Some are calling it the best political ad ever (they probably never saw the “Daisy” ad). While I think it hits some high notes, it is weird to see my favorite cranky old man – Mike Gravel, hammering the words out – while surrounded by images and music inspired by the 1960s. (Is that how I look to the young people around me?). Enjoy.
Monthly Archives: December 2007
A Patriot Acts
Air Force veteran and former: social studies teacher, college professor, and organizational consultant John Nirenberg patiently explains why he’s walking 480+ miles from Boston’s Faneuil Hall to Speaker Pelosi’s office to encourage her to put impeachment “back on the table.”
Scott Ritter, explains below why there is so little overt opposition to an attack on Iran. His words might also explain why Nirenberg decided to hit the road to get an audience with Pelosi (in December, no less):
…very few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don’t want to rock the boat. If it doesn’t have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don’t care.
There’s a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don’t. And if the people don’t care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don’t care, then those they elect to higher office won’t feel the pressure to change.
The Democrats, one would hope, would live up to their rhetoric, that is, challenging the Bush administration’s imperial aspirations. Once it became clear Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, one would have thought that when the Democrats took control of Congress they would have sought to reimpose a system of checks and balances, as the Constitution mandates. But instead the Democrats have put their focus solely on recapturing the White House, and, in doing so, will not do anything that creates a political window of opportunity for their Republican opponents.
The Democrats don’t want to be explaining to an apathetic constituency, an ignorant constituency whose ignorance is prone to be exploited because it produces fear, fear of the unknown, and the global war on terror is the ultimate fear button. The Democrats, rather than challenging the Bush administration’s position on the global war on terror, challenging the notion of these imminent threats, continues to play them up because that is the safest route toward the White House. At least that is their perception.
…They don’t have the courage of conviction to enter into that debate and stare at whoever makes that statement and say they’re a bald-faced liar. They’re not going to go that route…
I don’t know what the last straw was for Nirenberg. Meanwhile, H.R. 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act recently and quietly passed the House by 404 to 6, and is under consideration by the Senate. John Nichols of the Capital Times:
…H.R. 1955 would establish the framework for an Orwellian network charged with policing not the actions but the thoughts and statements of Americans. It would establish a commission with broad investigative powers and an official charge to propose legislation and regulatory moves to bar whatever thoughts or words the commission identifies as “homegrown terrorism.”
With its authority to call hearings and compel testimony, the commission would invite a return of the days of inquests into “thought crimes” by the likes of Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy and California Sen. Richard Nixon….
Under H.R. 1955, investigators would be authorized to examine Web sites and online communications with an eye toward controlling the free flow of ideas and information that is the lifeblood of the digital age. Indeed, the National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers warn: This legislation “will likely lead to the criminalization of beliefs, dissent and protest, and invite more draconian surveillance of Internet communications.”
…Backers of the bill claim they only want to address what they describe as “threatened” force. But what they identify as a “threat” might be nothing more than an expression of the deep frustration Americans feel with politicians…who show so little respect for freedom of speech.
This legislation suggests that a danger that must be officially addressed — “violent radicalization” — is characterized by the embrace of an “extremist belief system.” But who defines extremism? Didn’t the British label Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine extremists? Didn’t the supporters of World War I attack anti-war campaigners such as Robert M. La Follette and Eugene Victor Debs as extremists? Weren’t supporters of women’s suffrage dismissed as extremists? Weren’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin attacked because powerful figures considered their advocacy on behalf of civil rights to be extremist?…
I don’t need to remind you, that the on-air “talent” of Fox News, as well as many voices on the AM dial routinely label many of us reading and writing blogs like this one as “extremists”. Jeff Dinelli at the Left Coaster:
…The cleverly worded law would allow the government to arrest and imprison anyone who speaks out against the Bush administration, the Iraq occupation, the Department of Homeland Security or any other government agency, including the FDA….It is the latest in a long line of fear-mongering legislation that stretches back to the birth of our nation, as pointed out in a fine post by Phillip Giraldi at HuffPo.
Forget that this is going to be specifically aimed at Muslim organizations. This is the beginning of the end to Free Speech in America. If this law passes, every information source you know and trust could be shut down and its authors arrested…
Would you have believed thirty years ago that there would be Free Speech Zones in America? H.R. 1955 was co-authored by not by some far right nutcase, but by Jane Harman, a California Democrat, chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence. The fact that she’s considered mainstream, and that the bill passed while the news was occupied with massive fires in her home state, helped the bill dodge public attention. Harman’s district contains a number of defense contractors and borders the district that’s home to the RAND Corporation, which IMO would be a beneficiary of this legislation
You can feel what’s left of our democracy, “ossifying up”, as the bill’s thought police will likely chill what’s left of Free Speech in America. Its intent and vague language is a step toward putting web sites like this one out of business.
Join John Nirenberg, either in person on US Route 1, or via his website March in My Name.
Republicans and the “T” Word
Michael Kinsley says that Fred Thompson may not have what it takes to be the Republican nominee:
The real strategy of Thompson’s plan is a familiar one from past Republican tax plans: Give large breaks to businesses and the wealthy (by, say, abolishing the estate tax), bribe the middle class to go along by offering smaller breaks to them, and don’t worry about paying for it all.
