Tuesday Mashup (8/30/11)

Oh noes! It looks like our community organizer pre-zee-dint wants to “mobilize” all those lazy, spiritually deprived (or whatever that clown Stuart Varney said) poor people to launch his Marxist socialist revolution at long last!

That’s what Fix Noise would have us believe anyway. However, when you actually read the linked story, what you find is this…

…oops, well whaddaya know? Fix Noise pulled the linked story and I can’t find it anywhere. C’est dommage!

Well, I found another story about the “poverty tour” conducted by Tavis Smiley (one of the people who interviewed President Obama in the original Fix Noise piece) and Dr. Cornel West in which the “m” word is used as follows…

Both Tavis Smiley and Cornel West have recently drawn flack from some within African-American communities because they criticized President Obama as not addressing poverty during his policy speeches and debates. While this may appear justified in light of recent conciliatory gestures to Republicans in Congress, Obama, to his credit, has fought consistently to extend unemployment benefits, to fund public health clinics, and to promote better nutrition for the schoolchildren of impoverished families.

Billed as a Town Hall Meeting to air general community grievances, the event took place at the St. Andrew AME Church, located in poverty-stricken southwest Memphis.

It opened with a call to prayer that foreshadowed the night’s topic with reference to the “hard-hearted” policies of past months, the result of tea-party Republican candidates’ election to Congress. In characterizing the recent debt-ceiling deal, Tavis Smiley listed the negative impact of: no extensions this time for unemployment benefits, no calls for new revenues, and no closing of tax loopholes for corporations. He reported that the initial consideration of cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were put on the table not by Majority leader Boehner, but by President Obama himself.

In short, he said, the deal was all “cuts-cuts-cuts,” with a questionable resolution by a 12-member Super-Congress that would supposedly determine, in draconian fashion, what Congress could not. According to Smiley, as a result of the debt-ceiling deal, things are about to get worse for many Americans.

Addressing a near standing-room-only audience, the speakers were not there, however, to criticize President Obama’s performance, but to uplift, in the old Southern religious tradition, and to mobilize poor communities, those hit hardest by the current global economic crisis.

So basically, one person’s scary-sounding “mobilization” is another person’s standing up for basic human rights.

And on the subject of “mobilization”…well, it looks like Obama’s predecessor had a thing or two to say about it in a wholly other context (here, from 2007)…

Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror. This group will meet regularly with me and my administration; it will help strengthen our relationship with Congress. We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century. We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas, where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny.

Of course, had Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History decided to focus those efforts at home instead, we might all be in a whole other, better place right now.

And one more thing – speaking of Fix Noise “opinion” as opposed to Fix Noise “news,” I thought this was curious (so I guess they’ll be no editorials on the climate crisis, among other topics).

Next, I give you more effete, well-kept, Ivory tower punditry from Larry Kudlow on Hurricane Irene here…

Yes, the economic blow from Irene is noticeable, but it’s temporary. In fact, what makes this economic setback even less worrisome is that it occurred over a weekend. You really didn’t even lose two days of economic activity.

Restaurants, retailers, baseball games and Broadway shows all shut down, but only for a short bit. And actually, there was a lot of consumer buying in the days leading up to Irene. People went to Home Depot and Lowe’s to find stuff to board up their windows with. They went to Costco for food. And they went to Wal-Mart and Dollar General for all sorts of things.

There are times when it’s really hard to communicate my utter disgust with the wingnutosphere on their utterly and completely wrong “reporting” on an issue that has turned some people’s lives upside down in as catastrophic a manner as we can imagine. This is one of those times.

As noted here...

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Vermont awoke Monday to the aftermath of the storm that was Hurricane Irene with communities cut off, almost 50,000 customers without power, hundreds of roads closed, at least two deaths and the loss of a dozen bridges.

Gov. Peter Shumlin called it the worst flooding in the state in a century.

"We prepared for the worst and we got the worst in central and southern Vermont," Shumlin said Monday. "We have extraordinary infrastructure damage."

Vermont Transportation Secretary Brian Searles said a half-dozen state-owned bridges and at least that many local spans were "gone."

