All In The Family

Janeane Garafolo, on the Majority Report holiday special: how to talk to your right-wing relatives seated around the Thanksgiving table.

Yes, it's the start of that special time of year: when the public is encouraged to be charitable to the less fortunate, while wingnuts counter with the War on Losers Who Deserve Their Misfortune.

As income inequality is so obvious as to have become a bit more spoken of publicly, the right's pundits rush to expand categories of which groups can be blamed for not having chosen the right parents. Even if they too might be among the losers, there's never a danger of cognitive dissonance among the Fox viewership. As Roy Edroso put it—

If most of you who are punished by inequality are blameless, comfort yourselves that your suffering also touches the nation's whores, junkies, and MFAs!

Among the comments:

philadelphialawyer
[in] my own experiences at holiday family gatherings....Republican/conservaguy/"libertarian" makes a political statement of dubious merit. Liberal smiles and lets it go. Repub guy makes another, and another and another such statement, until, finally, liberal person calls him out on it. Then, like Sonny in the Godfather scene with his brother in law Carlo, Repub guy says we don't talk about politics over Thanksgiving dinner. Or someone else says that.

trex
Yeah, apparently "don't talk about politics" means don't argue about politics, and it is always OK to get in the first shot. Especially if it is a conservative one. Everyone, I guess, is just assumed to agree with conservative talking points, so presenting them is, somehow, not "political." But refuting them is.

[in a later comment]trex
... It's all "So I was just minding my own business commenting on how the Kenyan Pretender in the White House is a secret Marxist with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and all of a sudden a liberal attacked me for no reason and almost spoiled everyone's dinner."

This season I give extra thanks, for keta's comment: an account of "Uncle Dick Cheney" at the family's holiday table.

Well-Laid Plans

Adele Stands outlines the method to the madness: "Anatomy of the War on Women: How the Koch Brothers Are Funding the Anti-Choice Agenda."

Of the multi-state assault on reproductive rights this year—

To the untrained eye, it seemed that a sudden wildfire of anti-choice bills had engulfed the legislative agenda, but in truth the assault had been years, even decades, in the making. It wasn't until three years ago, however, that conditions became so hospitable for the arsonists who trained their flame-throwers on these fundamental freedoms.

In 2010, three key events created the incendiary political landscape that fueled this summer’s inferno: the Supreme Court's decision to strike down campaign finance restrictions in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, elections at the state and federal levels that rode the winds of backlash against the 2008 election of Barack Obama, and the subsequent census-year victories of right-wing Republicans whose gains in state legislatures and governors' mansions gave them control of the process for drawing legislative and congressional districts.

Stans lists anti-reproductive rights "social welfare" groups, funded from 2009 to 2011 by the "now apparently defunct" Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR): a Koch-backed "pass-through group... used by big, unnamed vendors to pass money to other organizations, apparently as a means of further obscuring the original source of the funding."

Multiple uses of "apparently" aside: just why would the Kochs care about pursuing the "social issues" war? They presumably don't, but there's the old MO—

"If you want to promote a pro-corporate agenda, you're only going to get so far," Sue Sturgis, the Durham, North Carolina-based editorial director of the progressive website Facing South, told RH Reality Check. “But when you start weaving in these social issues like abortion and other reproductive rights issues, then you're gonna appeal to a broader range of people, and a very motivated voting bloc. They will turn out. So it serves your larger cause."

And, of course—

It follows that attacks on reproductive rights came on the heels of the assault against labor unions, public-sector workers, and poor people that began, most famously, in Wisconsin, as soon as the Republican right racked up impressive state-level wins in 2010, or that renewed attacks on voting rights ensued at the same time.

While in other places—

... in the State of Ohio, we can re-elect [U.S.] Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), we can re-elect the president of the United States, but we have a different result on the state level," [said state senator] Nina Turner... "It's absolutely the result of gerrymandering."

In North Carolina, Sue Sturgis sees redistricting as a factor exacerbating the polarization of her state, where abortion was among a host of contentious issues, including voting rights, that fueled the historic weekly Moral Monday protests.

At the level of the courts, this attack on women's health options has reached the Roberts court, where it's sure to break new ground in corporate personhood.

Tbogg quotes this MSNBC coverage of the case—

"... corporations could be allowed to opt out not only of health coverage for religiously contested services – including vaccinations or blood transfusions – but labor regulations. Some organizations have already been testing this: Duquesne University has claimed that its Catholic affiliation means it cannot allow graduate students to unionize."

TBogg concludes—

Needless to say, a determination that corporations can be religious in nature (I was going to write "... have a soul", but I couldn't stop simultaneously laughing and weeping) means that somewhere down the line those same corporations will feel free to claim that they shouldn't be taxed at all because they are a religious organization and, OHMYGAWD, everyone at the American Enterprise Institute just now got an enormous 4-hour boner at the idea of that and now we're going to need those slut pills more than ever.

