This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.
The poor Wall Street fellas just want to bind up the nation’s booboos:

Somebody really needs to talk to these guys. It’s getting embarrassing. And the frat boy bonhomie with the Prez is very unfortunate, although his rejoinder was pretty good. I hope Obama heard the applause when he said that Main Street felt like it got whacked.

This post originally appeared at Hullabaloo.

TPM is featuring an interesting article today about Alan Grayson’s kooky opponent Daniel Webster. Seems he’s keeping company with the Christian Reconstructionists (aka American Taliban):

Listed in his official voter guide as a top supporter is a right wing activist named David Barton, who has already come under scrutiny for addressing two white supremacist organizations. READ FULL POST

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.

Notice how there’s no limit to how much money we can spend on this sort of thing:

In line with its “enforcement only” approach to immigration, the Obama administration has increased the number of border patrol agents, most recently as part of a $600 million border bill that passed without much ado this summer. But the rapid expansion appears to have come at a cost. The Los Angeles Times reports that there’s been a surge in sexual misconduct and assault cases against Border Patrol agents—a development that some attribute to the increased militarization of the border and greater numbers of inexperienced officers.

…”They see themselves as a quasi-military body defending the country,” one political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso tells the Times reporter. “Add to that the fact that they are expanding rapidly, and you have thousands of rookies who have very little experience.”

That’s just great. No need to be cool under pressure in this overheated environment. Just hire a bunch of yahoos, give them a gun and immunity and let ‘em loose.

The story also points out that the Border Patrol is the second largest police agency in the country after the New York City Police Department, having grown by 9,000 agents from 2005 to 2009 and currently employing 21,000. But there’s far less transparency than in most major police departments: unlike most big cities, Border Patrol does not reveal how often it uses force and under what circumstances. And there’s very little accountability, because “agents are loath to report peers and juries are reluctant to convict those standing guard along the country’s borders.”

I’ve been worried about the encroaching police state — for which unlimited government spending is untouchable for some time. This, for instance, is from 2006:

I’m personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they’ve pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There’s a lot of money and power involved, it’s secret and it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.

That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else.

And sadly, on this issue most starkly, the Democrats have shown that they are no different. In fact, it’s something that Obama can point to as the great success of his administration: he solidified a fully bipartisan consensus on the police state. (Not that there had ever been much daylight — but there was a moment of hope for change for a while there.)

*I also argued in that old post that the Democrats should make a pitch for privacy and populism with consumer protection arguments. It wasn’t a bad idea. Too bad they never tried it.

This post originally appeared on Hullabaloo.

From the “who could have ever predicted” file:

If you thought passing the health care overhaul was messy, wait until Republicans try to repeal it if they regain power this fall.

It could come down to who blinks first, with some Republicans raising the prospect of a government shutdown.

Even if Republicans succeed beyond any current predictions and capture both the Senate and the House, they wouldn’t have enough GOP votes to overcome President Barack Obama’s veto.

But Republicans could still fall back on the congressional power of the purse, denying the administration billions of dollars to carry out the most far-reaching social legislation since Medicare and Medicaid.

“The endgame is a fight over funding,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

During the health care debate, raising this point was cause for major slap downs from the Very Serious People who repeatedly assured me that once the legislation was passed they would never even try to repeal it because people would be so upset. When it was pointed out that the benefits weren’t going to kick in for years, leaving a huge gap between expectations and reality for quite some time, I recall being told that the Democrats would be able to run on the achievement of passing it in the fall of 2010 and ever after and would protect its legacy.

I wrote this back in December when the battle was raging:

There has been no public education about responsibility to buy insurance in all this or any strategy to manage expectations of what people will get with Health Care Reform. And because of that the right is going to have a field day telling everyone that the nanny state liberals are forcing them to give to money to insurance companies and then spending their tax money on poor (brown/black) people. So, again, running around saying “Mission Accomplished” is bad politics.

As for the promise to fix all the problems once the bill is in place, I think people are vastly underestimating the forces that are going to be brought to bear to prevent that from happening. Republicans aren’t so disorganized that they forgot that they must stop Democrats from giving people reason to believe in government. In addition to deploying their formidable communications apparatus to present health care reform as a massive failure to the majority who are currently covered by employers and will only see the effects from afar, they are going to strangle improvements in the cradle by any means necessary including leveraging their most valuable new voting demographic in the age of Obama — the elderly. On top of that, we are entering an era of deficit fetishism and have an industry that has shown it will do everything in its power to protect its interests.

It’s not impossible, but watching the Democrats operate at the zenith of their institutional power over the past year does not give me any confidence that they want to, much less can, battle all that back.

They said that we just needed to pass this so we could get something better down the road. Perhaps that’s true. But for the foreseeable future it’s going to a fight just to keep the fairly crappy plan as it is, and I frankly have very little faith that’ they’ll be able to do it. I certainly hope they do.