But maintaining your indifference to the size of the bill you are running up requires nerves of steel. You must never waver, never, never express the slightest concern that lost revenue may be a problem, and never, never, never even hint at where you might go to find the money. Thompson followed the script, putting out word that the explosion of economic activity after his tax reform would bring in too much money to even count, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then, unfortunately, he blinked. He revealed that he is a political amateur by making ominous noises about finding some savings through changes in Social Security benefits, which has to mean cuts in Social Security benefits or no money will be saved.
Raise your hand if you would be happy to accept lower Social Security payments in exchange for a simpler tax code.
I thought so.
Kinsley also discusses Mike Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal:
He has endorsed something called the “fair tax,” which involves repealing all federal revenue sources—the income tax, Social Security tax, estate tax, everything—and replacing them with a 23 percent sales tax on everything except education. The fair tax propaganda says, frankly, that it is intended to be “revenue-neutral.” That is, it would bring in just as much money as the taxes it replaces. No monkey business about explosions of new revenue.
This makes it easy to figure out who would win and who would lose in Huckabee’s so-called “fair” tax. It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar someone’s taxes go down is a dollar someone else’s go up. What you spend every year is the amount you earn minus the amount you save. On average, Americans save practically nothing, but wealthier people save more. Very poor people actually spend more than they earn, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn’t spend more than a small fraction of their income if they tried. So, wealthy people are going to see their taxes go down, which means that poor and middle-class people are going to see their taxes go up.
In spite of his soak-the-poor tax plan, the right-wing Club for Growth has gone to the mattresses to defeat Huckabee. Leslie Wayne writes in tomorrow’s New York Times:
As Mike Huckabee rises in the Republican presidential polls, fiscal conservatives have been raising alarms about a series of tax increases he oversaw while governor of Arkansas — new taxes on gasoline, nursing home beds and even pet groomers.
The Club for Growth, a politically influential antitax group, has dubbed Mr. Huckabee Tax Hike Mike and poured money into anti-Huckabee advertisements that were broadcast in early nominating states, with more on the way. Mr. Huckabee “spends money like a drunken sailor,†according to the group’s news releases, and it has sprinkled YouTube and the airways with videos that mock him and his policies.
Frankly, your average drunken sailor is a miser compared to most Republicans.
But the record offers a more complex and nuanced picture. While taxes did rise in the 10 years that Mr. Huckabee was governor, the portrayal of him as a wild-eyed spendthrift is hardly apt. For the most part, Mr. Huckabee’s tax initiatives had wide bipartisan support, with the small number of Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature voting for the tax increases and many maintaining that the state was better for them.
David Lightman writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
In the late 1990s, as the nation’s and Arkansas’ economies boomed, that wasn’t difficult, and Huckabee presided over substantial tax cuts. In 1997 and 1998, state lawmakers approved $97.9 million in income-tax relief, and another $14.1 million in smaller tax breaks.
About 65 of Huckabee’s 90 tax reductions were enacted from 1997 to 1999. The centerpiece was $90.6 million annually in individual income-tax breaks, but most of the cuts were small and highly specialized.
Among them: exempting residential lawn care from the gross receipts tax, a Salvation Army sales-and-use-tax exemption and an exemption for sales of biomass to produce electricity.
Huckabee came to Washington in 1999 and boasted about his record. “The big battle was no longer, ‘Which taxes will we raise and by how much?’ but ‘Which taxes will we cut and by how much?’ ” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.
Bill Clinton’s economy made being a tax cutter easy and fun.
But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.
But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.
The State Supreme Court handed him another problem when it ruled that Arkansas’ education-funding system wasn’t meeting student’s needs and had to be revamped.
So in 2003, Huckabee had a very different message. In his State of the State speech that year, he warned lawmakers that, “If you deem that all new revenue sources, your proposals or mine, are indeed dead on arrival, then you’ll be saying that teacher pay increases are dead, scholarships are dead, medicine for the elderly is dead, that long sentences are dead and that we’ll have a massive early release of thousands of inmates from the (prison) system.”
Unlike the bleepheads of the Club for Growth, Gov. Huckabee actually had to govern a state. But in GOP Land, facing reality is heresy, and as a candidate Huckabee has to prove he can still be oblivious. Back to Kinsley:
Neither Thompson nor Huckabee has anything useful to say about the real problem, which is the huge gap between revenues and spending that George W. Bush, having inherited a surplus, is leaving behind. Thompson’s willingness to take on Social Security would earn him some points for courage if he were planning to use the money to reduce the deficit or address the entitlements problem. But he wants to pour the money into new tax cuts for business, which is not just a bad idea but an incredibly lazy one. There’s more to running for president than buying a round of drinks at the country club and asking what’s on people’s minds.
At least Huckabee’s revenue neutrality would not make the problem worse. For this, the business wing of the Republican Party is hysterically labeling him a “fiscal liberal.”
A what? For Republicans, the epithet liberal used to mean someone who wanted the government to spend a lot of money that it didn’t have. Then it meant someone who wanted the government to spend what it had, but no more. Now, apparently, you are a “liberal” if you only want the government to spend a few hundred billion dollars a year more than it has.
Actually, the spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.
But if you peer into the abyss of debt and say that what this country needs is another tax cut, that makes you a good conservative.
What really makes you a good conservative is to believe you can have something for nothing. All their elaborate theories about supply-side economics and “fair” taxes are fiscal alchemy. If we can just find the right formula, they think, government revenue will appear magically, and fairies will provide the government services we want without our having to pay for them.