Bah, Humbug

Deal with Iran: historic diplomatic breakthrough?

Nah, just a plot to distract from the horror of Obamacare.

More here.

Or seen from another angle, Roy Edroso says

...about two events last week -- the filibuster vote and the Iran deal -- that seem to have thrown the brethren for a loop. They'd gotten used to just piling abuse on Obamacare, and I think they genuinely believed they'd never have to work hard for a dollar again. No wonder they're pissed!

Inventing Camelot

I caught a bit of anniversary coverage; as expected, in the breathless style of, "He was so glamorous! Then: he was shot! Do you remember where you where?!"

Also very predictable: conservative punditry, per Digby—

It was such fun yesterday watching all the right wingers try to appropriate John F. Kennedy as the one true conservative just as they do whenever we honor Martin Luther King. It's actually a good strategy to take credit for the things your popular enemies do that are in line with your agenda, so I don't blame them. Democrats should do more of it themselves. (Reagan the peacenik! Newt Gingrich the environmentalist! George W. Bush the ... patron of the arts?)

Unfortunately, the conservative economic mavens have Kennedy wrong. I have no way of knowing what he would do in today's circumstances and neither do they. But we have a pretty good idea of how he thought about economics in his day, and contrary to Grover Norquist's fevered tweet dream, it wasn't a celebration of laissez faire capitalism. Last night Stephanie Kelton posted this fascinating excerpt from his speech on that subject at Yale in 1962, that's well worth reading, if only to remind yourself that there is nothing new under the sun.

And fifty years ago this, if also nothing new under the sun, became the model for our media myth-makers: Jacqueline Kennedy's invention of the "Camelot" legend. Theodore White permitted her to re-write his post-assassination article for Life; in Rick Perlstein's account

... History should celebrate the Kennedy years as a time of hope and magic, [Mrs. Kennedy] ... insisted. White sat mesmerized for more than two hours, listening to the rambling and disjointed monologue.... She sneered at the 'bitter old men' who wrote history." ..."Finally, she came to the thought that had become her obsession, a thought embodied in the lyrics of the the Broadway musical—Camelot. Over and over again, she and the president had listened to the words sing out of their ten-year-old Victrola…"

What came next is pretty damned astonishing, a nadir in the history of court journalism, something that better belongs in the annals of the Kremlin. White retreated around midnight to draft his article in the maid's room, "mindful that Life was holding its presses at a cost of $30,000 an hour. When he finished, Mrs. Kennedy took a pencil to White's work, crossing out some of his words and adding her own in the margins. She hovered near the kitchen telephone—adamant that her Camelot portrayal remain the dominant theme—as he dictated the revised version to his editors." The article came out. Arthur Schlesinger, baffled, said, "Jack Kennedy never spoke of Camelot." One Kennedy hand said, "If Jack Kennedy heard this stuff about Camelot, he would have vomited."

Certainly, as Perlstein says, "The whole thing is a great object lesson in the horrors of access journalism—and access history." It's also been the model for the last fifty years. As Perlstein goes on to suggest the connections—

... here's a new Big Idea: journalist sycophants like White helped give us Watergate.

Consider: White felt so guilty at having slighted Nixon in Making of the President 1960 that he turned Making of the President 1968 into a virtual love letter to him, and sent him the book with a fulsome apology. Making of the President 1972 sucked up to Nixon even worse. But then, oops—I discovered this in research for the book I'm finishing now—White had to postpone publication so he could tack on a chapter about a little thing called Watergate, whose seriousness caught him completely by surprise.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. (Read Tim Crouse's Boys on the Bus for the full story.) Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long—because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

Well-Publicized Anniversary

The 50th anniversary suggests much history of interest—at least to the usual types who bother paying attention to history.

Early this month, Charles Pierce noted efforts in Dallas to create a November 22 tourist event that would kind of ignore a little thing that happened fifty years ago.

But as Pierce says, "50 years ago 'civic leaders with deep ties to the city' of Dallas were a major part of the problem with the atmosphere when Kennedy came to town."

Earlier this week Sam Seder did a very interesting Majority Report interview with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., on "JFK's Vision of Peace." RFK Jr. shared some fascinating details about how JFK, surrounded by war hungry right-wing military brass, undertook secret diplomacy with Kruschev, who responded to the chance of finding a way out of the box his own hawks were creating. RFK Jr. also says that after the trip to Dallas, JFK had planned to announce withdrawal from Vietnam. Then LBJ was in the position of insisting he would not be known as the president who "lost Vietnam."

Text of the speech Kennedy was to have given in Dallas.

