DownWithTyranny!

Whatever the president thinks he's doing, he can hardly claim to be a "pragmatist"

2009-11-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

Will they be celebrating the new Gallup numbers in the White House tonight? Will Master Rahm be inviting Larry Summers and Tim Geithner?

by Ken

Okay, it's official now: Gallup has the president's approval rating down to 49 percent. ("President becomes fourth fastest to slip below the majority approval level.") Question for the Obama "brain" trust: With the combination of desperate economic and international problems, an all-out war of obstruction by the Right that is morphing into an all-out culture war, and next to nothing to show by way of accomplishments, what exactly were you folks expecting to happen with the poll numbers?

"Pragmatist" is a word that turns up a lot in discussions of President Obama, especially from people who have realized, sometimes belatedly, that he never claimed to be any kind of liberal or progressive and really and truly isn't one. Meanwhile, I've been so preoccupied with trying to figure out what the guy actually believes, and what he thinks he's doing as president and hopes to achieve, that I needed intelligent prompting to see how badly the term "pragmatic" fits his policies.

For this, as usual, I turn to the group of the Smartest People I Know, and my counselor points out the most obvious contrast between President Obama and an actual pragmatist like Franklin D. Roosevelt: FDR surrounded himself with brilliant people, and they tried things. They rarely got it right on the first try, but when something didn't work, they tried something else.

President Obama, by contrast, surrounds himself with people who, for the most part, either don't have much real policy-making authority (as I assume is the case with most of those "teams of rivals" people who were cleverly removed from the streets and shoved into the government bureaucracy) or are much closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution. Do the names Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner ring a bell?

Now it's always dangerous to underestimate the extent to which the president's own views may actually favor the most narrowly corporatist strategy that can safely be gotten away with. A case can be made that artificially resuscitating the financial services industry (a fancy way of saying the banksters and Wall Street) actually is the president's economic program, and never mind that most of the country is still left in depression. By that standard, he and Rahm and Larry and Timmy can all go to bed each night feeling they've had another slammin' day and sleep the sleep of the blessed.

But even allowing for the magnitude of the problems the president inherited, you have to wonder how the great "pragmatist" fails to notice how badly so many of his policies are working for so many people. And because so many of those policies have been so badly misconceived and/or misdirected, tools that might once have been useful have become increasingly useless, the classic case being economic stimulus.

For reasons that only the president can explain, only two categories of economic "thinkers" have been included in the formulation of his economic policy, starting with the preparation of his "stimulus" package: (1) economists and economic players who either were instrumental in getting us into this mess or managed to miss it altogether, and (2) Republicans whose "bipartisan" support was deemed crucial, for reasons that were hard to fathom at the time and haven't become any easier to fathom.

The president's entire economic team falls into category (1). You would think there were no other economic thinkers to talk to. But just as policy on Iraq and Afghanistan continues to be made principally by the foreign policy dolts who botched the earlier stages, our deciders keep going back to economists and financial players who ought at the very least, to put it as politely as possible, to be invited to sit this round out. Input from people to the left of, say, Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh seems to have been virtually nonexistent.

In the case of the stimulus package, by the time the administration finished making concessions to Republicans who not only were never going to vote for it but planned to do everything in their power to prevent the administration from doing anything that might turn the economy around, as part of their plan to destroy the administration, while a certain amount was made available for sensible social purposes that might also have greased the economy and yielded new jobs, that was wildly outstripped by money that was either a pure giveaway to the banksters and Wall Street, with absolutely no way of getting them to use that money to get the economy moving, as opposed to lining their own pockets, or pure waste in terms of stimulus, as with the preposterous tax cuts. ("Bribes," my wise men like to call those portions of the stim package.)

Even money that is thought to have achieved such worthwhile goals as keeping state services flowing largely hasn't. Yes, money funneled to the states has been used to maintain services in the pampered groves of suburbia, but elsewhere in the states, naturally including the areas of greatest need, teachers are being fired wholesale and other "essential" services slashed.

It's not as if there were no warnings. For months now I've been reading people like Dean Baker (who has a splendid blogpost today responding to the preposterous WaPo column in which Village statesman Alan S. Binder claims that all serious economists, every last one, by which he means all those mainstream clods who watched blindly or even cheered as the economy went down the crapper, oppose auditing the Fed) and Ian Welsh and Stirling Newberry explaining why it wouldn't work, because it literally didn't even begin to deal with an economic system that is fundamentally broken.

And rather too much the way the right-wing maniacs have been screaming, we are piling up a ton of debt, hardly any of which has facilitated productive spending that might have gotten the wheels of commerce back in motion. One of my favorite phrases is "liberal Reaganites" to describe the people who tried this sort of stimulus all through the Bush years and failed every time.

And as Paul Krugman points out in his column today, "The Big Squander," writing not about the Obama stimulus package but about the Bush-era TARP bailout (adminstered, however, by our very own soon-to-be Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner), the net result is that the very idea of government spending to revive the economy has been generally discredited:

[T]he economy is still in deep trouble and needs much more government help. Unemployment is in double-digits; we desperately need more government spending on job creation. Banks are still weak, and credit is still tight; we desperately need more government aid to the financial sector. But try to talk to an ordinary voter about this, and the response you’re likely to get is: “No way. All they’ll do is hand out more money to Wall Street.”

So here’s the real tragedy of the botched bailout: Government officials, perhaps influenced by spending too much time with bankers, forgot that if you want to govern effectively you have retain the trust of the people. And by treating the financial industry -- which got us into this mess in the first place -- with kid gloves, they have squandered that trust.

So where is our great "pragmatist" president? As I've said before, I refuse to believe there's anything I know that he doesn't. Yet apparently he continues to listen to people like Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. On health care reform, for example, we keep hearing the Master Rahm line that what the administration needs is "a bill" -- and never mind whether what's in that bill has any chance of achieving meaningful reform. Does the president really not see how screamingly cretinous this is? With all those gleeful obstructionists lying in wait to crucify him over every flaw, real or imagined? Does he truly not see the catastrophe -- national, political, and personal -- into which these people he continues to trust are driving him?

(As polls begin to show widening majorities against the health care package being cobbled together in Congress, we can certainly thank the massive sums of money being poured in by the economic interests that feel justifiably threatened by meaningful reform. But as one of my wise counselors points out, this is after a year of advocacy by the president who made health care reform a signature issue. As the opposition has thrown ever-increasing manpower and money at watering down and defeating a serious bill, the president as advocate, a role in which everyone agrees he has achieved his greatest successes in office, has virtually disappeared.

As much as the times cried out for an FDR, I suppose it was too much to hope that we were getting one in Barack Obama. But what we got is an administration that seems constructed to be an anti-New Deal. One point my wise counselors make is that those brilliant people around FDR were mandated to come up with genuinely bold ideas, not the kind of incrementalist retread trash that mostly comes out of this administration. What's more, the architects of the New Deal didn't worry overmuch about whose toes they might step on. When the '30s banksters rose up in righteous wrath, the Roosevelt administration prided made them a centerpiece of the attack.

Candidate Barack Obama had a unique opportunity during the campaign to use the international and domestic crises brought on by year of conservative misgovernance as a teaching moment, to try to make Americans understand how the conservative philosophy had failed. The explanation was something about his not wanting to be "negative," because voters don't like that. It seems clear that once in office he and his people were consciously working to avoid the onslaught of a culture war.

The result, however, is that he's got his culture war, and no weapons with which to fight back. In my darker moments what I foresee is the wreckage of this administration being used by the forces of darkness as proof of the failure of progressive ideas -- when nobody tainted with progressive ideas seems to have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Meanwhle, the "centrists" who are responsible for the carnage will as always conclude that they need to hunker ever farther toward the center, which has moved so far right as to be no longer visible to the naked eye.

Alan Grayson Saves The Day On Federal Reserve Audit

2009-11-20T10:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday something truly startling happened. The American people won and the Establishment lost-- IN CONGRESS. That never happens. Alan Grayson and Ron Paul teamed up and made it happen-- against the wishes of their party leaders and, more important, against the wishes of the big banks that donimate the country and finance the campaigns of most of Congress. (Which probably means the bill-- we'll get to that in a moment-- will die in the House of Lords.)

Two days ago the Democratic leadership got Mel Watt to introduce a Wall Street-friendly bill as a substitute to the amendment Grayson and Paul have gotten most members of Congress to sign onto-- a bill that will mandate a serious audit of the Fed. The Republicans decided it must be a good thing if the Democratic leadership opposes it but it couldn't get out of committee if the chairman, Barney Frank, could hold all the Democrats together. Grayson, who is on extremely good terms with Frank, wasn't about to let that happen and it managed to whip up 15 Democrats to stick with the amendment he and Ron Paul had put together. Incredibly, many of these names are the ones you see at DWT on lists of the bad guys voting against the interests of working families.

John Adler (D-NJ)
Alan Grayson (D-FL)
Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS)
Steve Driehaus (D-OH)
Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX)
Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL)
Walt Minnick (Blue Dog-ID)
Ed Perlmutter (D-CO)
David Scott (Blue Dog-GA)
Brad Sherman (D-CA)
Jackie Speier (D-CA)
Paul Hodes (D-NH)
Lacy Clay (D-MO)
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Dan Maffei (D-NY)

I asked Grayson was he was willing to take the kind of political risk it took to make sure this passed. He pointed out that "many of the people who opposed it have bought into one of the big fictions of our era. That fiction is the fiction of Fed 'independence.' The Fed may be independent from our elected political leadership, but the Fed is anything but independent from Wall Street. On the contrary, the Fed is government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. Wall Street mobilized against this amendment to perpetuate its monopoly control of the money supply, and its ability to conduct secret bailouts with Fed blank checks. For once, Wall Street lost, and the people won.

This is important because it represents new hope that we can stop the wholesale transfer of wealth from us to them."

It passed (the House Financial Services Committee) 43-26 and since the bill has around 300 co-sponsors in the House, it is likely to pass regardless of what Hoyer tries to do to sabotage it.

The measure, based on a Paul proposal that has attracted more than 300 co-sponsors, passed, 43-26, as an amendment to a financial reform bill. Florida Democrat and fellow Fed critic Alan Grayson co-sponsored the amendment with Paul and played a leading role drumming up support for it among committee members. The adoption of this amendment is an extraordinary victory for Paul, whose libertarian, anti-Fed leanings have often been dismissed by the political establishment.

The amendment would give the Government Accountability Office much greater to audit the Federal Reserve, which has a long history of independence from congressional audits. Paul and Grayson beat out a competing measure offered by Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), who after weeks of negotiations with the pair felt their measure would threaten the Fed’s monetary policy.

Grayson, however, told Politico in an interview that Watt’s amendment would add more restrictions on the GAO’s ability to audit the Fed, not less. “And there’s a crying need to expand it because the Federal Reserve has completely changed the way it’s done business since a year and a half ago.”

Democrats Raise Re-Imbursement Rates For Medicare Doctors Over Determined GOP Opposition

2009-11-20T06:00:00.001-08:00

July 30, 1965, LBJ signs Medicare bill, Truman looks on, Republicans start plotting how to kill the program

Yesterday the House voted 243-183, only one Republican, Michael Burgess (R-TX) joining the Democrats, to pass John Dingell's Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961). The bill will "revise the Medicare sustainable growth rate (SGR) payment system for determining the annual updates to the Medicare physician fee schedule." In plain English, it is meant to protect health care for seniors and military families, the two groups who would have suffered in Republicans would have had their way on this. It prevents a 21% cut in Medicare physician payment rates scheduled for January. Instead of temporarily overriding the cut as Congress has done six times before, this bill replaces the broken Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula with a permanent, sustainable solution.

Although Republicans and several conservative Democrats who habitually vote with them, opposed the bill, it was vigorously supported by the American Medical Association, AARP, the Military Officers Association of America, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Surgeons, the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the Medicare Rights Center, and the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Still 11 right-wing Democrats crossed the aisle to vote against the bill. The Republicans, who never seem to have a probelm spending money on wars and bailing out banksters and giving billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, claim that this is too expensive. They opposed Medicare from the day it was introduced and have never stopped trying to undermine it.

Brian Baird (D-WA)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)
Chet Edwards (D-TX)
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Blue Dog-SD)
Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL)
Dan Lipinski (D-IL/TN)
Michael McMahon (D-NY)
Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
Adam Smith (D-WA)
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)

Highlighted members also joined the GOP to vote against the healthcare reform bill that passed the House a week and a half ago. Like the Republicans, their answer to healthcare is "Don't get sick or, if you do, do quickly."

House Committee Passes Domestic Partnership Bill-- With Every Single Republican Voting NO, Even The Gay Ones

2009-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted 23-12 to pass the Domestic Partner Benefits and Obligations Act, which would extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal government workers. Next step: the full House, where it is expected to pass, then the Senate and then the President's desk. All of the "yes" votes were from Democrats and all of the "no" votes were from Republicans, including Illinois closet queen Aaron Schock. Another Illinois member of the committee, Danny Davis (D-IL) mentioned in the debate that “It is unsettling to me to think that because of the way that someone might feel, the way they might act, or the way they might behave-- circumstances that they have no control over-- that the rest of us would sit in some kind of judgment to deny them the very things that we would want for ourselves." He didn't get into the deep psychosis involved when fearful closet cases like Schock and Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who also voted against the bill, factor in their own severe mental problems, trying to balance their own sexual preference against the demands of the extreme right-wing, homophobic political party they belong to. It will be interesting to watch and see what other Republican closet cases like David Dreier (R-CA), Adrian Smith (R-NE), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Trent Franks (R-AZ) do when the bill comes up for a vote in the full House.

Republican California congressman Darrell Issa, the ranking member on the committee, objected to the bill on the grounds that it was fiscally irresponsible.

“We are taking up a bill that casts aside all concerns about fiscal responsibility in order to bestow costly new benefits to a select class of federal employees,” he said.

We're talking about equality and the bill is covered under pay-as-you-go rules. But Issa wasn't the only vicious homophobe from California to object. San Diego Republican always has his own kooky perspective on anything that comes up: his virulent hatred of immigrants, especially immigrants from south of the border. If you thought Lou Dobbs was bad... Bilbray, who made it clear he would vote against the bill no matter what amendments passed, offered one of his own to "prohibit benefits from being awarded unless the applicant has been screened by the E-verify program under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (PL 104-208) and determined to have a lawful presence in the United States." Three conservative Democrats, Steve Dreihaus (OH), Bill Foster (IL) and Paul Kanjorski (PA) joined a dozen Republicans in favor; it lost anyway, 15-20.

I asked Francine Busby, the Democrat who is running against Bilbray next year, to make some sense for me about why Bilbray is bringing up his xenophobia in the middle of a discussion about health care equality. She didn't hold back: "Extending healthcare and other employee benefits to domestic partners of federal employees as a long-overdue giant step toward ending discrimination and assuring that all Americans enjoy their rightful civic and equal rights. Rep. Brian Bilbray's proposed amendment to verify the immigration status of domestic partners proves again that illegal immigration is his one and only issue, whether it is pertinent to the topic or not." Other Democrats were less polite to the whack-job everyone in DC knows Bilbray is. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) came right out and said his amendment amounted to political posturing and was not germane to the legislation. And during the debate Stephen Lynch (D-MA) asked Bilbray point blank if "we now have to be afraid of gay people coming over the border and entering into domestic partnerships with federal employees? This is where it becomes just too incredible to believe. There are concerns we ought to be grappling with... I don't think this is really one of them."

The bill itself, H.R. 2517 defines a domestic partner as an adult unmarried person living with another adult unmarried person in a committed relationship, who intends to live with that person indefinitely. It would apply to individuals in a domestic partnership with a federal employee, former federal employee, member of Congress, former member of Congress, or annuitant. The bill would cover benefits including health care; disability; family, medical and emergency leave; long-term-care insurance; and compensation for work injuries. Domestic partners could also receive benefits from participation in the thrift savings plan and the Federal Employees' Retirement System.

