority Leaders use a parliamentary procedure to block Republicans from playing stupid political games with important legislation? Well, that’s not how they put it, but that’s what it is.

And Steve M writes,

It seems that the Republicans either got lazy or sloppy, and left the door open for Reid to throw some serious jujitsu. Now, what this means is that one of the byzantine filibuster options available to the Republicans is going to go away. If that happens, all of a sudden things get very, very interesting.

So here’s what I want to know: is Reid really going to do this, or is he finally playing cards he has left in order to win concessions from Orange Julius and the House? Let’s not forget that Republicans immediately reneged on the deal reached after the debt ceiling fight and tried to shut down the government a few weeks ago. If this is Harry Reid’s payback, then I hope he’s at least getting passage of the American Jobs Act out of the deal at the bare minimum.

President Obama made it clear yesterday that he’s not going to let Republicans obstruct important legislation without paying a political price. Steve Benen writes,

In other words, if Republicans kill the legislation, Dems will then press GOP members to start also killing its component parts, one at a time. It’s one thing to reject a package deal; it’s more striking to force Republicans to vote against popular ideas, over and over again — no to infrastructure investments, no to small business tax cuts, no to saving teachers’ jobs, no to the jobs-for-veterans tax break, etc.

See also mistermix.

I haven’t been following the jobs bill as closely as I’d like, but the latest is that Senate Dems are rewriting it to change the way the bill is paid for. Apparently ending tax subsidies to the oil industry made some of them nervous, so they’re revising it to a tax increase on millionaires, possibly a 5 percent surcharge. That’s fine with me, although no one expects the bill to pass this Congress. Republicans apparently decided to block the whole thing, as expected.

See also Greg Sargent, “Obama losing jobs argument with Congress — but winning it with the public.”

Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the Massachusetts Senate seat looks very strong.

Some Republicans are complaining about Grover Norquist.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) thinks only people who pay income tax should be allowed to vote.

By now you may have heard about the rock at Rick Perry’s hunting camp that has the “N” word painted on it. There are so many interesting facets to this man it’s hard to keep up.

Some would think that keeping such a sign says something about a man’s character, even if he didn’t paint the rock himself. On the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that it says more about America that such a sign could become just part of the landscape.

However, the Right threw a fit because the sign became news. Erik Erickson accused the reporter who broke the story of having a racist agenda.

Even weirder, Herman Cain had to apologize to the Right just for saying the sign was insensitive. Seriously. He said on Fox News,

“My reaction is, that’s just very insensitive,” Cain told Fox. “[There] isn’t a more vile, negative word than the n-word, and for him to leave it there as long as he did, before I hear that they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.”

Well, yeah. But the really remarkable thing is that Cain was hammered with criticism from the Right for saying something that would be, in a sane world, utterly uncontroversial. He spent most of the next day explaining to reporters that no, he was not playing the race card.

As blogger Chauncy DeVega writes, “race card” is “a flat and lazy term that disingenuous colorblind white Conservative racial reactionaries can use to deflect any substantive engagement with how race and racism remain operative in American political and social life.”

The race card is a pair with the “political correctness” card, which righties pull out whenever they don’t want to admit they lost the moral high ground sometime in the 19th century. And the “class warfare” card is supposed to trump any evidence of growing income inequality.

However, righties are a tad selective about how these cards are played. Andrew Breitbart has been hyping a story about then-Senator Obama “marching” with members of the New Black Panther party in 2007.

The event was a commemoration of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and thousands of people were there, including President and then-Senator Clinton. Matt Gertz explains,

It wasn’t Obama’s event. It wasn’t the Panthers’ event. They were all in Selma for an annual celebration of an historic civil rights moment. During that event, Obama and New Black Panthers leader Malik Zulu Shabazz gave speeches from the same podium, and both were part of the crowd that then marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Breitbart says that the Panthers “explicitly came to Selma to support Obama,” and basically establishes that they followed Obama around that day. For Breitbart, this constitutes “an association between a vile racist organization and a future President of the United States.”

So let’s get this straight — a black candidate for the Republican nomination for president is acceptable only as long as he doesn’t play the “race card,” meaning that he must not acknowledge racism in America. But it’s OK for Herman Cain to say that African-Americans are brainwashed into voting for Democrats, a statement I find curiously racist.

And it’s OK for Andrew Breitbart to gin up a phony controversy by tying the black President of the United States to an organization with “Black Panther” in its name in an article that also hypes the “racist agenda” of President Obama’s Justice Department. And, of course, nobody on the Right ever yells at Rush for mentioning race.

If this is a card game, I wish somebody would explain the rules.