Some observations from Digby—

It occurred to me this week that very few people who are younger than I am can remember the Kennedy assassination --- which means that this commemoration is a lot like the memories of Roosevelt's death were to me when I was a little kid. Ancient history.

I was in the second grade in Wichita Kansas where my father was working for a defense contractor maintaining the nuclear missile silos. My teacher came into the room sobbing and told us all that we were going home, that the president had been killed. All the adults I saw for the next couple of weeks seemed to be shell-shocked, even my parents, who were big Kennedy haters.

...I don't think you can fully understand my generation without realizing that this was probably the most important national event of our young lives. The president was assassinated. To people my age that was not an abstract concern. It was something that happened. And it was only a few years later that it was further seared into our consciousness with the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the attempt on George Wallace. You have to understand that to kids who grew up in that time, this was normal.

People think the hippies were just a bunch of kids doing drugs (and they were) but there was a real message behind their "peace and love" campaign that sprang from this violence. And the young revolutionaries that everyone now sees as some left wing version of the Michigan Militia weren't responding to something like the horrifying prospect of health insurance for everyone. They were (at least in part) responding to the fact that our leaders were being killed. There was a sense of urgency. Something's happening here ...

I've been watching all these remembrances over the past couple of weeks realizing that it's the last time anyone will really care much about this. It will soon pass completely into the history books and that will be that. ...

Digby includes images of the "Wanted For Treason" handbill, and the full-page "American Fact-Finding Committee" ad that ran in the Dallas Morning News on November 22, 1963.

Pierce again, on the Warren Commission as

... a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it -- or the men who allegedly were in control of it -- ever ran amok.

A secrecy that could only become

... an irresistible impulse to treat the American people... like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf.
From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state -- the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission -- all of which sprang from the notion that the nation's elite should conduct the nation's business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well....

There's that, and the fact that the types behind the 1963 "liberal treason" accusations were regarded then as beyond polite notice. Over the last fifty years, the money has not only bought its own media empire, it has also bought unlimited access to, and unquestioned respect from, Establishment media.

IOKIYAR

Charles Pierce—

Okay, poor bastard congresscritter gets busted for cocaine and becomes yet another casualty of our silly "war" on drugs. The traditional abject grovelling ensues.

"I'm profoundly sorry to let down my family, particularly my wife and son, and the people of Southwest Florida," Radel said. "I struggle with the disease of alcoholism, and this led to an extremely irresponsible choice. "... This unfortunate event does have a positive side. It offers me an opportunity to seek treatment and counseling. I know I have a problem and will do whatever is necessary to overcome it, hopefully setting an example for others struggling with this disease."

... Okay, so far, go with god, congressman. Best of luck in your struggle. Except, yeah, you know what's coming, right?

Well, Rep. Radel was one of many House Republicans who voted for a bill that would allow states to require all recipients of welfare to be drug tested prior to receiving benefits.

On second thought, to hell with it.

A white guy? Question answers itself.

Tea Party guy? Check.

Commenter Casey Laughman adds—

No, see, it's totally different because the people who should be drug tested are only those whose income is funded by taxpayers. Wait. What?

A Page From Ye Olde Playbooke

Contemptible, but in no way new: the meme that ACA rollout problems are "Obama's Katrina."

Its shtick that in fact has been used throughout this presidency, as Steve M.'s "Canonical List of Obama's Katrinas" shows. Steve does a backward rundown of the punditry: from the ACA trope of today's NYT, to all previous "Katrinas" (from 5/17/13 back to 6/30/08)—

Check the date on that last one. I love it -- Obama is such a terrible president that he had his first Katrina even before he officially became his party's nominee.

Commenter Knight of Nothing added, "Good lord, I had blocked-out how absurdly high that number was. Apparently for some, in fact Katrina was Obama's first of twenty-four Katrinas."

In response to today's NYT piece Driftglass re-posted this 2005 piece. Written post-Katrina—the real one, that killed and displaced thousands of people—and meant now as a reminder to right-wing operatives and media stenographers alike

... of exactly what a bloody, murderous slog of pure hubris and anguish the Bush Regime really was.

It is certainly well past time to remind them that regardless of how many layers of whitewash they slather onto the Bush Administration to create a blank scrim against which they can project their paranoid fantasies and panic-peddling fairy tales about the Failed Obama Administration being as bad or, perhaps even Worse Than Booosh!...

...a few of us will never go along to get along and will never, ever agree to forget what life was really like under the ongoing, train-wreck of failure, ruin, hopelessness, corruption, treason, round-the-clock Liberal-bashing and utter, prostrate media-complicity that was the Bush Administration...

No Low Too Low

Two videos here.