Paul Hodes (D-NH), who is running for the U.S. Senate, feels the bill is just one step on a long road: "Yesterday," he told DWT "I voted for the Domestic Partner Benefits bill, which would extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal government workers. While this is an important step forward towards ensuring equal access to marriage benefits, I am still fighting for full marriage equality. The time has come for all couples to be able to enjoy the benefits of marriage.”

I was proud of my own congresswoman, Diane Watson (D-CA), who-- as usual, did not disappoint. "All this bill does is stop the federal government from playing favorites, based on irrelevant factors, among those who do the work of this nation. But for five hours we were subjected to Republicans waxing self-righteous on the right of Congress to discriminate against federal employees' whose committed relationships they disdain."

Earlier today I noticed a tweet from the right-wing version of the Log Cabin Republicans, a bunch of gay GOP extremists, sort of teabaggers in more ways than one.

They seem happy the bill passed-- and they should. Kumbaya, teabaggers! But they still didn't offer a word of admonition for the homophobic votes cast by every Republican: Brian Bilbray (R-CA) John Burton (R-IN), homophobic fanatic Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), Patty McHenry (R-NC), Aaron Schock (R-IL), Mark Souder (R-IN), and Steve Turner (R-OH). And not a peep about the two gay Republicans on the committee, McHenry and Schock. Let's keep in mind that even passive homophobia from public officials leads to-- gives permission to-- this kind of thing. Muchas gracias, Aaron and Patty!

It sure is a very different matter for David Dreier's congressional chief-of-staff/domestic partner. Because the powerful Republican closeted congressman was able to get his lover, Brad Smith, a very highly paid job in Congress, they not only traveled the world together, Smith had all the healthcare insurance he needed. The thing I never understand about these Republicans-- and especially not about the closet cases-- is not just that they have no empathy for other people outside their narrow circles, but that they actually hate and fear anyone who does have empathy.

Blue Dogs Show Their True Color On The Estate Tax-- And It Ain't Blue

2009-11-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

People who live in nice houses like this have pretty tulips-- and the clout to get out of paying their fair share of taxes

The battle over the Estate Tax is heating up again. The simplistic way to look at it is that the defenders of wealthy elites-- the Republican Party and DLC and Blue Dog Democrats (particularly Blanche Lincoln)-- are opposing real Democrats, who want to reform a system that the Bush Regime re-jiggered to save a handful of billionaires immense amounts of money (which is, at least in part, what put the deficit out of whack). That story line works, but it doesn't tell the whole story. It really isn't just the obvious villains who are currying favor with the richest 1 percent of Americans.

Tuesday CQPolitics carried a report that the House was likely to delay consideration if any kind of estate tax. Recall that when Blanche Lincoln and Jon Kyl tried to lower the rate on estates worth more than $7 million (under which the rate is zero; they pay nothing), their efforts (in her case on behalf of the Walton family which owns so much of WalMart) met some success.

Congress is under extreme pressure to act by the end of the year. If it does nothing, current law will make the estate tax disappear on Jan. 1, only to return in 2011 at higher rates and lower exemptions... Democratic leaders [K Street toadies Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel] want to move a permanent extension of the 2009 structure of the estate tax, which features a $3.5 million per-person exemption and a top rate of 45 percent.

Liberals are upset that such an extension-- which would cost $233.6 billion over 10 years and benefit the country’s wealthiest families-- would not be offset, even as they have to scrape up every dollar they can to offset health care legislation.

Meanwhile, a moderate faction led by Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has offered a proposal that would be more favorable to estates. It would gradually bring the top rate down to 35 percent, and push the exemption up to $5 million and index it for inflation.

Berkley’s legislation mirrors a plan supported by a bipartisan group of senators during the budget debate earlier this year. The amendment-- offered by Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.-- was adopted by a 51-48 vote, signaling that Republicans and moderate Democrats had the clout to get a better deal for estates than the 2009 rates.

Wednesday's CQPolitics followed-up with the story of a revolt from the Democratic congressional ranks. Real Democrats are telling Hoyer and House Ways and Means Committee Chair-- and notorious crook-- Charlie Rangel that they're not going along with this proposal that puts an unfair tax burden of the middle class to clean up the mess that corporate America made on behalf of the very wealthiest families. John Larson (D-CT) and Richard Neal (D-MA) led the revolt that ended in a Ways and Means Committee vote that backs a one-year extension and ties it to a broader overhaul of the tax code next year.

That move would spare Democrats from endorsing a tax cut for the wealthiest few families during a time of double-digit unemployment.

But Rangel, D-N.Y., and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., have been seeking a permanent extension of current law, which would cost $233.6 billion over 10 years but would not have to be offset under the budget framework backed by Democrats.

An estate tax bill is expected to reach the floor after the Thanksgiving recess.

Under current law, the tax includes a top rate of 45 percent and a per-person exemption of $3.5 million. If Congress does nothing, the tax disappears Jan. 1 and then returns, with a $1 million exemption and a 55 percent top rate, in 2011.

Rangel said that no final decisions had been made and that committee Democrats would meet again later Wednesday.

But Larson and Neal said the direction Democrats were heading was clear. A one-year extension would make the estate tax levels expire at the same time as many other provisions in the tax code, potentially giving members an opportunity for a broader rewrite of the revenue structure. It was unclear whether the estate tax measure would include specific language that would somehow trigger a broader tax measure.
A one-year bill could face some difficulty, however.

A leading Ways and Means moderate, Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., warned that the push for a one-year extension might falter in the broader Democratic caucus.

“It’s not about that room,” he said, gesturing toward Rangel’s off-the-floor office, where Democrats met Wednesday morning.

He threatened to vote against the rule that would bring such a bill to the floor and said other members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Caucus might do the same.

Before you listen to Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL), who is both a multimillionaire and the single most reactionary Democrat in Congress, please remember that assets left to spouses (or charities) are exempt from estate taxes, as are family farms. The idea behind an estate tax is to ameliorate the accumulation of tax free wealth in the hands of a small number of families. Estate taxes in America are far too low and have already led in the dangerous direction of perpetuating the nation's wealth in the hands of a few powerful families. Even conservative icon Winston Churchill famously argued that estate taxes are argued that estate taxes are “a certain corrective against the development of a race of idle rich," and argument entirely embraced by two of America's wealthiest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. As Buffett pointed out in 2006, in regard to predators like Griffith: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” That same year he also said "I would hate to see the estate tax gutted. It's a very equitable tax. It's in keeping with the idea of equality of opportunity in this country, not giving incredible head starts to certain people who were very selective about the womb from which they emerged."

Now please listen to this neo-Confederate Blue Dog scumbag reading Republican Party talking points, all distortions, about the estate tax:

And speaking of slimy, greed-obsessed and selfish rich people like Parker Griffith, the IRS announced this week that their crackdown on off shore banking cheats will produce billions of dollars. Almost 15,000 Americans who were cheating have come forward in time for the leniency window.

A rush of tax evaders applied before the program's Oct. 15 deadline-- nearly double the IRS preliminary tally-- taking advantage of guarantees that they wouldn't face criminal prosecution if they paid taxes, interest and reduced civil penalties... The leniency offer accompanied the IRS' legal battle with UBS, which in February agreed to a $780 million settlement of criminal charges that it had secretly sent bankers into the U.S. to help American clients evade taxes. The bank later turned over data for up to 250 Americans whose accounts had alleged signs of tax evasion.

Under the federal civil settlement, Swiss authorities have until August to disclose accounts for 4,450 American clients of UBS. Federal officials said the first 500 would be identified by month's end.

The targeted UBS accounts include those that held more than 1 million Swiss francs-- roughly $985,000-- any time between 2001 and 2008 for which "tax fraud or the like" is suspected.

And a bonus-- Forbes is reporting that the IRS will be looking for patterns that point to specific financial advisors and companies that were steering their clients into cheating on their taxes. I sure hope there's no amnesty or leniency for them.

Thad Cochran Can Expect A Fat Bonus From The Banksters This Year As He Kills Chris Dodd's Bill To Stop Credit Card Companies Bilking Consumers

2009-11-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

You wanna guess what side these two dour a-holes are on?

A friend of mine does policy work for Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) and right now they're working on something that doesn't sound very sex-- but that touches almost every single person in the country-- interchange rates. Those are the fees that Visa, Mastercard, etc charge merchants, large and small, for the privilege of being able to use their payment network. Needless to say, the merchants have no real choice but to pass those charges on to their customers. The U.S. has the highest interchange rates in the world currently costing U.S. consumers $48 billion a year. This isn't chump change and the banksters are fighting-- with lobbying efforts and outright bribes to members of Congress-- regulation of these fees. In the UK, Canada, Australia and many other nations the government regulates the fees in order to protect consumers. The banksters, of course, are an oligopoly and because of their ability to control an entire political party and the conservative wing of another-- basically the Blue Dogs and DLC Dems-- dictate the terms.

My friend did some calculations to bring it right home to DWT readers. ActBlue has raised over $111 million online through credit card contributions. By my calculations with the kind of regulations being proposed by Senator Dodd lowering interchange fees, over $600,000 of that wouldn't have been paid in fees. That's hard-earned contributors money that could have gone to campaigns.

These interchange fees are just another way that the banksters and their credit card companies siphon from people. It's a hidden cost that people don't realize impacts them everyday. Meanwhile Dodd himself took to the Senate floor seeking unanimous consent to prevent the credit card companies from continuing to bilk consumers by jacking up interest rates at will. As you can see in the very compelling video below, the bankster-owned senior senator from the Confederate state of Mississippi rose to object-- many of the angry white citizens of his state being too stupid to understand how he just screwed them-- on behalf of the GOP (and the financial sector, which has donated $660,234 to his electoral campaigns).

When Dodd's bill originally passed, all but five of the very worst and most shameless Republicans were too embarrassed to vote against it and in the end it garnered 90 votes. Unfortunately, it included a grace period for the credit card companies to prepare for the changes that will take place February 1, 2010. But what we've been hearing is the giant sucking sound of credit card companies vacuuming up every dime they can get their criminal paws on before the law changes. Dodd pleaded with his colleagues to close the loophole in time for the holidays, when spending rises dramatically. "[T]he credit card industry as well has a responsibility to deal with their customers honorably. There is nothing honorable about what’s happened with these significant rate increases and fees. Most importantly, they don’t have a right to rip off American families, especially when the Congress has already gone on record opposing the very actions they’re engaging in. This will provide us a window of about 12 weeks between now and around the first of February, during this holiday season, to just put a stop to these outrageous rates and fees being charged to people. Ninety colleagues here voted for the bill this spring. Why wouldn’t you join us today? ... Unfortunately they’ve taken that window and used it as a way to jam in on consumers in this country. Particularly at a time when people are losing their jobs, their homes their health care, their retirement, and the holiday season is upon us." Cochran didn't bother saying way he was objecting, just that he was. And that ended that.

Tim Kaine Explains Why The Creigh Deeds Strategy Failed And Warns Blue Dogs That Deeds' Fate Awaits Them

2009-11-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

To be kind, Obama's DNC head, Tim Kaine, isn't exactly from the Howard Dean mold and doesn't quite represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Generally speaking, the outgoing governor of Virginia represents the Establishment or, in Paul Krugman's words about his kind of Democrats, "corporate tools, defending special interests." What he has in common with Dean, though, is that he's smart and he likes to win. There aren't many people better positioned to analyze the spectacular defeat earlier this month of conservative Democrat Creigh Deeds to succeed him in the governor's mansion. Deeds turned Obama's startling 6-point win in Virginia last year into an 18-point ass-whooping this year. How did he do what Republicans haven't been able to accomplish?

Kaine admitted Deeds was "unable to energize his base, falling into a Republican trap that led him to shrink from the president and his policies," exactly what Blue Dogs and cowardly conservative Democrats are doing across the country, where quasi-Democrats like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Glenn Nye (Blue Dog-VA), Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL), Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD), Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and John Adler (D-NJ) are preparing to cede their seats to Republicans by re-enacting Deeds' catastrophic campaign strategy.

In a meeting with editors and reporters of the Washington Post, Kaine (D) said Deeds squandered the opportunity to sell his own appealing life story as a guy who had overcome long odds and economic disadvantage. Instead, the rural state senator took the advice of campaign consultants who wrongly assumed Deeds's Democratic support was solid and believed he should instead focus on wooing independents by attacking Republican Robert F. McDonnell.

"After the [June] primary was done, his advisers basically said, distance yourself from the president. We think we have our base locked down, we've got to win independents. And we're going to win by being negative about McDonnell," Kaine said. "That was the basic strategy they pursued, despite some significant urging to the contrary."

Asked about his own advice to Deeds, who lost to McDonnell on Nov. 3 by 17 percentage points, Kaine said: "I'd rather not talk about my personal conversations. But what I will say is that I always believed from the very beginning that the paradigm in Virginia had changed and that the way to win the race was to energize voters who had demonstrated they would vote for Democrats. That I did advise him very, very early. I advised all the candidates, prior to the primary, that was a path to victory."

When Deeds declared he would opt out of the public option-- the public option being a winner nationally and an overwhelming winner among Democrats-- he opted out of any chance for a victory. What Deeds did was completely de-incentivize the Democratic base to turn out-- why bother if he's just going to be the same piece of crap as the Republican?-- and not only doomed his own chances but killed Democrats in state legislative races where a strong turnout from the base was essential.

Now, look at that motley list of supposed Democrats above. Let's start with their overall voting records this session. These are the ProgressivePunch rankings of substantive votes this year:

John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)- 29.41
Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL)- 17.65, worse than 3 conservative Republicans!
Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS)- 25.29
Glenn Nye (Blue Dog-VA)- 25.49
Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL)- 23.53
Frank Kratovil (Blue Dog-MD)- 29.41
Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ)- 34.00
John Adler (D-NJ)- 38.00

All of these "Democrats" vote far more frequently with the Republicans than they do with their fellow Democrats-- especially on the important issues that are meaningful to people's lives. Remember Krugman's words. He was talking about this crew: "corporate tools, defending special interests." It describes each and every one of them. On top of that, let's take a look at how they voted on two issues that are of the utmost importance to the Democratic base-- the ones who propelled Obama to victory, gave both houses of Congress to the Democrats, and are essential if any of these galoots hopes to not repeat what happened to Creigh Deeds and last year's most pathetic losers, Don Cazayoux (Blue Dog-LA) and Nick Lampson (Blue Dog-TX). Both votes came up 2 weeks ago on the same extraordinary Saturday session, one to make it more difficult for women to exercise their constitutional right to reproductive choice and the other for the highly popular health care reform bill.

Among the 64 Democrats voting against women were Boehner Boys Barrow, Bright, Childers, and Griffith. And among the 39 Democrats to cross the aisle and vote with Republicans against health care reform were Adler, an egregious Insurance Industry shill, Barrow, Bright, Childers, Griffith, Kratovil, and Nye. Although these corrupt members are already looking forward to their lives as K Street lobbyists, Kaine is hoping more reasonable conservative Democrats-- like himself-- will take the right lesson from Deeds' massacre and "be more supportive of Obama's policies, not less, as they contemplate their reelection efforts next year."

Kaine said the key to victory for Democrats in a highly competitive Virginia is recognizing that party members need not be "apologetic" about their affiliation to find success. He noted that about 200,000 more people voted in the Democratic primary for president on a frigid February day in 2008 than cast ballots for Deeds this year, and said McDonnell successfully spooked Deeds by suggesting that Virginians had grown anxious about the Democratic agenda.

"I think the issue of being nervous about the Virginia electorate was overdone and I think Creigh did exactly what the McDonnell campaign hoped he would do, which was distance himself from the president and national issues," Kaine said.

We are running an ongoing campaign to replace Blue Dogs with real Democrats, and we are already in gear with Regina Thomas and Marcy Winograd, respectively running against John Barrow and Jane Harman. Please take a look at what we're trying to do at the link just above. Are these the kinds of people-- regardless of what party they happen to claim they're in-- you want to see in leadership positions in our country?

Even If Palin Does Think Afghan Policy Is Wrong, It Doesn't Make It Right

2009-11-18T18:00:00.000-08:00

Palin & Karzai-- trading tips on voter fraud?