"Some of this can't be assessed because the water is still very high," he said. "Some will call for fixes that will take a while. We're going to need a lot of temporary bridges."

Shumlin was touring the state in a National Guard helicopter with U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy.

"We haven't seen flooding like this, certainly since the early part of the 1900s. The areas that got flooding are in really tough shape," Shumlin said.

Historically, a flood from 1927 is considered to be Vermont's greatest natural disaster.

Instead of belaboring the point that Kudlow is an utterly soulless corporate media shill, which is obvious, I’ll instead just link here and encourage one and all to provide whatever support you can to Irene’s victims (yes, it could have been worse, but let’s express gratitude that it wasn’t).

Continuing, I give you the latest from Repug U.S. House Rep Vern Buchanan of Florida here…

One important action Congress should take when it returns in September is to pass a package of free-trade agreements that will generate thousands of jobs in Florida and elsewhere.

The Obama Administration estimates that as many as 250,000 new American jobs could be created, if we adopt pending agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea.

Unfortunately, these trade deals have been languishing in Congress for years, frozen by gridlock and partisan squabbling.

(I wish the Obama-ites were a little quicker to embrace dumb stuff that, like, you know, creates jobs, instead of parroting Repug talking points.)

It should also be noted how much Buchanan and his pals just love these crappy trade deals as long as they don’t contain trade adjustment assistance for workers in this country who come up short, as noted here (a lot of workers by my last count… what say you on this, by the way, Mikey the Beloved, as if I need to ask?).

And as noted here…

The extraordinarily high trade deficit is the direct result of America’s failed trade policies. For years, agreement like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and trade regimes such as the World Trade Organization have stifled the country’s competitiveness, allowed for millions of jobs to be offshored and gutted the nation’s manufacturing base.

That much is evident in how the trade deficit is structured. On the year, the nation actually held a surplus of $148.7 billion in trade in services. The problem, however, lies in the fact that America’s deficit in goods was much, much larger - $646.5 billion, in fact.

The trade deficit accounted for 3.4 percent of the nation’s total gross domestic product. If Republicans were serious about cutting into the budget deficit and paying down the national debt, an excellent way to start would be by reducing the nation’s trade deficit.

America’s failed trade policies are responsible for more than half of the current national debt of $13 trillion.

America has not held a trade surplus with the rest of the world since 1975. In the years since, the nation has run an overall deficit of $7.5 trillion.

(I seem to recall our former U.S. House Rep Patrick Murphy telling us this over and over during the campaign last year, by the way. What a shame more people didn’t listen.)

This stuff isn’t surprising from Buchanan, though – as noted here, it looks like he benefitted from a disproportionately high percentage of “undervotes” in his last election (I mean, we are talking about Florida here, so…)

…while reporting on state certification of election results in Florida's 13th Congressional District in favor of Republican candidate Vern Buchanan, (CNN’s John) King stated that Democratic candidate Christine Jennings "is suing for a new election. She says thousands of voting machines in Sarasota County did not work properly."

But King failed to note the actual evidence Jennings has cited in claiming that the machines "did not work properly." Ballots filed on electronic machines in Sarasota County contained a much higher percentage of undervotes -- no recorded choice for congressional representative -- than did absentee ballots in Sarasota County or ballots in other counties. The Miami Herald reported on November 9 that the Sarasota undervote was "nearly 12 percent," "the undervote rate for absentee ballots, cast on paper for fill-in-the-blank Optiscan machines, was about 3 percent in Sarasota," and the surrounding counties had "an undervote rate of less than 3 percent." As the weblog TPM Muckraker noted, a review in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune concluded that "[i]f the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368."

And as noted here..

Though Rep. Vern Buchanan has yet to publicly comment on a watchdog group’s efforts to launch an FBI investigation into his past congressional campaigns, he has found time to sell his $4.49 million yacht, The Entrepreneur. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is now using that yacht sale to highlight the allegations surrounding the Florida congressman.

On Wednesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (aka CREW) sent a letter to the FBI, asking that the Bureau launch a thorough investigation into Buchanan, R-Sarasota. Buchanan has long been dogged by rumors of campaign fraud and the release of a sworn deposition by one of his former business partners, Sam Kazran, further highlights the alleged improprieties.

No wonder these clowns fought so hard for tax cuts on behalf of yacht owners (here – yes, I know it’s Texas and not Florida, but “birds of a feather” I always say).

Finally, it looks as if our beloved commonwealth is getting closer to enacting its own wretched voter ID law, as noted here (the Repugs bring us yet another “solution” in search of a problem)…

Rather than tell a poll worker your name, House lawmakers have passed a bill that would require voters to show a government-issued photo ID along with their name and address.

The bill will be taken up as early as next month when the state senate reconvenes.

“I’m very concerned about it,” said Madeline Rawley of Doylestown, a member of the Coalition for Voting Integrity. “You’re putting up barriers that make it difficult for seniors, the disabled and young people.”

Daryl Metcalfe of Butler County, chairman of the House State Government Committee sponsored House Bill 934, co-sponsored by Bucks County Republicans Paul Clymer and Scott Petri.

Modeled after Indiana’s photo identification law, Metcalfe’s legislation would amend the Pennsylvania’s election code to require voters to present valid photo ID before voting. Current law requires identification for voters who appear to vote in an election district for the first time.

Well, at least we can’t say we weren’t warned – as noted here, Metcalfe was making noises about this last March even though his “expert” from The Heritage Foundation couldn’t find any actual instances of voter fraud. Also, Metcalfe introduced an Arizona-style “illegal to be brown” law, protested a resolution to recognize October 2009 as Domestic Violence Awareness Month because “it has a homosexual agenda,” and he called Iraq and Afghanistan war vets “traitors” for opposing his energy policy (all here).

The Courier Times story also tells us the following…

(Secretary of the Commonwealth and a proponent of Metcalfe’s scheme Carol) Aichele said voter turnout in states such as Georgia, with strict photo ID laws, has increased across racial, ethnic and socio-economic lines.

I don’t have any information on the Peach State, but as noted here, three studies all concluded that voter ID laws lower voter turnout.

And as noted here...

Voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in America, but this imaginary crime still serves to justify a wave of onerous new voter registration laws—often requiring a state-issued photo ID—that Republican legislators have rapidly spread across the nation. The implications for the 2012 elections are huge.

“The overall idea is pretty obvious,” says Frances Fox Piven, author of three books outlining America’s unusually harsh and restrictive voting laws. “Both parties expect close elections in 2012, and if you peel off just a couple percentage points, you can determine the outcome.”

Piven points to Wisconsin, where protests over a law passed earlier this year rendering public-employee unions toothless were followed by the imposition of a restrictive voter ID law by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican majorities in the state legislature. “We saw labor protests of unprecedented size and intensity over limiting their voice as workers,” Piven says. “And then [protesters] were greeted with a law to limit their power electorally, too.”

With the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) promoting voter identification, eight other states also passed restrictive new laws this year, bringing the total number of states with such laws to 30. Another 16 states have seen similar ID laws introduced in 2011. Only a veto in June by New Hampshire’s Gov. John Lynch (D) prevented the passage of a law using residency requirements to diminish the voting of, as the state’s House Speaker William O’Brien (R) described them, “liberal” students.

Returning to the Courier Times story, I give you the following…

Cost is also an issue. A Department of State analysis shows 99 percent of eligible voters already have an acceptable photo ID, and providing free photo IDs to every other eligible voter would cost just over $1 million.

The House Appropriations Committee estimated the cost at $4.3 million next year while a House Democratic Appropriations Committee pegs the cost at $9.8 million.

So Democrats and Republicans not only differ on the cost of change, but also on the merits of the bill.

State Rep. Steve Santarsiero, D-31, voted against the measure. He calls the legislation a waste of money and “simply not necessary. The voter fraud House Republicans claim it will prevent is virtually non-existent in Pennsylvania. All we are doing here is disenfranchising tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters.”

Steve stands tall for us once again – to contact him (and to say thanks), click here.