1. Fox host Stuart Varney smirks at the retraction of Australia's [newly wingnut] government of a previous pledge of climate change aid to developing nations. Video of Typhoon Haiyan devastation in Phillippines rolls in background.

2. A plea through tears, by Naderev "Yeb" Sano, a Phillippines' representative to U.N. climate summit. Who is on a hunger strike for "concrete pledges" to the Green Climate Fund; knowing the death toll, that the fate of relatives is unknown, and that his own brother has survived but is is trapped without food.

Shauna Theel notes—

The U.N. fund is intended to address a critical moral hazard of climate change: those who have contributed the least to climate change will suffer the most. The Philippines, for instance, is the third most vulnerable country in the world to climate change -- "particularly exposed" to "cyclones, flooding and sea level rise" -- yet it has much fewer carbon emissions than either Australia or the U.S. ...

The climate fund would help the Philippines lessen its vulnerability to the changes that are already locked in -- changes that are projected to include stronger tropical cyclones such as Haiyan -- by implementing measures such as smart construction and a more effective government response that could lessen the deadly impact of future storms. (Varney selectively quoted The New York Times saying "it is difficult to link any single weather event to climate change" to claim that the recent typhoon is not at all connected to climate change. However, he left out the second half of the sentence: the editorial board continued, "there is little doubt that rising sea levels caused by global warming will worsen the dangers.")

Varney is not alone in his callous response to calls for such aid. Many prominent conservative media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, scoffed at the climate fund when it was first proposed, saying developing nations simply wanted to "cash in" on "climate gold."

Half-bitten

Because until now, insurance companies never baited and switched, or canceled policies...

But absurd sound-bites count. The corollary being that a Dem won't get away with a clumsy one; it matters not one whit that no actual human being ever before would have imagined "liking" their insurance.

As Roy Edroso put it—

...about the latest Obamacare outrage -- that some people had their old policies cancelled, an event that could not have been foreseen unless you had been paying attention to the news when the ACA was passed three and a half years ago or at any time since. I'm thinking they have these things on a rotation schedule -- next week, I'm told, Routine 12 will be that your new Obamacare plan will have fewer providers than the one you have now. The week after that, it'll be that the laminate will wear off your plan ID card more easily than your old one. Eventually, it'll be "Benghazi" and "skree."

Specialty of the House

So special, indeed, when it's on the menu cooked up by this particular House.

Here's Tbogg, quoting Rep. Renee Elmers on the meme of the moment: Obamacare makes men pay for maternity benefits "they" don't "need," because "they can't give birth!"

And in another venue—

There's a reason why the Republicans blocked the president's attempts to fill vacancies on the federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. They have made it a decades-long project to salt the federal courts with people like Janice Rogers Brown, and they are disinclined to allow anything as trivial as two presidential elections to stand in the way.

Referring to the healthcare reform law as "the behemoth known as the Affordable Care Act," the court said the case was not about the law's "constitutional authority." "Instead, we must determine whether the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Act trammels the right of free exercise -- a right that lies at the core of our constitutional liberties -- as protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. We conclude it does." The appeals court, widely regarded as the second-most powerful U.S. court after the Supreme Court, found the mandate was burdensome to business owners even if it does not require them to pay for contraception directly. "The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase," wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. "It occurs when a company's owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan."

(Judge Brown is one of the lasting gifts to the Republic of former president C-Plus Augustus, and her record is a chewy blob of wingnut goodness. Nakedly ideological and utterly heedless of precedents that she doesn't like, Brown believes the New Deal to have been "a socialist revolution," and has called the federal government a "leviathan" -- which, like "behemoth," which she used in her opinion today, is a term for a biblical monster....

When conservative politicians tell you that the DC circuit has enough judges to do the work in front of it, this is what they mean. This ruling is preposterous on its face -- Companies do not have a right to freedom of religion. People do. -- and intemperate in its language. ... This has been a long march for these people, and they believe that only their victories are permanent ones. ...

Before the end of the day, a TSA agent was killed at LAX, where Charles Pierce happened to be in transit—

Well, that was certainly a strange way to end the week. We would be remiss, however, if we didn't point out how well the local police handled the mass exodus of tourists wandering down Century Boulevard on foot. It looked like the last scene in Fiddler On The Roof, except with rollerboards and cellphones. We also would be remiss if we didn't point out that the TSA agents who were the targets of this latest impromptu exercise of Second Amendment rights probably were working without pay a couple of weeks ago because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is the single biggest jackass to hit American politics since the voters of Long Island sent John LeBoutillier into early retirement. This was (again) a day to celebrate the singular courage of public employees....

Later: the shooter was found to be carrying "anti-government material."

About which, more may become known, eventually. Or maybe not, assuming it's the usual right-winger: a loner, influenced by no one, and so, a non-story.