Despite her massive unpopularity-- and status, to non-teabaggers, as a rather embarrassing and borderline outré vaudeville act-- Sarah Palin's proclamation that Obama is wrong on Afghanistan won't make it any easier for him to be perceived as being correct. Most Americans say the war isn't worth fighting-- and they're correct. A huckster and a self-proclaimed rogue, Palin has turned herself into a classic American crank whose opinions are sought as entertainment. She'll pontificate about teenager Levi's sexuality in one sentence and in the next, without skipping a beat, weigh in on the most profound foreign policy matters facing the nation. She's the walking embodiment of Charles Pierce's American Idiot. But she's not enough of a distraction, not even this week in full huckster mode, to get Obama off the hook. He's still got to figure out what to do about Afghanistan.

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, who served two tours of duty there, the second as head of the Combined Forces Command, is telling Obama-- as is General Wesley Clark-- that its a hopeless mess and we should get out, and fast. Fluent in Chinese, he's a West Point graduate with advanced degrees from Harvard and Stanford. He has a far better understanding of Afghanistan than the hawkish and political Stanley McChrystal.

It seems that General McChrystal is on a special mission based on a specific philosophy of warfare and that General Eikenberry is performing his duty according to his current assignment with an ongoing evaluation of the various players and facts at hand. McChrystal's job has been killing what Seymour Hersh called "enemies of the state" in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's not finished. They're still out there. He made commitments to the 400 officers and soldiers that he hand-picked. He doesn't want to let them down.

Given his history and assignments before his command role, everything he's done suggests that he would want to finish the job. Why wouldn't he push for as many more troops as he can get?
But the real questions are: does finishing that job make any sense and will more troops help finish the job?

Eikenberry's position has evolved over time. He once got along with Karzai, but, as ambassador, during the recent presidential campaign, he appeared with the opposition candidates who accused Karzai of election fraud in the first election and pushed Karzai to overturn the initial disputed results that would have ruled out a runoff election.

Can you recall any U.S. ambassador ever showing up at a press conference with opposition candidates challenging the legitimacy of an election?

Eikenberry was interviewed on NPR just two days after he testified before Congress in 2007. He said, "The Taliban military forces remain a much weaker enemy. Whenever the Taliban masses on the battlefield, those Taliban forces are defeated, always in very short order." He went on to offer this: "… the challenge has been building the state of Afghanistan, extending the writ of governance. That has been a very steady growth of progress that we've had with the government of Afghanistan over the last six years" NPR Feb. 13, 2007.

Two and a half years later, General Eikenberry has "expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country" just at the point when President Obama was said to be announcing some level of troop increases. The key to success, as outlined by the general previously, was real progress in responsive and trustworthy civil governance that delivers for the people.

In his congressional testimony, Eikenberry quoted a poll in which, "almost 90% of the Afghan people consider reconstruction and economic development the most important requirement to improve their quality of life."

It is fair to assume that the illegitimate election played a major role in Eikenberry's questions about the future of the Afghanistan military mission. His recommendations represent a huge step given the stakes for the NATO military effort and the larger concerns about the nation. Other factors may have included the McChrystal emphasis killing "bad guys" and the inevitable deaths of innocents paired with lackluster U.S. financial support for Afghan rebuilding and development.

General Eikenberry is both a soldier and scholar of history and political science. He knows the history of occupations that fail to deliver for the populace and he's telling us right now that the U.S. can't succeed with more military forces in a nation run by an illegitimate president who has been exposed for election fraud. More troops are not the solution. In his view, success requires stronger governance and real democracy which means transparent elections free of fraud.

Yesterday Alan Khazei, a candidate to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, came out strongly for a drawdown in Afghanistan. And more important, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Raúl Grijalva, Michael Honda, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee and James McGovern, sent Obama a respectful letter asking for a meeting to help him come to the right decision on Afghanistan. All five were among the courageous 32 Democrats who opposed his supplemental war budget in June. None will vote for any further money for Afghanistan without a disengagement strategy and timeline. Click on the image to get a clear photocopy of the letter itself:

Please consider giving a re-election contribution, even a $10 or $20 one, to any of the 32 Democrats working to end this catastrophe. Yep, you actually can help save this country-- and our president-- from a real disaster.

Populist anger can advance progressive values; OR, that anger can be ceded to the cruel manipulators of the Right

2009-11-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

"[A] battle is on right now between the Right and Left to offer an enraged America a populist way to channel its justifiable anger. . . . [A] cautious and sometimes corrupt Democratic Party has become the Washington Establishment via its overwhelming wins in 2006 and 2008. That means it becomes harder to harness anti-establishment fervor in a backlash election climate. . . . On almost every issue, the right is way out of step with America. In that sense, our charge is simply delivering on the progressive promises we've been making. . . . That's why those who berate progressive pressure against Obama and Democrats are so wrong in their outlook. If we don't mount that pressure and Democrats therefore do not deliver, we will help build the Armey/Palin movement into something even more dangerous."

-- David Sirota, in an OpenLeft post today,

"Taking Right-Wing Economic Populism Seriously"

by Ken

There's so much blatant nonsense and cynical astroturf-type manipulation permeating the teabaggers' movement that it's easy to pay too little attention to what's real about it. Oh, I don't think there's much of anything real about the specific complaints and accusations, but the anger and even desperation behind them, which is of course the object and vehicle of all that manipulation, is real, and is going to have consequences that we need to understand, prepare for, and ideally align -- at least to some extent -- with a more rational political agenda.

Some really smart online friends and colleagues have been focusing a lot of attention in this direction lately, and as I digest it and get some requisite permissions, I want to share some of that in hopes of opening up a more positive discussion. Right now I want to start with a new column by our friend David Sirota. In addition to being an exceptionally clear thinker, dogged reporter, and terrific writer, David has an uncanny habit of snagging the issues we should really be talking about, as opposed to the ones that have been manipulated into "burning" issues by clever special interests.

He has been focused on the nationwide wave of populist anger for years now. He was perhaps the only observer of the 2008 presidential election who looked at the politics of it from this perspective, noticing that it was almost entirely Republican candidates, notably Minister Mike Huckabee, who were tapping into it, while the Democratic candidates almost all hunkered down inside the corporatist bunker.

And of course David wrote an entire book on the subject: The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.

I wrote several posts about The Uprising while I was reading it, and returned to it a year ago in a post about New York State's Working Families Party, one of the manifestations of the populist uprising that David had written about in the book:

I've been promising for some time to write about David Sirota's remarkable book, The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.What makes it so hard to write about is that the many strands of that populist revolt David's referring to have basically nothing in common except that they have arrived at a point of open revolt against the current distribution, or rather concentration, of economic and political power in the U.S.

What makes the book so remarkable is David's ability as a reporter to get "inside" each of these movements, to enable us to understand and even feel the source of each one's discontent and how this has led to the form that has developed.

The reaction of most of the people I tried to tell about The Uprising was an assumption that the author was claiming that these disparate groups were going to meld into a political movement. Of course he wasn't saying that at all, although he did allow himself some speculation as to how at least some of those groups, which might not seem natural allies, might yet find common political ground. Once people discovered that the book wasn't claiming any such single, clearcut vision of what this uprising was going to develop into, they lost interest.

Not surprisingly, it's David himself who has returned to The Uprising and carried it the next step into the future, in an OpenLeft post this morning. As usual with him, I'm not going to attempt to paraphrase or synopsize. When David wants to make a point, it's usually a good bet that he has found the best way to make it.

Taking Right-Wing Economic Populism Seriously

by: David Sirota
Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 09:16

It's easy to write-off batshit crazy narcissists like Dick Armey and Sarah Palin as what they are: Batshit crazy narcissists. But as Wellstone Action's Jeff Blodgett reminds us in this blog post, Armey/Palin-ism does represent something real and potentially powerful, even if it is insane.

Blodgett is a former aide and campaign manager for Paul Wellstone, so he knows a little bit about progressive movement building and the double-edged sword that is populism. Here's what he sees:
ECONOMIC CONSERVATIVES ARE IN ASCENDANCE -- growing in influence and setting strategy for the right. The social religious wing, dominant in the Bush administration, has become less effective and relevant. Their message is angry, populist, and economic: FreedomWorks' slogan is: Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom. Government takeover is their bogeyman. In 2010, they will focus on exploiting the economic pain in the country, railing against spending and taxes, and blaming all government and certain incumbents.

CONSERVATIVES ARE BORROWING FROM THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT. The NYT article quotes FreedomWorks staff saying that they are making close study of Saul Alinsky and other community organizers. Like progressives, the other side is increasing conservative candidate development (NY-23 and in GOP primaries all over the country), and improving their grassroots advocacy skills (like the impression made at August town halls).

THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT CONTINUES TO BE BETTER FUNDED. FreedomWorks, just one of many groups, easily raised $7 million from donors in 2008, including single gifts of $1 million and $750,000. The Leadership Institute, the premier training center for the right, sustains an $8 million dollar annual budget--at least twice the budget of any of comparable groups (like Wellstone Action) on the progressive side. Americans for Prosperity, another key conservative economic group has 73 staff people nationally and in 20 states.

In the short term, of course, this frothing movement may temporarily self-destruct by virtue of being publicly represented by incoherent and politically unpalatable freaks like Armey and Palin. But in the long term, it's scary stuff, because it represents one expression of authentic anger in the country at large.

As I wrote in my book, The Uprising, populism is value neutral - there's conservative populism and there's progressive populism; there's productive populism and there's destructive populism. And so a battle is on right now between the Right and Left to offer an enraged America a populist way to channel its justifiable anger.

Progressives can win this fight - but we face some disadvantages, not the least of which is that a cautious and sometimes corrupt Democratic Party has become the Washington Establishment via its overwhelming wins in 2006 and 2008. That means it becomes harder to harness anti-establishment fervor in a backlash election climate.

It doesn't, however, mean we cannot defeat the Armey/Palin phenomenon. On almost every issue, the right is way out of step with America. In that sense, our charge is simply delivering on the progressive promises we've been making, while their charge is the much more difficult task of convincing/misleading America into supporting positions the country doesn't already support.

That's why those who berate progressive pressure against Obama and Democrats are so wrong in their outlook. If we don't mount that pressure and Democrats therefore do not deliver, we will help build the Armey/Palin movement into something even more dangerous.

There They Go Again: Foxsuckers

2009-11-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

-by NOAH

Well, it just seems that President Obama can’t leave our country without the Republikook Party spitting and foaming at the their whining gangrenous pieholes about some sort of imaginary continuing “Apology Tour” that our President is supposedly undertaking in order to turn us into a nation of commiemuslimpinkofeminazihomos who will end up breeding ourselves into a race of giant, dark-hued and big afro-ed Angela Davis look-alikes in a pair of jackboots, machete holster, and a reasonable health care policy in one hand and a fully motorized dildo in the other.

This Monday morning, The Padded Cell Channel’s “Fox & Fiends” show invited Dubya’s ever-flatulent gasbag propagandista Karl Rove on to tsk-tsk about President Obama going to Japan and offering a courtesy bow to Japan’s Emperor; really important stuff! Show co-host Steve “Dufus” Doocy jumped in with the utterly baseless claim that shock, horror, such things simply are not done, the sky will fall, etc., etc. What seemed to irk the half-witted intellect of Steve Dufus the most was that it was “a very deep bow.” “deep," and, probing, too, I bet, eh Stevie? He went on to brazenly bullshit (What else do they do on FOX?) that there “is a long standing precedent going back to the founding of the republican (Take note of the ‘n’. This is not a typo.) American Presidents don’t bow to anybody.” In a perfect Freudian slip, he actually does say ‘republican’ where rational people would say ‘republic’. Like a good little Murdoch puppet boy, Dufus prattles on about previously perceived grievances, including Obama having once bowed to Saudi King Abdullah. The simultaneous visual on the screen features Obama and the Saudi King as Dufous says “There’s Abdullah right there. He’s goin' down”. Interesting choice of words, Stevie, very interesting. We read you loud and clear. I am getting your “sublublibminal” massage! But, I am surprised that your producer folks didn’t fade up the 70s wah-wah porno music as you spoke.

This is how stupid the FOX people think their gullible and easily led around by the nose viewers are. Rupert Murdoch and FOX have built a little empire out of playing viewers for suckers and fools. FOX will say that it covers stories that other media do not. That’s because they often don’t exist until they make them up. They will create a non-story and treat it as news of importance. As is often the case, the story is just that, a story; a mountain made from a molehill or a complete fiction pulled out of thin air or Sean Insanity’s fat ass. It is a story with a designed agenda. In this case it is one designed to push fear of a leader who will willfully do us all in. The screen shows a line that reads “Gesture in Japan under fire”. Well, yes, at Fox, if not elsewhere, but, maybe, soon in the rest of the media if Fox is successful in seeding this story out to the only slightly saner media world. This is how it works in Murdoch land; fabricate, distort, and spread. On cue, Rove chirps in that Obama’s gesture is “inappropriate”, going on about “that deep bow from the waist”, “weakness”, “world-wide apology tour”, “deep bow from the waist” again, “values”, blah, blah, blah; the usual hot air that you get from people who resent that they no longer walk the corridors of power and are reduced to playing second banana to the likes of the simpletons on FOX. Relax Karl. You’ve got it easy and you know it. If I were in Doocy’s chair, I’d ask you why you and your cronies aren’t in jail for what you did to Governor Siegelman, election theft, outing agents or whatever. Whatsamatter gasboy, can’t get your boyfriends in the pressroom anymore? Inappropriate, my ass. Obama isn’t the one who needs to go on an apology tour.

The reality is that a bow goes a long way in Japan and elsewhere. It is traditional and honorable diplomatic protocol. It’s about people showing respect for others. That’s something the loonsquads of the right have very little, if any, familiarity with and it troubles them greatly, as well it should. Maybe, I should be more sympathetic and understanding of bitter old Karl. He probably can’t look at Obama bowing without being reminded of the day that the either hated librul media, or some private dicks that he had hired, snapped these caught in the act photos of Bush kissing an arab. Did these get him all hot with jealous rage, or just all hot?

I can’t wait to hear what Slimebaugh has to say about this whole bowing thing. No doubt his stock phrases/obsessions “bend over,” “grab your heels” and similar will be included. Sean Insanity is running a picture caption contest on his site. Fox Nation points out that the President’s wife only patted England’s Queen “on the back”, but I seem to remember the loonies going nuts about her touching the Queen. Complete crackpot site Newsmax runs with an outright lie with a Daniel Ruddy screed headlined “No American President Ever Bowed to a Foreign Leader- Until Now”. He also questions President Obama’s motives (sinister, no doubt) in doing so. Ruddy happens to have a new book on American History coming out through Harper Collins. Shall I question their motives? I sure won’t be reading the book if today’s fiction by Ruddy is any indication of what I can expect, and, it is. Do any of these cretins remember Dubya groping the head of Germany or his dad puking in the lap of Japan’s Prime Minister? Or even Nixon bowing to Emperor Hirohito, on American soil no less? Probably not, after all, memory requires some megs in the cabeza.

There’s nothing odd or unusual about Presidential bowing. Even republican presidents have done it, as you can see with President Eisenhower and French President Charles De Gaulle below. By the way, those two didn’t exactly care for each other, but Ike was a man of common sense, not a bitter, frustrated, sputtering gasbag. Near the end of WWII. Ike even knew the value of letting De Gaulle lead French troops into Paris, right under the Arc de Triomphe, ahead of the troops who had a lot more to do with liberating France from the Germans. It’s called diplomacy and it earned the gratitude and cooperation of De Gaulle for over 20 years as the world tried to rebuild. The far right of Ike’s day thought that he, too, was a commie, or at least a sympathizer. The difference is that now the devious far right evil doers have their own TV station. Maybe diplomacy doesn’t let you get your rocks off in quite the same way. And maybe it doesn’t fill you with the sense of instant gratification that bombs bursting in air does, but, diplomacy works more often. Besides, it sure beats stuffing your crotch, donning a manly flight suit and landing on an aircraft carrier to stand in front of a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner. Here’s another word for Karl and Steve: Substance. Look it up in the dictionary, even if you have to learn the alphabet first.