I assume that President Obama will veto repeal measures, and I would certainly assume that there will be enough Democrats left in congress to prevent an override. Funding will be an ongoing problem because of the way the program is designed, so I don’t know if Obama can maintain the levels needed to gain support and if a Republican takes office with a GOP congress, we can forget that altogether. I still think, as I thought then, that this sanguine attitude about the future of this health care bill was extremely short sighted.

Just now I saw Jonathan Alter on Ed Shultz’s show impatiently defending Rahm Emmanuel from Adam Green’s criticism by saying he had pushed through “the most important social legislation in 30 years.” He explained that he’d told Alter that Democrats had tried it the “progressive” way for 50 years and failed and that you had to invite in all the special interests in order to get it done. (And apparently he was just spitting fire when Holy Joe backed out of the medicare expansion. Sure he was.)

I assume that he’s going to to be long out of the White House when the Republicans starve it of funding and repeal all the affordability measures. But don’t worry, they’ll keep in the provision that says insurers have to agree to provide policies for pre-existing conditions. It’s just that they’ll allow them to charge whatever they want for them. But the legislation did pass so it’s not like Rahm won’t always have his check mark in the “win” column. As far as the rest of us goes, the jury is still out.

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.
It’s not a sexy as Glenn Beck and his Black Robed Regiment of Christian Reconstructionists (just don’t call them Mullahs …) but this rally scheduled for next month in DC is just a teensy bit more relevant to our current problems. It’s called One America, Working Together.

Here’s the agenda:

Provide immediate relief for those who are currently unemployed

* Extend jobless benefits, COBRA, mortgage assistance, and other initiatives for those currently out of work.
* Target help for populations and communities in the greatest need

Provide immediate action to stimulate job growth and consumer demand

* Provide aid to states and cities – including direct job creation at local levels – especially in education, health care, social services and first-responder workforces
* Increase the ability of small businesses to obtain loans
* Fund infrastructure investment that spurs economic growth and clean energy enterprises

Provide a fair chance for everyone to succeed and advance in the workplace

* Everyone who works in America should have the right to join with their co-workers to have a voice on the job
* Pay all workers wages that allow them to support their families
* Increase and index the minimum wage
* Close all pay gaps
* End all forms of workplace discrimination
* Protect, honor, fully apply, and expan

This post originally appeared at Hullabaloo.

This NY Times story says that the youth vote for Democrats is dwindling because of the economy. I think this quote is very telling:

“There’s a vibe,” he said on a recent afternoon, while pumping weights at the gym. “Right now it seems like Republicans just care a lot more than Democrats.”

I get that. They do seem like they care more.

Those who are paying close attention realize that they either care more about destroying the socialist/Muslim menace or they care more about taking back the power they so recently lost. But either way, they do appear to give a damn. The Democrats, on the other hand, rather than coming out with their guns blazing at those who have made it impossible for them to fix these problems seem content with trying to convince people that it isn’t as bad as they think it is.

You know — like when your friend tries to convince you that you shouldn’t be upset about something you are upset about. It’s annoying. And you realize very quickly that they just don’t want to hear about it anymore. That’s how the Democrats seem right now — that they are sick of hearing about it.

.

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.

The troops were awesome, America is awesome, we saved Iraq, we’re saving Afghanistan, now everybody needs to turn the page on all those unpleasant differences we had over the wars and work together like awesome soldiers to fix the economy. Oh, and the troops are really awesome.

Did that cover it?

First impressions: David Gergen says he was perplexed, Zakaria called it workmanlike, Peter Bergen says that nobody knows what’s happening about Afghanistan.

READ FULL POST

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.

Sam Sedar did some interviews at the Beck Rally on Saturday. This one is particularly interesting because of the conflation of Obama being a Muslim and his adherence to Jeremiah Wright’s ideology. I suppose there might be something other than race that informs her conclusions, but it’s hard to see what it is.

She’s a likable person actually, easy smile and laugh, and I’m sure she is. As with so many of the tea partiers, the impression I get is that they are inspired and energized by the solidarity they feel with others there as much as anything else. They are searching for fellowship and meaning beyond the normal religious and political realm. (In some ways they remind me of the fervent Obama followers of the summer of 2008.) And let’s face it, what she says about the two party’s failing and political corruption could have been said by any one of us. The problem is that the ties that bind her to her fellows are toxic know-nothingism and reflexive tribal identity based upon race, religion and fear and loathing of those who would stake an equal claim to America. It’s a dark vision, although I’m sure they don’t see it that way — their lack of self-awareness, as that woman showed in that video, is intellectually incapacitating. And their willingness to listen to demagogues hypnotically reinforcing their insular worldview is apparently limitless. (You’d think they’d get bored at some point.)

READ FULL POST

This post originally appeared at Hullabaloo.

Not that we didn’t already know this …

If President Barack Obama needed any more incentive to go all out for Democrats this fall, here it is: Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority. READ FULL POST

This post originally appeared at Hullabaloo.

Did you know that they are selling those full body scanners they want to deploy in airports to anyone who wants to buy them for use on city streets? Did you know that law enforcement is using them without warrants?

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S. READ FULL POST