Mainstream Conservatives Slap Down Jeff Sessions' Obstructionist Filibuster

2009-11-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Rushin' to get his makeup right, Sessions left his sheet & hood home

After spitefully holding his nomination up for nearly nine months, the dominant obstructionist wing of the Republican Senate caucus was dealt a severe setback today when even the most reactionary and cowardly Democrats who often join GOP crusades against sanity-- Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Claire McCaskill to be precise-- stuck with their own party and 10 mainstream conservatives abandoned Jeff Sessions' harebrained filibuster of Judge David Hamilton. His nomination was confirmed 70-29. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (KKK-AL), still vengeful because of his own rejection for a judgeship in 1986 when it came out that his bigotry was rooted in his relationship to the Klan, has vowed to obstruct every Obama judicial nomination.

This time he lost conservative members of his own caucus who felt that his pointless and childish game-playing was making the Republican Party look bad to mainstream voters. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dick Lugar (R-IN), John Thune (R-SD), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) all voted to confirm judge Hamilton, as did Republican-leaning Independent Joe Lieberman. Once again, Session was left looking like the extremist idiot and loser that he is.

The American Bar Association rated Hamilton "well qualified." But even the hard right Federalist Society of Indiana endorsed him-- as did legitimate editorial boards across the country. And one of the Senate's worst racists and most blatant bigots condemned Sessions' ill-conceived strategy... Jeff Sessions in 2003:

Of the many reasons why we shouldn't have a filibuster, an important one is the Article I of the Constitution. It says the Senate shall advise and consent on treaties by a two-thirds vote, and simply "shall advise and consent" on nominations.

Historically, we have understood that provision to mean-- and I think there is no doubt the Founders understood that to mean-- that a treaty confirmation requires a two-thirds vote, but confirmation of a judicial nomination requires only a simple majority vote. That is why we have never had a filibuster. People on both sides of the aisle have understood it to be wrong. They have understood it to be in violation of the Constitution.

As Senator Hatch has said, the complaint suggesting there was a filibuster on the Fortas nomination is not really correct. They had debate for several days. Apparently, when the votes were counted, it was clear that considering those who were absent, there were enough votes to defeat the nomination, and the nomination was withdrawn.

So there has never really been a filibuster of a judicial nominee in the Senate until now, when our Democratic colleagues have decided to change the ground rules on confirmation. They have said so and done so openly, and seem to be little concerned that the Constitution may be violated in the process.

Mr. President, these nominees are entitled to an up-and-down vote. If a Member does not like them, he or she can vote against them. But it is time to move these nominees. How can they defend voting against nominees of the quality of Priscilla Owen or Miguel Estrada? How can they justify opposing a man of such integrity, ability, patriotism, and courage as Attorney General Bill Pryor, a man of faith and integrity? These are questions that should be answered on the floor. Let us discuss these nominees' records here. And then, let us just vote. That is what the Constitution and Senate tradition demand of us.

I think the American people are getting engaged, and they are telling us "we are tired of obstructionism," "we are tired of delays," and "we believe these nominees deserve an up-and-down vote." I could not agree more.

This bumbling imbecile and idiot is the best the Republicans can come up with to lead their members on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

UPDATE: Hamilton Confirmed

Only one Republican, Dick Lugar, joined every Democrat today in confirming David Hamilton to Seventh Court of Appeals.

KKK, Know Nothings, Teabaggers, Fascists... You Think There's A Difference? They're All At The Core Of Movement Conservatism

2009-11-17T18:00:00.000-08:00

The far right has never been friendly territory for Jews

It's always a little jarring to watch the small but determined handful of befuddled Jews flirting-- for one reason or another-- with the right-wing elements that have been trying to exterminate them since Biblical times. There were even confused Jewish fascistswho supported Hitler and Mussolini (and wound up being killed by those they supported). Their political posterity in contemporary American politics is Eric Cantor (R-VA), Sheldon Adelson, Mel Sembler, Scooter Libby and a motley gaggle of neo-fascist hate talk media types from Irving and William Kristol to Mark Levin, Michael Savage and Michael Medved, as well as members of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

In 1981 the Ramones released their sixth album, Pleasant Dreams, which included The KKK Took My Baby Away, a song by Joey Ramone, who was Jewish and progressive, about the theft of his girlfriend by Johnny Ramone, who was non-Jewish and conservative. I was a dj in San Francisco at the time and was, at least in the beginning, reticent about playing it. Eventually, though, people started understanding that it wasn't supporting the KKK, and it became a big hit on our station. Something similar happened 5 years later when they released Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, commemorating Reagan's tribute to SS troops in Germany. It came out in the U.K. first, and Warner Bros was reluctant to even release it in America-- and waited a year!

Last night was the closing of a hugely successful play in L.A., a musical in fact, called Parade, which starred one of my neighbors, T.R. Knight. If you know him at all, you probably know him in his scrubs as Dr. George O'Malley from Grey's Anatomy, although he received spectacular reviews in the role of Leo Frank, a Jewish resident of Atlanta who was lynched by the KKK in 1915. Extreme right-wing Jews like Eric Cantor and Michael Savage should keep in mind the barely below-the-surface virulent anti-Semitism their "allies" in the conservative movement have always harbored.

In 1984 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, still a viciously right-wing and thuggish outfit, denied Frank a posthumous pardon. I doubt too many teabaggers have joined that movement because they want to kill anyone; give them time. Here's a great video of the whole Leo Frank story and how the far right works:

Holy Joe, Rudy, and Rush know you don't have to pay a price for public lying. But truth-telling can kill you -- ask Greg Craig

2009-11-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

When it comes to manipulating a terror-prone public with lies and obfuscations, Rudy gives Rush a run for his money.

by Ken

We say we want pols who "say what they mean and mean what they say," but we really don't, do we? Americans want lies. They demand lies. They want lies that will make them feel better than reality. Ironically, the lies they like best are usually ones that you'd think would make them feel worse, feeding on their deep-set terrors, rage, and hatred. But it turns out that, if you stoke those internal demons right, many Americans enjoy suffering from them -- and it takes their minds off the absence of any good news to offer them from reality. (Is it any wonder they've developed such contempt for reality?)

At the same time, we easily forget why public figures tend to be so guarded about saying what they mean and meaning what they say. It has a way of biting you in the butt.

Case in point: In yesterday's Washington Post our pal Al Kamen was reflecting on the unceremonious departure of White House Counsel Greg Craig, and recalled a detail he had previously reported:

Too much passion

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, commenting Friday on the long-expected resignation of White House Counsel Greg Craig, told reporters that Craig never wanted to be an administration lawyer.

"Greg is, as you know, somebody who served in a previous administration in foreign policy. That's his passion," Gibbs said. He called Craig a "reluctant acceptor" of the counsel position.

So why didn't he land a foreign policy job? we wondered. And why can't he get one now?

Oh, yeah. Forgot about this item we wrote just after the election, the one about Craig's March 2008 hit memo on Clinton, his law school classmate and longtime pal.

After a passing shot at Clinton's "failed effort" on health insurance, Craig, a senior State Department staffer during her husband's presidency, argued that her "claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated." He then delivers a claim-by-claim rebuttal, from her helping to broker the peace in Northern Ireland -- "gross exaggeration" -- to helping open Kosovo's borders, to urging President Bill Clinton to intervene in Rwanda, and so on, including that sniper-fire thing in Bosnia.

In contrast, Obama, Craig wrote, "does not use false charges and exaggerated claims to play politics with national security." Whew. Brutal.

Once Clinton was named secretary of state, a foreign policy job for Craig was not gonna happen. And you can bet she hasn't forgotten.

Which should be an object lesson in just how careful you have have to be if you want to make your way through the corridors of power. Look, anyone who signs on to a presidential campaign knows he/she is rolling the dice. If your candidate wins, and the People Who Matter see you as having made an important contribution, your résumé should find its way into the elite pile for People to Be Taken Care Of. It goes without saying that if you bet on a losing candidate, you're up Doody Creek, and you're going to have to be a master of fancy footwork or plain old-fashioned groveling and butt-kissing.

According to those traditional terms, Greg Craig was just playing the game. No one is suggesting that anything he wrote in the fateful memo was untrue, and if it was, well, impolitic, he had every reason to think his was a winning gamble when, first, his candidate bested Senator Clinton for the Democratic nomination and, then, won the election. That, surely, should have been his cue to put those final polishing touches on the réseumé, and maybe craft a covering letter that made prominent mention of that memo of his that did such damage to the rival candidate's claims of foreign-policy expertise.

Wouldn't you just like to see videotape of the first moment that player Craig learned that for real the president-elect was considering Senator Clinton as his secretary of state? I think we can understand it totally from her standpoint too. If you had someone who did to you what Greg Craig did to her, and you then found yourself in a position to influence his hirability, would you have any impulse to let bygones be bygones? No, I didn't think so. Of course the president appoints scads of people to foreign-policy-related jobs that aren't in the State Dept. and aren't within the chain of command of the secretary of state. It's for considerations like this that "over my dead body" and other similar expressions of discouragement were crafted.

I haven't noticed any rush by the White House to find another spot for our Greg. If he wants another government job, it's looking as if he's going to have to wait for most of not all of the people in the present administration to move on to other opportunities, and then find a presidential candidate to back, and hope his good service in a winning campaign effort is recognized with a nice offer. (Probably not White House counsel.) If he hedges his bets a little more next time around, I think we would all understand.

ANNALS OF THE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Usually when public figures publicly pull their punches, or just plain lie, it's not their fellow pols they have in mind; they're pitchin propaganda to the proles. And when they do it skillfully, it isn't always easy to debunk the fiction.

Yesterday Howie and I were e-chatting about which of us might venture to say something about the latest bogus wingnut issue: the totally manufactured threat to national security posed by (a) relocating Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons and (b) actually trying such of them as are to be tried in U.S. courts. The first part is so pathetically stupid that even some of the nuttiest of the wingnuts are refusing to go along. As Sam Stein reported yesterday on Huffpost:

[O]n Sunday, a group of highly respected conservative figures lent their support to the transfer, calling it necessary to "preserve national security" while simultaneously avoiding "sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition."

In a joint statement prepared by the Constitution Project, David Keene, founder of American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, and former representative and presidential candidate Bob Barr say moving suspected terrorists to the Thomson, Illinois prison facility, "makes good sense." Taxpayers, they note, have already invested $145 million in the facility, which has been "little used." And the surrounding community, they add, could benefit from increased employment once the prison becomes filled.

"The scaremongering about these issues should stop," they add, noting that there is "absolutely no reason to fear that prisoners will escape or be released into their communities."

To believe otherwise, you have to be arguing that American prisons are incapable of securing prisoners, which is an especially loony argument to come from the right-wing loonies, because prisons are the American institution they believe most fervently in. In economic terms, prison-building is about as close as Republicans have come to a jobs policy since the Great Depression.

But more important, to argue that there's a security risk in moving detainees to U.S. prisons, you are now officially declaring yourself nuttier than Grover Norquist. Until now surely our Grover would have stood as the closest a human mind has ever approached scientifically absolute nuttiness.

And yet, as Sam also reported, leading GOP Senate candidate Rep. Mark Kirk has already positioned himself at the front of the line of scumbag nutjobs seeking to terrify voters for electoral advantage, declaring, ""As home to America's tallest building, we should not invite Al Qaeda to make Illinois its number one target." At some point, are we going to have to have a Butterfly-Net Brigade to get these people off the streets and into the institutional care they need?

It's been fascinating watching the model of the New Conservatism emerge on its four-legged base of insanity, stupidity, dishonesty, and criminal predation. In each domain it's been like watching gifted athletes pass memorable milestones on their way to breaking existing records. On the path to utter insanity, the "Just Say No" Republicans have now left Grover Norquist in the dust.

The issue of proper trials, as with the DoJ's announced intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others, is trickier. The argument against is just as bogus, but committed and brazen liars -- you know, people devoid of the tiniest shred of ethics or indeed any kind of principles, like Holy Joe Lieberman, Rudy Giuliani, and Rush Limbaugh -- know they can have a field day hoodwinking Americans who are too lazy to use their brains, or feel that it's an infringement on their rights even to ask them to.

Due process of law is of course supposed to be one of the unshakable pillars on which the American republic is built. But of course Rudy's and Holy Joe's boundless hatred of everything America stands for makes it easy for them to make a mockery of our most basic principles. It could be that they're angry because they thought in eight years the Bush regime had once and for all dismantled the concept of American justice, one of the things about our system that used to be the envy of the world. Of course it's meaningless to people whose preference is to transform America into a jackbooted ultra-right-wing dictatorship.

But these issues are much easier to obfuscate, involving as they do many principles, like "justice" and "due process," that are too abstract for processing by, say, the average Fox viewer. I don't imagine that Joe and Rudy and Rush are telling them that the real obstacles to civilian trials for the Guantanamo detainees is the rampant lawlessness of our government in its grotesquely incompetent investigation of the suspects. The real challenge is going to be scraping together enough evidence that can pass the basic tests of legality and fairness that the Roberts Court hasn't had enough time to strip away.

No, the Far Right propagandists aren't likely to dwell on that. (Actually, Rudy does raise the issue, but he manages to make it sound like due process is an evil terrorist plot. That's pretty inventive, but I have a feeling it may be too subtle for the target audience. So maybe I was wrong, and Rudy isn't as skilled at this as Rush.) They prefer to play on the psychotic delusions of crap-brained entertainments like 24, which similarly trades on the stupidity and gullibility of its viewers to fob off its lies. Whether they do it for ratings or votes, what the propagandists of the Far Right have incommon is that they're past masters at using terror to scare the bejezus out of their sheeplike countrymen. When it suits their purposes, the devils of the Far Right like to portray liberals as weak-kneed nervous nellies. In fact, nobody is more cringingly gutless than the red-blooded, fag-hating, macho-in-their-own-minds white males who are the standard targets of the Far Right demagogues. These people love to be scared out of their panties.

If you'd like some more reasoned discussion of the detainee-trial issue, our friends at Think Progress have done a bang-up job in a post piquantly titled "Faith in Our Justice System" in today's edition of The Progress Report. If you're not signed up to receive The Progress Report daily, it's one of the smarter and more useful things you can find in your e-mailbox, and it's a snap to sign up for.

With regard to the patented Fox process of manipulating its gullible viewers, by the way, Noah has a post coming up tomorrow I think you'll really enjoy.

Has Obama Got What It Takes To Say No To The Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower Warned Us About?

2009-11-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

Last month 25% of Brits polled wanted their troops out of Afghanistan asap. Last week it was 63% who had figured out this war was useless. And now the figure is 71%. This weekend the U.S. media was trumpeting the decision by Germany to send another 100 troops to give a hand to the 30-40,000 Obama is about to announce he's sending to that hellhole. A report from Oxfam has soured the British public on the whole mess.

The powerful dossier by the aid agency reveals how women and children in Afghanistan are bearing the brunt of the ongoing conflict, undermining the international community's claims that they are the very people being helped by the West's activities.

Its contents will add to mounting concerns among the public, and in some quarters of the military and the House of Commons, that the US and the UK are fighting an ill-conceived and ill-judged war that has left as many as 32,000 Afghans dead and 235,000 displaced.

As if by clockwork, the increasingly less popular British prime minister, Gordon Brown, may have found a way to turn the opinion polls around for himself. Today's he's calling for a summit of NATO leaders to discuss an end to the occupation of Afghanistan... eventually. Still, as Steve Hynd pointed out, Brown certainly wouldn't have made that call without first consulting with Obama, possibly an indication that Obama is realizing he has to end this mess-- and soon.

Reading about Obama's horrible dilemma in Afghanistan keeps making me think about how the Vietnam War destroyed LBJ's presidency-- if not his life. I recall a description I read in Rick Perlstein's brilliant and startling predictive Nixonland:

While Americans read in Time about the light at the end of the tunnel, in Saigon women secreted guns, ammunitions, land mines, and grenades in flower baskets and laundry bundles, and spies set up as taxi drivers and noodle sellers prepared to breach the U.S. embassy. They succeeded-- as 85,000 troops of the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese army overran thirty-nine of forty-four South Vietnamese provincial capitals. The Tet Offensive: the tidal wave dousing the light at the end of the tunnel.

I've spent time in Afghanistan and Vietnam. If I had to pick between the two to fight, I'd pick the Vietnamese... hands down. I think Rudyard Kipling would agree:

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier."

Sounds worse than the grenades in the flower basket. Kipling also said: "Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old." And yesterday's L.A. Times reiterated what this unwinnable war is costing, something the Republicans and Blue Dogs never seem to mind quite as much as they do when one discusses passing healthcare reform.

The White House Budget Office estimates that it will cost about $1 million for each additional soldier sent to Afghanistan. So, a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops -- which is what Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal is recommending -- would add $30 billion to $40 billion a year to the deficit.

At the Pentagon, the comptroller disagrees, estimating the cost of deploying and maintaining one soldier in Afghanistan for a full year at $500,000. So, bottom line would be $15 billion to $20 billion... An escalation in military spending could put Obama in the awkward position of winning Republican votes for the budget while losing Democratic ones for the policy. And a drain on the nation's bottom line also could imperil domestic programs favored by the White House.

A new surge, said Wisconsin Democrat David Obey, would "drain the spirit of the country ... as well as drain the U.S. Treasury, it would devour virtually any other priorities that the president or anyone in Congress had."

Obey, the powerful chair of the House Appropriations Committee, has promised that June's supplemental war budget was the last one. I can't imagine Obama allowing himself to be in the position of having to use pay-as-you-go for spending $30-40 billion. And the only way a substantial number of Democrats are going to agree to any money for Afghanistan is if it comes with a well-conceieved strategy and timeline for exiting. Now restive conservative Republicans are starting to desert Obama on Afghanistan, something that was inevitable:

Melissa Bean Draws A Democratic Primary Challenger... Sort Of

2009-11-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

That's Jonathan Farnick on the right

Melissa Bean never joined the Blue Dog caucus; she's too smart for painting that kind of a target on his back. But her record in Congress has been just as bad-- and in some cases worse-- than most Blue Dogs. The Democratic darling of the Chamber of Commerce, Bean is a quintessential corporate Dem, representing IL-08, suburbs northwest of Chicago, including Schaumburg, a city of corporate headquarters. Gore and Kerry both lost badly to Bush there but Obama defeated McCain 56-43%. This year Bean's ProgressivePunch score on crucial, substantive votes, 49.02, is tied with conservatives Jerry Costello and Dan Lipinski, as second most wretched, beaten only by Bill Foster (35.29), among Illinois Democrats. Last week the Daily Herald took an early look at her race for re-election, pointing out the danger from disaffected Democrats. There are already 8 challengers for her seat, 6 of whom are Republicans (who will face off in a primary February 2).

Progressive, anti-war candidate Bill Scheurer is running as the Green Party nominee and Jonathan Farnick is opposing Bean in the Democratic primary. Yesterday Farnick sent DWT a copy of a rather strange letter, politically speaking, he sent to Bean:

Dear Representative Bean,

I am writing to you as I have no other recourse at this time. I am a constituent in your district and have tried to get on the primary ballot to be the lone challenger for a race in the upcoming Democratic election.

On November 9th, 2009, a local Democratic committeeman from Zion, Gregory Ferritto, challenged my petitions. Should he prevail, there will be no challenger in the Democratic primary.

I have a 100% assurance that I will not be able to overturn the challenge to my petitions: I needed eight hundred ninety and collected eight hundred ninety. The only way the voters will have a choice in the primary is that Mr. Ferritto withdraws his challenge.

To be clear, Mr. Ferritto has every right to challenge, that's not being debated, it's just that, here in Illinois, election law allows for one person to be the deciding vote in a choice that the district’s residents should have.

As the Florida Supreme Court has previously said regarding votes in elections: "We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration…The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right."

I'm asking for your help to try to persuade him into dropping his objection, as I said, I have no other option, other than to withdraw my petitions, and the result is Democratic voters of having no choice in the primary.

There is a hearing about the matter tentatively set for Tuesday, November 17, 2009, so seeing to this quickly would be appreciated. I only received the notice on Friday the 13th, sorry for the short notice.

Thank you for your time and consideration of this matter.

Good luck with that. Jonathan, whose publishes the blog TOFUBO says he doesn't consider himself the best possible person for the congressional seat. "I’m not 20 years old with 20 years of experience. I’ve never held elective office. I’m not part of the local democratic machine... I have no name recognition and no money. I just know that there are a number of people in this district not happy with Rep. Bean and do want to see her replaced, but not by a Republican.

Patti Smith, A Guest Post By Sandy Pearlman

2009-11-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

photo by Jean Baptiste Mondino, 2009

The Museum of the City Of New York just put out a compendium of the 400 most essential people in NYC's 400 year history. It's quite an inspiring list and one of the names on it is Patti Smith, someone I first met long before she had recorded anything. I was visiting NYC for the first time since having moved abroad in 1969 and she was living in a loft on 23rd Street with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Sandy Pearlman, an old college chum, brought me over to meet her and later to see her and Lenny Kaye do a beat poetry session in the basement of a church. I was floored by the performance, which I told Sandy was probably too spectacular to ever capture on vinyl. I was wrong. On Thursday Patti is giving a talk on the poet William Blake at the Morgan Library. Sandy, who now teaches music at McGill University agreed to help put Patti into some kind of context for DWT readers who might not be familiar with her work.

Of the Matter of Patti Smith’s Horses, Horses

-by Sandy Pearlman
15 November, 2009

(1) Sing Goddess. Of things now past but not forgotten. It’s 1975 OK. Avery Fisher Hall, home of the NY Philharmonic, sanctified space under Bernstein & Boulez, about to be re-energized as the 1st Big-Box Venue for Patti, in honor of release of Horses. A full house is in the house. Two Goddesses have converged. The ancient antagonists, Aphrodite and Athena back at it for one more fall that’s all. Taking a back seat for once, though seated in the front row, the world’s de facto reigning sex goddess, Marilyn Chambers, the Queen of Porn herself, is perched for good view of the stage. As above so below, Aphrodite for a Day, know your competition. Above her, was the Girl with the Tie, Patti Smith, commanding the stage with full panoply of Athena’s playbook. From onset of Patti Smith’s project way back with Jesse James, live in 1971 w/Lenny Kaye (one time only and ever only so) at St Mark’s in the Bowery, the Athenoid parallelisms have been too dense for mere coincidence: Wisdom, Fury, Poetry, Guardian of Heroes, the Merciless Heart, Tamer of Horses. Athena was the archetypal Tamer of Horses. Incarnation or possession, perhaps, but, mere coincidence, never. As above so below, the dance of the archetypes begins. Needles and Pins. Two Goddesses on the track, but one of them will sing. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."

(2) That there’s no such thing as coincidence. That Patti Smith often hung w/the alien that ran the Saucer News Book Store over at 45th Street on the West Side of Manhattan. That he was not human. That Patti would wind up 30 years later, totally by coincidence, with the sign that hung outside that store, when she discovered it on a wall of the house she was about to buy. That Birdland was written with crop circles in mind and UFOs on the brain when no one even knew what crop circles were. That Wilhelm Reich, who’s at the controls, in, and whose son is inhabitant, of, Birdland, wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism. That what Patti Smith stands for, now and forever issues a challenge to the very existence of essentially pessimistic Mass Cult Fascist Art, and, by extension, to insidious propagation of those industrial music objects, which, deploy entrainment by repetition and commodity fetish compulsion as compliance mechanisms first to captivate, with exclusionary repetition like airplay, then to capture, their captive audiences. That the Cult Patti simultaneously embodies and serves is of the truth that music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation: Love Minus Zero/No Limit. That the truth is music is neither wallpaper, nor means of entrainment; neither vehicle of domination, nor of its mass psychology; neither an industry, nor industrial. That when music is treated as if it is of that kind, then what we get is more of what we’ve got now and no more Horses. That for exposing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich got run out by the 3rd Reich. That as a function of insights developed earlier around his Mass Psychology, in the late 1940’s thru mid 1950’s, Wilhelm Reich went on to dream up a comprehensive theory of the great world systems, even accounting for UFOs, the age of which was at first dawning. That this theory anticipates and encompasses the X-Filing Corpus Mulder/Sculley.,That this theory got him run off the Planet (i.e. he died in prison) by his next government, the same US government that brought leading lights of the 3rd Reich home to build Space Ships in Area 51,White Sands and Huntsville, Alabama. That Moon of Alabama written by Kurt Weill (also run out by 3rd Reich), not Steven Foster, was covered by the Doors and eventually recovered by Patti’s Crew on Brecht/Weill Night at her London Meltdown performance in 2005. That Horses as recorded at the Meltdown now closes, or, better, recapitulates with a 3rd cover (…beyond Van Morrison and Cannibal and the Headhunters…) and that cover is the Who’s My Generation. That on the night of her Meltdown, the night when Patti’s Band played all of Horses from cover to cover, for the first time, live, in the order it was recorded, Patti revealed the corrosive irony that dare not speak its name: That Our Generation had given the world George Bush.

(3) There is a geography of Horses. Its territory is divided into two parts: Birdland and The Land of a Thousand Dances. They are the same but different. Twins again, since we’ve seen this before. Twin states of mind, of matter…? As above so below. Upper and Lower Egypt, The Twin Towers, Places Charmed and Ordinary, the State of Maine and New Orleans… Twins again, but not identical. Perhaps “twinned” would be better. Each twin influences the other, but, their differential “gravities” disruptively interact to produce unpredictable dynamical outcomes. With chaotic perturbations in the orbits of their spheres of influence and dialectical chaos at their structural core. The center will not hold. Actually there is no center. This territory has no capitol city. When systems collapse like this, for better or worse, liberation attends. Not just of, and, from things. But of, and, from process itself. Including the process of language. Within the concept logic boundaries of Horses transit is possible without transition. Transformation is possible without process. To get anywhere it’s not necessary to go through somewhere. Transformation Direct, that’s the ticket. With Horses, truly the transformational generator’s on interstellar overdrive and all wormholes fully activated. There are no loops but Mobius and Patti Smith is their prophet. And the radical, clearly counterintuitive leaps of lyrical faith that characterize the “texts” of Birdland, Land, Kimberly, Free Money, Redondo Beach… all pass for intuitively logical in the final analysis. Free Money/Free Language. If poetry like music is born of invention, adventure, of paradoxical limitless individuation, then the first principal of Patti’s excellent adventure w/Horses was to bet the ranch on a poetic language that directly transforms itself by means of clearly counterintuitive unstaged leaps of word faith, that, wind up being perceived at the other end of the combinatorial wormhole as inevitable intuitive logic. As if creation of Horses somehow entailed the simultaneous running of an infinite number of data loops, and, where they stopped and started nobody knows, nor, cares, since, all their data are already mapped for previously unknown intuitive validity anyway. As if by coincidence. Or paradox of limitless individuation. Or by virtue of Patti Smith, Our Lady of Perpetual Intuition’s Greater Magdalenic Cloud of Grace. Consider, for example, the dialectical orbit of Patti Smith and Chris Carter, the X Files/Millennium Creation God. That Chris Carter would cut Lara Means’ awesomely creepy revelation overload sequence from “Time is Now,” the 1998 Millennium season finale, to the full 9 minutes and 26 seconds entirety of Land, closes the Mobius Loop that Patti opened 25 earlier with Birdland, her comprehensive premonitory dream of Domaine Mulder/Sculley, dreamt up before anyone had ever dreamt of an X File.

(4) Pulling out of Birdland. On the Glossolalia Moonlight Express. Riding the Trend Line. Somewhere near the end of the Line. Where Do Wop Shaman reveals mastery of autoexstatic trick of Singing In Tongues by singing own name to produce sax parts Charlie Parker would have played, if only not precluded by circumstances unforeseen (i.e. his death), this being Birdland after all. A function of access to the Exstatic Instruction Set, induced by consumption of Maine Blueberries under unique plasmatic moonlight environment. (Plasma being the 4th State of Matter.) The photoreactive bacterial noble rot (more noble than that of Sauternes even) on the surface of these blue berries being activated thru exposure to a one time per year manifestation of extremely limited edition light from the Harvest Moon. It was the last discovery by Wilhelm Reich, made on his farm in Maine, just before the US Government put him on ice, that blue was the color of the fundamental energy of the Universe. By 1957 he would be dead enough to discover nothing more. Speaking in Tongues was only 1st level of this Adventure. Singing in Tongues is actual bomb. Then there’s the Tonguing in Tongues. The viscous, plasmatic eroticism of Birdland. Swimming the Thick Ocean. Singing in Tongues while you swim. Be bop Do wop Re bop Zo bop. Mostly of the Voodoo Lexicon. The Glossolalia Express embarking now for Haiti, ultimately bound for Guinee, the Old Country, all by way of New Orleans. The Mobius Loop is closing. In 1962 Chris Kenner is back in New Orleans. He’s pretty much blown whatever he’s made from his monster hit, I Like It Like That, way back in 1961. Please sir, may I have another is what he says to himself. Which is how "Land of a Thousand Dances" gets to be written. Nobody really knows who’s recorded the song, or, how many times since Chris Kenner launched the trend back in 1962. Certainly its enough to be a trend, including Fats Domino, Rufus Thomas, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Little Willie and Thee Midnighters, Wilson Pickett, Tina Turner, Patti Smith, Tom Jones, Junior Walker… Notwithstanding the manifest greatness of the whole cover crew, the only versions that matter are Patti’s and the Cannibal. Alone of all their kind they discovered the dark chaos ritual inhabiting the antic shell of the song. This was always there, but, an interpreter of genius was needed to bring down the night. The first such interpretive breakthrough was made by Cannibal and the Headhunters in 1965. In an Alternative Universe this band was actually a gang in East LA. But they wanted to become a band. They were looking for simple songs, since, that was all they could play and they landed on "Land of a Thousand Dances." That was their first mistake. Their 2nd mistake would make them immortal and is outlined by Cannibal (nee Frankie Garcia) below:

“Now the original of that song, if you've ever heard it, is lyrics from beginning to end. Dances all the way through. Lots of lyrics. And on stage, I blacked out and couldn't remember the words. So I started ad-libbing, 'Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.' After the show, the other musicians went 'What were you doing?' and I said 'I don't know.' And they said 'Well do it again, it sounded real good. Could you do it again?' Finally we got to where I could remember it, but didn't care about the words anymore. I just wanted to get to that 'Na na na na na.”

What Cannibal had done was to recover the sanctified incantorial stuff still latent from Chris Kenner’s original inspiration for "Land," an old Spiritual (Are there any new ones?) called “Children Go Where I Send Thee.” Once the latent sanctified incantorial got dressed down to preverbal reptile brain sex moans coupled to a very modern prepunk amphetamine anti-Disney fright park shred track. Well, the dark side of entrainment was in the house and on your phone. In 1975 Patti Smith’s left handed re/sanctification of the Cannibal Worldview gets released upon an unsuspecting world. Recalling Cannibal’s complaint about “Lots of Lyrics” from a piece in Hit Parader or a show at the Camden Armory, she reacts the way anyone other than Emily Dickinson would, with lots more. Somewhere a young Chris Carter takes note and we’re back to where we started. Sing Goddess.

Glenn Nye-- Few Disappointments, Since There Were Never Any Expectations

2009-11-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

This weekend we looked, sadly, at Tom Perriello's failed balancing act between his attempts to do the right thing-- he was one of the only red-district freshmen who voted for cap and trade, and he did vote for the healthcare bill-- and his attempts to curry enough favor with GOP extremists to stay in office. Congressmen who live in fear everyday, though, rarely make inspiring leaders, something many of us thought we saw in Perriello the candidate. That's why so many grassroots and netroots activists supported him, and that's why so many are disappointed and disillusioned by his decision to go back on his word to protect reproductive choice for women and vote for Stupak's disastrous anti-choice amendment, a Trojan Horse the GOP managed to inflict on the House Democratic caucus.

Today's CQPolitics compares Perriello's approach with that of a far more straightforward Virginia conservative, Glenn Nye. Upon election, Nye joined the Blue Dog caucus and never made any pretense about being a progressive. Another red-district Virginia freshman, his voting record is considerably worse than Perriello's. Perriello's dismal 39.22 ProgressivePunch score almost looks reasonable next to Nye's 25.49, barely above Republican Ron Paul's 25.31. Nye is a charter member of the Boehner Boys. The only Democrats in the House who have voted with the Republicans more frequently than Nye are hard-core reactionaries Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Scott Murphy (NY), Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL) and Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL). Unless teabaggers split the Republican Party in their districts, Childers, Bright and Griffith have virtually no chance to be re-elected next year. Like Nye, they have assiduously followed a Creigh Deeds loser strategy: alienating the Democratic base while courting unimpressed Republicans.

Where Gore and Kerry had badly lost Virginia's 2nd Congressional District, Obama beat McCain 51-49% and helped Nye score a stunning 52-48% upset over reactionary backbencher Thelma Drake. He now represents Virginia's largest city, Virginia Beach. The enthusiastic Democrats who turned out for Obama and Mark Warner are unlikely to bother coming to the polls in 2010, and Nye is on the short list of Democrats most likely to lose his seat.

Perriello and Nye are taking different tacks in their voting behavior and campaign styles as they prepare to seek re-election against vigorous Republican opposition.

Perriello has been more of a populist and risk-taker in his votes and public statements. On closely divided votes, he has sided with his party more frequently than Nye even though Perriello’s district, located in the mostly rural Southside area of the state, backed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the 2008 presidential election and Nye’s district, a more geographically compact area in and around Virginia Beach, backed Barack Obama.

Perriello last year won the 5th District seat by 727 votes over Republican Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr. in what was one of the closest House elections of the 2008 cycle, while Nye won in the 2nd District by the more comfortable margin of 5 points over Republican Rep. Thelma Drake.

Nye has been running a more traditionally independent campaign that puts some distance between himself and the national party. He’s bucked Democratic leaders on some high-profile votes. Their House votes diverged most recently-- and most notably-- on the health care bill the House narrowly passed Nov. 7. Perriello voted for the bill, a rare Democratic freshman from a McCain-voting district who backed it, while Nye was among the 39 Democrats-- most of them from politically competitive districts-- who opposed it.

...“Nye is really trying to ensure that his voting record is more consistent with what he considers to be the views of the district than of the national party, and I think he’s setting the framework for an election where he’s going to run as kind of an independent person, not someone beholden to party,” said Robert Holsworth, a Virginia political analyst who runs the Web site Virginia Tomorrow.

Holsworth said Perriello, by contrast, is “really setting up an election strategy based on his constant communication with his constituents.”

“He comes home regularly. He holds town halls, public forums by the dozens. He is really trying to be extraordinarily visible in the district,” Holsworth said.

In an interview over the summer after he voted for the cap-and-trade bill, Perriello said that “when I’ve cast a vote that I think is going to be unpopular, I don’t hide behind it-- I go out and I talk about it and make my case and let the chips fall where they may.”

After he voted for the health care bill, the National Republican Congressional Committee pounced on Perriello, issuing a statement shortly after the vote that his “political career was pronounced dead” because of “political malpractice.” The NRCC has described a vote for the health care bill as a “career-ending vote” for Perriello and other politically vulnerable Democrats.

By being among the Democratic no voters, Nye shielded himself from the tough criticism that GOP leaders leveled at Perriello. Still, Republican businessman Ben Loyola, one of Nye’s two major challengers, criticized the lawmaker’s vote against an anti-abortion amendment to the health care bill that passed with the backing of Perriello and 63 other Democrats.

There's nothing Nye or Perriello could do-- short of joining the GOP-- that will make Republicans happy... and even if they became Republicans, they'd then have to face the ire of teabaggers. This morning CQPolitics also looked at the Nye-like voting record of Blue Dog Frank Kratovil, a Maryland Boehner Boy with little chance at re-election for the same reasons. Alan Grayson should offer classes to Democratic freshmen: Political Backbone 101.

The Little Girls Who Screech The Sky Is Falling... Everyday, All Day

2009-11-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

Henny Penny prepares for battle, along with Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey & Turkey Lurkey

Imagine Dick Cheney shot up with lots of botox and wearing a blond wig. Or just watch the video from Fox yesterday morning:

I had already started writing this piece before I saw that clip. So the piece isn't really about the Republican determination to drag the country back into the "good old days" of Bush-Cheney. And the "little girls" in the title have nothing to do with the Cheney girls. It refers to the Republican Senate Caucus and whoever decides what the members are supposed to do. Saturday we looked at Tuesday's impending battle over the nomination of David Hamilton, a moderate Indiana judge recommended by Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar, who has been blocked by the GOP since March. Last week Harry Reid filed a cloture motion and Tuesday, Senate Republicans have to decide how seriously they want to filibuster this one.

Yesterday, The Hill reported on a schism within the GOP over this, with hysterical extremists like Reagan's widely discredited porn and drug-obsessed Attorney General Ed Meese and neo-fascist publisher Alfred Regnery clamoring for more and unending obstructionism while other movement conservatives-- not to mention worried elected officials-- worrying that voters are getting sick and tired of overly partisan GOP jihads against all of President Obama's nominations and programs. It works for Liz Cheney, but normal Americans don't have the same point of view.

Twenty four leading conservatives have signed a memo urging Republican senators to filibuster Hamilton, setting the stage for the first protracted Senate fight over one of Obama’s judicial nominees.

Hamilton will likely receive an up-or-down vote because Democrats control 60 seats, but conservative and liberal advocates say a filibuster would be significant because it would serve as a precedent for Obama’s future judicial nominees.

But the effort to build momentum for a filibuster has become snagged on dissent within conservative circles over whether it is the right strategy. The outcome of the debate may influence how Senate Republicans, such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), proceed on other controversial nominees.

Manuel Miranda, a former Senate GOP leadership aide and chairman of Third Branch Conference, a coalition of conservative leaders that has taken an active role in several high-profile debates of judicial nominees, has questioned the push to block Hamilton.

“Respectfully, I disagree with this rally to ‘vote no on the cloture’ for this or any nominee that one would expect a Democratic president to nominate, if he sole purpose is to block or ‘stop,’ and not merely and genuinely to prolong a debate,” Miranda wrote in an e-mail to fellow conservatives.

Miranda’s group was formerly known as the National Committee to End the Judicial Filibuster. He was one of scores of conservative leaders who sent a letter in 2005 to Senate GOP leaders demanding they abolish the filibuster of judicial nominees.

While Miranda still opposes the filibuster of controversial nominees, other conservatives are warming up to the idea with a Democratic president in the White House.

Two dozen conservatives led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese have signed a letter calling on senators to invoke the justification of “extraordinary circumstances” to block Hamilton’s nomination.

“Judge Hamilton is precisely the kind of liberal judicial activist who would use our federal courts as his own superlegislature,” they wrote. “The Senate should vote no on the cloture vote to stop his nomination.”

Nine of the individuals who signed the memo also signed the 2005 letter to GOP leaders calling for them to abolish the filibuster of judicial nominees, an apparent conflict that leaves some conservatives uncomfortable.

Tuesday approval of the Senate will, no doubt, sink even further in the minds of most Americans, although it isn't likley that Republican congressional approval, currently at 19%, can possibly sink any further until after Texas and South Carolina secede.

Why The Arkansas Counties Facing The Mississippi River Are Important To YOUR Health Care

2009-11-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, after talking a little bit about our media strategy for the new Blanche Lincoln TV ad (see below) we got a lot of e-mails asking why we were spending money in Memphis, Tennessee and Springfield, Missouri. I want to clear that up. The way the cable systems cover Arkansas is by dividing it up into media markets, DMAs I think they call them. The bulk of the money we've spent in the past-- and that we're spending on the new campaign, is in Little Rock, Jonesboro and Ft Smith. However, big swathes of northwest Arkansas and eastern Arkansas are covered out of Springfield and Memphis, respectively. That doesn't mean TV viewers in those cities will see our ads. We're only buying placements for Arkansas homes that are covered as part of those markets. Amazing what they can do with cable TV targeting these days!

Our last batch of Arkansas ads kicked off with a 6AM shot on CNN's American Morning For those interested, the cost of running that spot in each of the markets was this:

Little Rock- $85.00
Jonesboro- $10.00
Ft Smith- $25.00
Memphis- $3.00
Springfield- $4.00

A spot on Larry King Live is much more expensive, primarily because they reach a larger audience. We've bought quite a few of them.

Little Rock- $155.00
Jonesboro- $12.00
Ft Smith- $90.00
Memphis- $6.00
Springfield- $6.00

Although we are gladly honoring the Color of Change boycott of Glenn Beck's racist program, we do want to reach Fox viewers have we're running spots on that network too. Their morning show, Fox & Friends, was a pretty good buy:

Little Rock- $100.00
Jonesboro- $12.00
Ft Smith- $34.00
Memphis- $4.00
Springfield- $8.00

By way of comparison, the MSNBC ads we ran last month went something like this [in the Ft Smith market]:

The Rachel Maddow Show- $27.00 (8:47PM)
Countdown- $27.00 (9:17PM)
Hardball- $17.00 (10:56PM)
The Ed Show- $18.00 (5:50PM)
Caught On Camera- $17.00 (7:09PM)
Lockup- $18.00 (6:31PM)
Honeymoon From Hell- $18.00 (4:52PM)

I haven't spent much time in Arkansas, although in 1995, when I was running Sire Records, I went to Memphis to watch Jerry Lee Lewis record Young Bloodfor the label. There were 4 memorable things we did on that trip aside from hanging with Jerry Lee. We went to see Graceland. We went to a Sunday service at the Full Gospel Tabernacle church, where Al Green is the pastor. We rode in the elevator with the ducks at the Peabody Hotel. And we went to a dog track, Southland Greyhound Park, in West Memphis, Arkansas.

West Memphis is the 12th largest city in Arkansas with a population of around 30,000. It's the county seat of Crittenden County and it gets its cable TV from across the Mississippi River in Memphis. Once the home of Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson and CNN anchor T.J. Holmes, West Memphis is a majority black city, represented by a notoriously drunk Blue Dog, Marion Berry. Only 9 of Arkansas' counties went for Obama over McCain last year and in Crittenden it wasn't even close. Obama took 57% of the vote (in a state which only gave him 39% overall). Blanche Lincoln depends on the heavily Democratic counties of eastern Arkansas to win her races-- Crittenden, Saint Francis, Lee, Phillips, Desha, Chicot and Woodruff. She couldn't win re-election without them. And the people in this part of the state are overwhelmingly in favor of meaningful healthcare reform. They favor the public option by massive numbers. And it's crucial that they understand that it's Blanche Lincoln who has been working against meaningful reform-- and doing so on behalf of the insurance and medical industries that have been flooding her campaign coffers with "contributions." Close to 90% of Democrats in these counties, all of which voted for Obama in 2008, want health care reform with the public option. Thanks, in part, to the ads Blue America has been running all summer and fall, they are now aware that Blanche Lincoln is not representing them. Interestingly, the congressman who represents much of the area, Marion Berry, broke with the Blue Dogs and did vote for the healthcare bill last weekend.

So... would you help us keep our ads running in eastern Arkansas through the Memphis media market? The most expensive spots are $8.00! And like I said earlier, CNN's American Morning is $3.00. So is Wolfie's Situation Room and Studio B With Shepard Smith, The Live Desk, and Cashin' In on Fox. Speaking of Fox, though, you could consider a splurge and let us put more ads up on Huckabee-- this is Arkansas we're talking about-- which costs $8.00 a spot.

The spot is below and here's where you can donate $3.00 or $8.00 or $30.00 or any amount you want to get it shown as many times as you'd like. And, today, everyone who donates at least $30 (that's 10 spots on CNN's American Morning) gets a thank you from Blue America-- a rare (never sold) CD of the full 2:45 version of "Have You Had Enough," which features Rickie Lee Jones with Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher of the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Is there a "Doctor Who for Dummies"? (More important, SHOULD there be one?)

2009-11-15T18:00:00.000-08:00

Don't ask me to explain, 'cause I don't care. I just know -- from watching Graham Norton last night -- that in Britain they're counting down to David Tennant's final episode as Doctor Who, "The End of Time."

by Ken

I admit that I watch my share -- okay, just possibly more than my share -- of stuff on TV that might be judged by the Supreme World TV Council as, well, "crap." (Heck, it's not all Michael Palin travel films.) But I have to say, I just don't get this whole Doctor Who thing.

SIEDBAR: IS IT A BRITISH THING?

It's not, is it? It would be easier to deal with if it were. Then I could just write it off as, well, one of those British things. You know, like maybe it's something in the water over there. Or all that driving on the wrong side of the road.

(Parenthetical aside: Many, many years ago I had the pleasure of introducing a friend -- one of the smartest people I've ever known, in both the commonsensical and book-larnin' senses -- to the pleasures of the British-style Times of London crossword puzzles that appeared in New York magazine. Of course he picked up the basics pretty quickly, but for a while there would always be a set of clues in each puzzle which he couldn't puzzle out, and being really smart, he quickly figured out the dodge: that those clues, surely, related to idiosyncratic Britishisms. Of course a certain number of them would be, and would thus be heavy going for us non-Brits. However, there weren't nearly as many of them as my friend Bruce made out. Still, it made for a tidier, more soul-satisfying explanation for not being able to solve those final clues. It's a British thing.)

So could the whole Doctor Who thing be, you know, a British thing? I'm not optimistic about this. Americans are subject to infestation, aren't they? In much the same way that it's not just trees in Holland that are subject to Dutch elm disease.

I bring this up now because one of the guests on last night's Graham Norton Show -- last night on this side of the pond, that is (but then, we're only, what?, a week or two behind the mother ship on Graham, aren't we? how often do we get that close on entertainment programming?) -- was the departing Doctor Who, David Tennant, whose final episodes, after four seasons, are rolling out now, with the last ones scheduled for around Christmas and New Year's.

In the U.K., I gather, this is a big deal, the changing of the Doctor Who guard. The new Doctor, Matt Somebody, has already become an icon. I don't know exactly how many Doctor Whos (Doctors Who?) there have been, but from the way the Brits argue over their Doctor Who preference, I get the impression that Matt Whoever is, like, No. 23. I don't know, and I don't care. (If you care, the BBC has a Doctor Who website. You'd figure the info would be there somewhere. Knock yourself out.) I get the impression that the way they cast the role now is to send casting people out like truant officers -- if you're caught home with no excuse, you have to do it.

David Tennant himself, by the way, continued to insist to Graham, as he apparently has in all his interviews, that he is a lifelong Doctor Who aficionado. (The show appears to have been going on since the days of Mary, Queen of Scots.) He swears he has always loved the show, that he could have gone on doing it forever but didn't want to risk it becoming just a job he has to go to, and that yes, he will continue watching the show with Matt Whatshisname. (Graham had asked whether deep down he didn't wish that from now on the show would be a disaster without him. He said he understood what Graham was asking, but no, he doesn't feel that way at all.)

I tried to watch a few episodes, I believe during David Tennant's residency. (He looks kind of familiar.) Every time I thought I was beginning to make sense of any of it, it fell apart. I couldn't figure out who those people were or why they were doing the stuff they were doing. What's more, and more important, I couldn't figure out any reason for caring.

I know they're big on monsters, or should I say alternative galactic life forms. But they strike me as even cheesier, and less believable than the cheapie jobs on the original Star Trek series.

Obviously I am Doctor Who-challenged. I'm not really asking to have any of this explained. I'm just looking for confirmation that when it comes to Doctor Who, it should really be Doctor Who Cares?

GRAHAM NORTON ISN'T JUST ONE OF THOSE BRITISH THINGS

In this new season, in case you didn't know, Graham has been promoted to BBC One, the big show. (He was pretty funny about this.) And while admittedly I have to be in the right frame of mind (though sometimes, if I'm in the correct wrong frame of mind, he can get me to the right frame), but I love Graham. It has nothing to do with gayness, although that's obviously part of who he is. A lot of the pop-culture references go over my head -- British things, you know -- but what I love is his wonderfully sane feeling for the zany, even preposterous side of the way we live. How many interviewers, for example, would have asked David Tennant the question about hoping that the show would go in the crapper without him?

Here's the start of a 2007 Graham show -- still on BBC Two, of course -- with David Tennant, then midway through his Doctor Who run (the clip is posted as "Part 1 of 4," so you fans can have a ball). The other guest is funnylady Jo Brand, who was just a guest in the new series.

What Do Reps Charge Lobbyists To Parrot Their Talking Points? Does It Cost Less To Just Have Them Inserted Into The Congressional Record?

2009-11-15T14:00:00.001-08:00

Change? Sure, these 2 crooks are gone, but their system is as strong and vibrant as ever

A week ago Ken and I were marveling about how one trained congressional chimpanzee after another got up on the House floor and made an identical 60 second speech about why he opposes healthcare reform. Word-for-word... on TV. They must have figured no one was watching C-SPAN and that when THE speech got played back in their districts, the voters would only hear their parrot-like version of it. It was a very different approach from the powerful and moving speeches by healthcare reform advocates like Donna Edwards (D-MD), Alan Grayson (D-FL), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Lloyd Doggett (D-TX).

Yesterday's NY Times shed new light on the same/same speeches-- both those brazenly delivered on the floor and those simply inserted into the Congressional Record-- and sent out as part of fundraising pitches to partisan supporters back home. It turns out 22 Republicans were using a speech written for them-- either wholly or in part-- by a team of lobbyists from biotech giant Genentech. And the same Genentech team, it turns out, wrote a slightly different speech for Democrats, 20 of whom used it in their inserted remarks for the Congressional Record!

In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” He said he got his statement from his staff and “did not know where they got the information from.”

Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to “revise and extend my remarks.” It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists.

The e-mail messages and their attached documents indicate that the statements were based on information supplied by Genentech employees to one of its lobbyists, Matthew L. Berzok, a lawyer at Ryan, MacKinnon, Vasapoli & Berzok who is identified as the “author” of the documents. The statements were disseminated by lobbyists at a big law firm, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

In an e-mail message to fellow lobbyists on Nov. 5, two days before the House vote, Todd M. Weiss, senior managing director of Sonnenschein, said, “We are trying to secure as many House R’s and D’s to offer this/these statements for the record as humanly possible.”

He told the lobbyists to “conduct aggressive outreach to your contacts on the Hill to see if their bosses would offer the attached statements (or an edited version) for the record.”

In recent years, Genentech’s political action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign contributions to many House members, including some who filed statements in the Congressional Record. And company employees have been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers. But Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.”

Well, of course not! The contributions from lobbyists and Big Business are always just made in the purest spirit of civicmindedness. Pascrell, who voted for the healthcare bill, has received $118,800 this year alone. Among the Republicans who used the lobbyists' wording were Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO-$71,700), Joe Wilson (R-SC- $79,150), Michael Conaway (R-TX-$15,150), Lynn Jenkins (R-KS- $26,250), and Lee Terry (R-NE-$37,681).

The boilerplate in the Congressional Record included some conversational touches, as if actually delivered on the House floor.

In the standard Democratic statement, Representative Robert A. Brady of Pennsylvania said: “Let me repeat that for some of my friends on the other side of the aisle. This bill will create high-paying, high-quality jobs in health care delivery, technology and research in the United States.”

Mr. Brady’s chief of staff, Stanley V. White, said he had received the draft statement from a lobbyist for Genentech’s parent company, Roche.

“We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record,” Mr. White said. “I asked him for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

...In nearly identical words, three Republicans-- Representatives K. Michael Conaway of Texas, Lynn Jenkins of Kansas and Lee Terry of Nebraska-- said they had criticized many provisions of the bill, and “rightfully so.”

Time Magazine's Karen Tumulty writes that the NY Times piece quoted above reminded her of another lobbyist scandal from not so long ago, especially when a Genentech lobbyist is quoted insisting "there is nothing nefarious about any of this, and that it happens all the time." She went back to a Washington Post report from October, 2005 that looked into the relationship between then Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) and the country's then king of GOP lobbyists, Jack Abramoff, both of whom were subsequently arrested, tried and thrown in prison:

A few years later, Ney paid unusual attention to another Abramoff client, the Florida gambling boat company SunCruz, which was headquartered more than 1,000 miles outside of Ney's congressional district. Abramoff and his business partner were trying to buy the cruise ship fleet from Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, but Boulis was demanding unwelcome additional terms.

In March 2000, Ney used the Congressional Record to assail Boulis.

"On the Ohio River we have gaming interests that run clean operations and provide quality entertainment," Ney wrote. "I don't want to see the actions of one bad apple in Florida, or anywhere else to affect the business aspect of this industry or hurt any innocent casino patron in our country."

Ney's remarks were orchestrated by Michael Scanlon, a former DeLay spokesman who had just been hired to work for Abramoff at Preston Gates & Ellis LLP. Scanlon had approached Ney through his chief of staff, Neil Volz, according to sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Volz has repeatedly declined to be interviewed.

A few months later, Boulis agreed in principle to sell SunCruz to Abramoff and Kidan for $147.5 million. The deal closed in the fall. But Abramoff and Kidan failed to make good on a $23 million payment owed to Boulis, court records show.

When Boulis was being difficult in the negotiations, Ney again made an official statement, this time heaping praise on Kidan.

"Since my previous statement, I have come to learn that SunCruz Casino now finds itself under new ownership and, more importantly, that its new owner has a renowned reputation for honesty and integrity," Ney said in the Congressional Record on Oct. 26, 2000. "The new owner, Mr. Adam Kidan, is most well known for his successful enterprise, Dial-a-Mattress, but he is also well known as a solid individual and a respected member of his community.

"While Mr. Kidan certainly has his hands full in his efforts to clean up SunCruz's reputation, his track record as a businessman and as a citizen lead me to believe that he will easily transform SunCruz from a questionable enterprise to an upstanding establishment that the gaming community can be proud of."

But Kidan's "track record" included a string of lawsuits, judgments, liens, bankruptcies and failed businesses. His Dial-a-Mattress franchise in the District was in bankruptcy. He had filed personal bankruptcy, and he had surrendered his law license in New York after being accused of fraud. One of his mentors, Anthony Moscatiello, was alleged by law enforcement to be an accountant for New York's Gambino crime family.

Ney later said he did not know about Kidan's background.

It's a shame the NY Times didn't bother releasing all 42 names of the members of Congress who used the lobbyists' speeches.

UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler Uncovers The Republican Script

Marcy's diligent work-- I got no further than rooting around for some YouTubes that were no where to be found-- has yielded up the exact texts the Republicans (plus quasi-Republican Blue Dog Heath Shuler) used. Shuler, who rooms with Jim DeMint in the neo-fascist Family house on C-Street, is Rahm Emanuel's idea of a Democrat: someone who votes for the party when it comes to the biannual organization and then goes and roosts on the other side of the aisle for 2 years. Marcy uses several examples penned by Genentech lobbyists. Here's the first:

Joe Wilson (R-SC)

I have criticized many of the provisions of this bill (H.R. 3962) and rightfully so. But in fairness, I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Jerry Moran (/R-KS)

Mr. Speaker, after reviewing H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, listening to the concerns of Kansans, and visiting Kansas hospitals to speak with doctors, nurses, patients, and administrators, I have concluded that this bill will be harmful to Kansas and I strongly oppose it. However, I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to patients without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Kay Granger (R-TX)

Mr. Speaker, I have criticized the majority of the provisions in H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and I will vote against it. However, I am pleased that H.R. 3962, as well as the Republican Substitute Amendment that I support, both include language relating to biosimilar products.

Lee Terry (R-NE)

Mr. Speaker, I have criticized many of the provisions of this bill and rightfully so. But in fairness, I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Ted Poe (R-TX)

I am strongly against H.R. 3962, and I will vote against it should it come to a vote on the House floor. However, I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO)

Mr. Speaker, I have criticized many of the provisions of this bill and rightfully so. However, one bi-partisan area that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower-cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country that is included in both the underlying bill, which I strongly oppose, and the Republican substitute, which I intend to support, are the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products.

Lynn Jenkins (R-KS)

Mr. Speaker, I have criticized many of the provisions of this bill and rightfully so. However, I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Mike Conaway (R-TX)

Mr. Speaker, I have criticized many of the provisions of H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and with good reason. However, I believe that the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options to consumers without destroying a healthy and functioning industry in this country.

Darrell Issa (R-CA)

Despite this bill’s many faults, I support the bill’s language establishing a market for biosimilars which balances the desire to provide cheaper biologics with the need to continue incentivizing investment in research and development.

Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

These are some of the many concerns I have with H.R. 3962, which is why I instead support the Republican health care alternative. The alternative excludes the unnecessary and burdensome excise tax in H.R. 3962, and also includes a responsible pathway for follow-on biologics by including provisions from the Pathways for Biosimilars Act, which I am a proud cosponsor of.
[snip]
But we need solutions that strike a balance in reducing health care costs, strengthening health care access, and allowing health innovators, like our biotech industry, to continue to research and improve therapies for patients.

Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)

Mr. Speaker, as you know I am opposed to the bill we are considering today for many reasons that I have articulated previously. I am pleased, however, that the bill strikes the appropriate balance on the issue of follow on biologics. This bipartisan compromise language will provide lower cost options to consumers and my constituents without destroying a healthy and functioning bio-tech industry in this country.

The Hill Gets It Wrong-- Real Democrats Embrace Healthcare Reform As Blue Dogs Slink Off To Perfect The Creigh Deeds Strategy

2009-11-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Aaron Blake seems like a decent enough writer at The Hill but sometimes... I just get the idea those headlines come right from the RNC communications department. Like yesterday's: Few Dems In Big Races Jump Headlong Into Backing Health Bill. Unless he meant "Few Blue Dogs," he sure has that wrong, wrong, wrong.

The suicidal Blue Dogs and fellow travelers (like Artur Davis, the cowardly conservative making a hopeless run for the Alabama governor's mansion) are hell bent on following the Creigh Deeds campaign strategy of turning off the Democratic base and hoping Republicans will forget they're Republicans who vote for other Republicans when they get to the ballot box. It didn't work for Deeds-- in fact it didn't work for him spectacularly, as his dumbass remark about opting out of the public option kept Democrats home on Election Day while an Obama 6 point margin over McCain turned into an 18 point deficit for the hapless conservative quasi-Dem. But Democrats from that (home) school-- like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Parker Griffith (Blue Dog-AL), Larry Kissell (D-NC), Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS), Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL), and Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA) seem determined to ride that strategy to political oblivion. They won't be missed-- not even by John Boehner, who has come to count on their perfidy for his own ends.

Blake starts his story by admitting that the only reticence respectable, non-Blue Dog candidates have is the hideous billing-killing anti-Choice amendment that Bart Stupak worked with the U.S. Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops to put into the bill. Within minutes of the House passing the bill, Senate candidates like Jennifer Brunner and Lee Fischer in Ohio, Mike Capuano and Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, and Kirsten Gillibrand and Jonathan Tasini in New York were on the warpath against it, though all three pairs are major supporters of meaningful health care reform.

Blake points to Senate candidates, Robin Carnahan in Missouri, flirting with the Creigh Deeds strategy, and two conservative non-starters in Texas, Bill White and John Sharp, who have fully embraced it.

Among Senate candidates currently serving in the House, four Democrats voted for the bill, while one voted against it.

Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) voted for the bill last weekend but now says he would oppose a bill with the Stupak language.

Among the other supporters, Reps. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) and Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) are both running in swing states, while Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) is challenging Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) from the left.

All three proudly cast their votes on the bill, and all three were met with criticism from the GOP opponents.

The lone dissenter, [reactionary Blue Dog] Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.), is running against Republican Sen. David Vitter in deep red Louisiana. Melancon was highly critical of the bill, saying: “I can’t support a government-run insurance option that the people of Louisiana don't want.”

...Among House candidates, some running in swing or conservative districts have expressed support for the bill, including physicians Ami Bera and Manan Trivedi, who are running against Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) and for the seat of Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.), respectively.

“It’s a good first step that’s starting to move the conversation forward,” Bera told The Hill. “There’s still obviously a lot that needs to be worked through.”

Trivedi said the bill was a “strong step in the right direction,” but that system-wide clinical reform is needed.

Conversely, candidates like Palm Springs, Calif., Mayor Steve Pougnet are hedging their bets and waiting to see what bill comes out of the Senate and conference committee.

Pougnet is challenging Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.).

“Mayor Pougnet is committed to reform and, although he believes there are many more questions to be answered, he wants to ensure the process advances and looks forward to seeing what develops in the Senate,” said spokesman Jordan Marks.

Pougnet is a social liberal-- he's an upfront gay man legally married to another man-- but he's a frightened and confused conservative who would be a surefire recruit for the Blue Dog caucus in the extremely unlikely event that he can rescue himself from Creigh Deedsism, a strategy that is tailor-made for him. Meanwhile, I've been barraged with e-mails from dozens and dozens of Democratic incumbents and challengers campaigning for healthcare reform. Blake has to either stop letting the RNC write his headlines... or stop mixing up Blue Dogs with real Democrats.

Learn more about Blue America's plans to rid Congress of as many mangy Blue Dogs as possible.

Sunday Classics: Mr. Mendelssohn explains it all for us

2009-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sarah Chang was only 15 when some evil genie stuffed her into that hideous green dress to perform Mendelssohn's E minor Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, one of the composer's longest-serving successors as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. We hear (for a change -- ha-ha!) the Andante.

by Ken

For reasons I suggested last night, being 15 isn't necessarily an insuperable obstacle to finding the profound simplicity of this movement. We heard how hard it is even for the greatest violinists to "come off it" -- to set aside the whorish habits of wanting to please an audience and just hear and try to pass on what's happening in the music. Going by the Parsifal Principle, a "pure fool" might actually have an advantage stumbling onto the truth of this music. (I'd be very much surprised if it happened in that green dress, though.)

As I mentioned last night, by the time I had my revelation, I must have heard the Mendelssohn E minor Concerto at least a hundred times. When it suddenly "landed" on me, it really seemed as if I'd never heard the Andante. That pretty much blew my mind, but as I've revisited performances that I would have heard, I've been less surprised. I'm not sure that I ever did hear the movement.

Once I did, it occurred to me -- and the feeling has only deepened since -- that in this movement we hear all the mysteries of the universe explained and all the questions of mortal existence answered (if perhaps stopping short of such nagging but essentially local perplexities as where you left your house keys last night, or where you might find some edible corned beef or pastrami). The only catch is that those explanations and answers come in musical form, and so still need to be translated into more usable form for practical application. If nothing else, though, they make you feel that the pursuit is worth pursuing.

The Violin Concerto was first performed in 1845, and thus comes from near the end of the career of Mendelssohn (1809-1847), who alas didn't make it to his 39th birthday. It was a career that may have had the most remarkable launch in musical history. There have been numerous "prodigies" who produced first-rate music in their teens. Mendelssohn did something more. Make up a short list of the greatest music ever written, and no matter how much you try to shorten it, you're going to have a tough time excluding the Octet for Strings Mendelssohn wrote at 16 and the Overture for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream he wrote at 17. I just don't see how it's possible to write "better," more fully imagined music.

Let's start with the opening movement of the Octet. Oh, I don't think there's any doubt that it was written by a young person. There's an age beyond which it's just hard to sustain this degree of freshness, buoyancy, and sheer joy. But the structure is so taut and the musical materials so arresting that for me that 15 minutes pass in a trice, and a delighted trice at that. Note, by the way, the tempo marking: "moderately quick but with fire (emphasis added). I think there's plenty of fire in this 1959 recording by the veteran Smetana Quartet (though violist Milan Škampa was a relative newcomer, having been with the group a mere three years) and its younger colleagues, my much-loved Janáček Quartet.

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20:
i. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco

Jiří Novák, Lubomír Kostecký, Jiří Trávníček, and Adolf Sýkora, violins; Milan Škampa and Jiří Kratochvíl, violas; Antonín Kohout and Karel Krafka, cellos
Westminster, recorded in Vienna, June 1959

Jeez, having come this far -- we're almost halfway through the Octet (15:01 out of 34:04 in this performance) -- how can we not hear the rest?

Octet for Strings in E-flat major, Op. 20:

ii. Andante, iii. Scherzo, Allegro leggierissimo, iv. Presto

Smetana and Janáček Quartets (Vienna, June 1959)

We might as well continue straight on with --

A Midsummer Night's Dream: Overture, Op. 21

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond.
Broadcast performance, May 23, 1969

Now I wouldn't suggest that young Felix's talents were fully developed at this point, just that they were as fully developed as he needed for the Octet and the MSND Overture. In fact, he continued expanding and heightening his resources all the way up to his intolerably early death, which genuinely seems to have been hastened by disregard for his health in the effort to create and promote such works as the great oratorio Elijah. (We're going to return for a closer look at Elijah in a separate post.) With Mendelssohn's early death in November 1847 (for what it's worth, less than six months after the death of his beloved sister Fanny, about whom more in a moment), he seems to me perhaps the composer whose fulfillment was left most tantalizingly unfulfilled.

I have no problem chalking the two supreme masterpieces of Mendelssohn's youth up as miracles. Still, we know a lot about the conditions in which the budding composer's talent was discovered and nurtured -- in a prosperous and deeply cultured household where artistic creativity and the life of the imagination were prized. Felix's skills and imagination expanded in tandem with those of his sister Fanny (a bit more than three years older than him; the relationship certainly recalls the symbiotic one between young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his "big" sister Nannerl), who was a bit more than three years older.

All four Mendelssohn children (there was another brother, Paul, and sister, Rebecca) seem to have been dazzlingly precocious, and Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn took their children's gifts seriously. Of course there was still a difference between the way boys' and girls' talents were treated. Although the parents clearly recognized Fanny's talent, there just wasn't any precedent or even procedure for developing a musically precocious girl's talent in the same way as a boy's. This leaves permanently open the question whether Fanny may not in fact have possessed a creative gift at least equal to Felix's.

Most of Felix's early music was written as part of communal creative explorations of Felix and his siblings, in particular Fanny. This is emphatically true of the Midsummer NIght's Dream Overture. If you're familiar with this altogether remarkable and ravishing piece, you may have noticed that I chose that decidedly unorthodox broadcast performance by Otto Klemperer and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

It's an odd business, choosing a performance by the BRSO for the special intensity of its orchestral playing. Despite the blessing of the BRSO's 30-year stewardship by those splendid musicians Eugen Jochum (who founded it in 1949 and remained at the helm until 1960) and Rafael Kubelik (1961-79), we tend to think of it as a "solidly reliable" ensemble, not one you would turn to for special qualities in phrasing or tone production. However, there are a number of broadcast performances, in Bavarian Radio's excellent early broadcast stereo, that suggest some chemistry between Klemperer and this orchestra. Klemperer had made a fine studio recording of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1961, but listen to the BRSO Overture, and for all that it may not be the last word in forward drive, or the ultimate in ensemble precision, enjoy the way it digs into the music and maximizes its magic.

So it seems only natural, as we continue with the Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music (from which we already heard the universally known Wedding March last night), to stick with the Klemperer-BRSO performance. We're going to hear, not just the three remaining excerpts (Scherzo, Notturno, and Wedding March) that form the standard MSND "suite," but also the Intermezzo and Mendelssohn's setting of the fairy scene "Ye spotted snakes, with soprano and mezzo solos and chorus, for no better reason than that I can't bear leaving them out.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Op. 55:

Scherzo, "Ye spotted snakes," Intermezzo,

Notturno, Wedding March

Edith Mathis (s), Brigitte Fassbaender (ms) [in "Ye spotted snakes"]; Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. (Munich, May 23, 1969)

Ye spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So, good night, with lullaby.
Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence.
Philomel, with melody, & c.
Hence, away! now all is well:
One aloof stand sentinel.

I should probably have mentioned that, apart from the Overture, the MSND incidental music is not a product of Mendelssohn's youth. It was written in 1842. Did you notice any discontinuity? Your ears may be better than mine, but I'll be damned if I hear any evidence of the 16-year time gap between the Overture and the rest of this amazing music. Again, in the music of Mendelssohn's that works best, he had found a match between subject matter and his then-available technical and emotional resources.

All told there's about an hour of MSND music, though not all of it can be performed independently. At the same time, the music is rather overwhelming for practical use in performances of the play -- though RCA recording made a three-LP recording of the only-somewhat-abridged 1954 Old Vic production (directed by Michael Benthall, with a cast including Moira Shearer as Titania, Robert Helpmann as Oberon, and Stanley Holloway as Bottom), which incorporated most of Mendelssohn's music, performed by the BBC Symphony under Sir Malcolm Sargent.

Here, just for fun, is a more standard performance of the standard four-movement MSND "suite":

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opp. 21/55:
Overture, Scherzo, Notturno, Wedding March

Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam), George Szell, cond.
Decca, recorded Dec. 2-4, 1957

Mendelssohn certainly made good use of the limited time allotted him. At 26 he became music director of Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra, and beyond his own compositional activity, it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of his role he played in advancing the cause of music, especially German music, old and new. (He was a central figure in the revival of public awareness of the works of his great Leipzig predecessor J. S. Bach. Bach's music was never lost to musicians and scholars, but the idea of performing it publicly seemed somewhere between quaint and preposterous until Mendelssohn took up the cause, most famously resurrecting the St. Matthew Passion, which he performed in his own edition.

I guess we should stop now. As I mentioned, we're going to come back to Elijah, the work that occupied so much of his attention in his final years, and a work that despite its unevenness is filled with unmatched dramatic power as it chronicles the prophet's rise in God's service and then his collapse, followed by what I like to think of as the story of the one person in biblical history who commanded an apology from God.

OOPS, SHOULDN'T WE HEAR THE WHOLE VIOLIN CONCERTO?

While I was trying to get the final links sorted out among this week's classical posts, it suddenly occurred to me that we never did get to hear the whole of Mendelssohn's great E minor Violin Concerto. So here is the whole performance that contains my preferred version of the Andante:

Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64:

i. Allegro molto appassionato, ii. Andante,

iii. Allegretto non troppo -- Allegro molto vivace

Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz, cond.
EMI, recorded Apr. 30, 1958

OKAY, THAT'S A WRAP

I can't think of a lovelier way to end than with Mendelssohn's best-known song, "On Wings of Song," sung for us first by soprano Margaret Price and then by baritone Wolfgang Holzmair. (If Ms. Margaret -- oops, Dame Margaret -- and Herr Wolfgang were fiddlers, I think they would both have "gotten" the Andante of the E minor Concerto.)

Note the composer's title: "Abendlied" ("Evening Song").

"Auf Flügeln des Gesanges" ("On Wings of Song"),

Op. 34, No. 2

Margaret Price, soprano

Graham Johnson, piano
Hyperion (CD of Mendelssohn songs)

recorded in Munich, March 1993

Wolfgang Holzmair, baritone

Anna Wagner, piano
Preiser (CD of Mendelssohn songs)

recorded in Vienna, October 1985

poem by Heinrich Heine

On wings of song,
My beloved, I'll bear you away,
Away to the pastures by the Ganges,
Where I know the loveliest spot.

There, in the quiet moonlight,
Is a garden, blossoming red;
The lotus blossoms are awaiting for
Their dear little sister.

The violets chuckle and fondly murmur
And look up at the stars;
Secretly the roses whisper
Fragrant tales to one another.

The innocent and knowing gazelles
Bound past, listening;
And in the distance murmur
The waves of the sacred steam.

There will we recline
Beneath the palm tree
And drink of love and peace
And dream a blissful dream.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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Sunday Classics preview: Mendelssohn speaks eloquently in simple declarative musical sentences

2009-11-14T21:00:00.000-08:00

I guaranteed you last night that even if you don't know anything about classical music, you know at least one piece by the composer of the violin concerto whose slow movement we heard performed by a number of outstanding violinists. And here is that piece: yes, the world's second most famous wedding march, and Mendelssohn's, from his incidental music for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, really is a wedding march -- unlike its even more famous rival. (The Bridal Procession at the start of Act III of Wagner's Lohengrin is exactly that, not a wedding march. Elsa and Lohengrin were already married at the end of Act II; here they're being escorted to the bridal chamber for the, er, main event.) Tomorrow we're going to be hearing more of the MSND incidental music, notably the incandescent Overture.

by Ken

Now to return to our concerto movement. This is of course the central Andante of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64. Here are the performances again, in the same order, this time properly identified:

A. Johanna Martzy (1924-1979)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch, cond.
EMI, recorded June 1954

B. David Oistrakh (1908-1974)

USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin, cond.
Melodiya, recorded 1949

C. Arthur Grumiaux (1921-1986)

New Philharmonia Orchestra, Jan Krenz, cond.
Philips, recorded September 1972

D. Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond.
RCA/BMG, recorded February 1959

E. Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)

Philharmonia Orchestra, Efrem Kurtz, cond.
EMI, recorded Apr. 30, 1958

Despite often considerable differences among these performances, the middle three -- by violinists as great as Oistrakh, Grumiaux, and Heifetz -- like just about every other performance I've ever heard, from violinists great and not so great, begin with the assumption that the performer has to start by making this movement "expressive," via some combination of syrupy legato tone, or lush vibrato, or other violinistic devices. I don't know how many times I'd heard the piece -- 100? 200? -- when it suddenly hit me that all those violinists have basically missed the point of this music, which proceeds from its utterly confident simplicity.

As best I recall, the performance that suddenly enabled me to hear this was our E, in the form of a British LP reissue of this 1958 recording by Yehudi Menuhin. And I have to say that as I listened through the clips, a certain amount of the radiance of the music began to reach me via A, Johanna Martzy.

I think it's clear that on some level Arthur Grumiaux and Jascha Heifetz hear this. Note how they're both able, thanks to their amazing bow-arm control, to control the tension of the bow's contact with the strings so that there is no audible tension -- the sound seems simply to float. (I can't begin to tell you how hard this is.) But neither of these magicians can put aside the habit of wanting to make the music "emotional" -- you don't often hear Grumiaux's vibrato throbbing this wildly, while Heifetz injects graffiti-like little curlicues that are not only unnecessary but destructive to the music's remarkable flow.

Of course the ultimate in beautiful tone was rarely among Menuhin's priorities. Boy, does that work in his favor here! By allowing the music to speak in relatively simple declarative musical sentences, he lifts the piece way beyond surface prettiness into the realm of the ethereal. I'll have a few more words to say about this tomorrow.

FINALLY, FOR A BIT OF RAZZLE-DAZZLE . . .

I've talked more than once about pieces of music, starting with Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture, I can listen to over and over and over, on to -- if not beyond -- the limits of human endurance. I couldn't resist throwing in another one here: the finale of Mendelssohn's First Piano Concerto in G minor, Op. 25.

Of course to achieve the full lift of which this joyous movement is capable, the performer has to earn it, and for a job like this, there was no one better than Rudolf Serkin, another great artist who placed less than the highest premium on beautiful tone. He was more concerned with firmness and evenness of tone and finely controlled gradations of attack, and compensated in various other ways, including what I can only describe as an intuitive feeling for musical quirkiness, which is about as close as many Germans get to a sense of humor. He made this recording of the concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy on Dec. 19, 1957:

Note how we can feel the principal theme trying to break through before it finally does at 0:47, and ditto with the joyous finger-rippling romp that finally erupts at 1:25 and again at 2:13. If these emergences are really earned, the whole thing can be simply exhilarating.

P.S.: MENDELSSOHN'S STRUCTURAL "INNOVATION"

You may have noticed in our clips of both the finale of the E minor Violin Concerto and the First Piano Concerto that there's some kind of introductory funny business going on. I thought I might have something to say about this in tomorrow's post, but I didn't. What happened was that Mendelssohn got this idea to "improve" the concerto form by binding all three of its movements musically.

Of course, on occasion composers have found wonderful real links between movements -- the most wonderful, surely, being the way Tchaikovsky got from the slow movement to the finale of his Violin Concerto. It was certainly an interesting thought on Mendelssohn's part, worth pursuing, but I can't say it strengthens the pieces, which stand or fall on the quality of the materials, workmanship, and compatibility of their component movements. Fortunately, the pieces turned out not to be in need of artificial strengthening.

P.P.S.: YES, WE WILL HEAR THE WHOLE VIOLIN CONCERTO

I always meant for you to hear the whole thing, and even after finishing tomorrow's "real" post somehow never got around to it. Never fear, you'll find it as a "bonus" at the end.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The current list is here.

The Sad Saga Of Tom Perriello, A Confused And Dishonest Man, Lost In A Political Nightmare He's Spiritually Unprepared To Navigate

2009-11-14T18:00:00.000-08:00

Untrustworthy

This morning I got an e-mail from Tom Perriello's re-election campaign. Blue America endorsed him in 2008 after he assured us-- several times, in writing and on tape-- that, if elected, we could count on him to be a pro-choice congressman. He was elected, and one week ago he voted for the horrific Stupak-Pitts anti-choice amendment to the health care bill. I wrote him a letter; he didn't respond. Instead I got this from his campaign finance director:

Tom's political opponents have sunk to a shocking new low.

Yesterday they announced they will actually burn Congressman Perriello in effigy. This clear departure from the bounds of decent political discourse is beyond the pale.

The skyrocketing cost of health care is bankrupting our families, our small businesses and our government. Last Saturday, Tom Perriello voted to take common sense steps to curtail the rising cost of health care, because fixing the broken system is too important to delay any longer. We knew the opposition would be vocal, but we never thought it would come to this.

We need to raise $8,000 by Tuesday night for our Rapid Response Fund. Please click here to give $25, $50, or even $100 today!

Congressman Perriello has never shied away from discussion with anyone-- whether they agree or disagree-- who wants to be a partner in finding solutions to the problems we face. He has even met with his foes repeatedly to listen to their concerns. Yesterday our opponents made it clear that they have little interest in problem solving. Don't let the underhanded attacks and inflammatory rhetoric distract from our fight for affordable health care.

The attacks are coming fast and furious. The low tactics and false arguments used by opponents to health care reform only reinforce the reasons most people in the 5th District are supporting Tom Perriello for his vote.

Help us fight back against the misinformation and political smears! We need to raise $8,000 by Tuesday night for our Rapid Response Fund. Can you contribute $25, $50, or even $100 today to help us reach our goal?

...Together, we can speak the truth and bring about the change we so desperately need.

Speak the truth? I'd never believe another word that Tom Perriello uttered. When he first solicited an endorsement from Blue America, we were very wary because it had been pointed out that he opposed women's right to Choice. He insisted his position had been misrepresented. He kept calling and calling and then visited my house. On February 27, 2008, Tom did a guest post here at DWT and he addressed concerns about Choice head-on:

Confusion ...[about] my position on abortion may stem either from my public association with Catholicism as co-founder of the progressive Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good or from being badly misquoted in a New York Times article following the 2004 election. I firmly believe that abortion should not be criminalized, nor can we allow any action that seeks to coerce women by reducing access to care or making the process less safe.

The emphasis is mine. But that is exactly what Stupak-Pitts does, and quite intentionally, as Perriello well knows.

Perriello is in a very tough district, and he beat one the House's most notoriously corrupt incumbents 158,810-158,083, one of the closest congressional races in a decade. Mark Warner's coattails certainly helped drag him into office-- not to mention the tremendous support he had from grassroots and netroots activists taken in by his ability to portray himself as a progressive on key issues. He's turned out to be another political coward with a wretched 39.22 ProgressivePunch score on substantive issues, nestled comfortably between arch-reactionaries Brad Ellsworth and Health Shuler. In fact, many of the worst and most extreme Blue Dogs in the Congress have better voting records than Perriello: Heath Shuler (NC), Chris Carney (PA), Harry Mitchell (AZ), Dan Boren (OK), Gene Taylor (MS), Collin Peterson (MN), Jim Mashall (GA) and even John Barrow (GA). When Perriello gets burned in effigy by the teabaggers he tried to please by throwing women under the bus, he'll have to look elsewhere for sympathy and support.