Scalia Watch

DonkeyHotey

There has long been a consensus in mainstream circles, if not necessarily in the legal community, that whether you agreed with him or not, Justice Scalia possesses a great legal mind.  Indeed, the conventional wisdom for decades, as Jeremy Leaming writes, "has held that Justice Antonin Scalia is the high court’s most brilliant, disciplined, albeit ideological, member."

It may be that exposure through the internet "has altered the narrative by giving forums to an array of writers who have been quick to poke holes in an increasingly tiresome and shoddy line of reporting" or simply that Scalia's over-the-top rants and overt partisanship have finally reached a critical mass.

But as the country becomes more politically polarized, Scalia, as Dana Milbank wrote a while back, has had more difficulty containing his rabid partisanship.  He noted that “Scalia’s tart tongue has been a fixture on the bench for years, but as the justices venture this year into highly political areas such as health-care reform and immigration, the divisive and pugilistic style of the senior associate justice is very much defining the public image of the Roberts Court.”

Leaming is absolutely correct that "with each passing high court term, Scalia seems to be coming wackier, more out-of-touch, increasingly shrill. And he’s being called out for his nuttiness with growing frequency." 

"The Madness of Justice Scalia," Leaming's piece, cites various legal scholars and reporters, including law professor Paul Campos, who observed that Scalia “has in his old age become an increasingly intolerant and intolerable blowhard: a pompous celebrant of his own virtue and rectitude, a purveyor of intemperate jeremiads against the degeneracy of the age, and now an author of hysterical diatribes against foreign invaders, who threaten all that is holy.”

Perhaps Scalia has finally gone too far.  In a column last Wednesday (before the ACA decision), E.J. Dionne called for Scalia to resign:

So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.

Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioning President Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.

After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the secretary of homeland security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants,” Scalia said. “The president has said that the new program is ‘the right thing to do’ in light of Congress’s failure to pass the administration’s proposed revision of the immigration laws. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of federal immigration law that the president declines to enforce boggles the mind.

What boggles the mind is that Scalia thought it proper to jump into this political argument. And when he went on to a broader denunciation of federal policies, he sounded just like an Arizona Senate candidate.

Dionne takes Scalia to task for being a "blatantly political actor" and justice at the same time:  "Unaccountable power can lead to arrogance. That’s why justices typically feel bound by rules and conventions that Scalia seems to take joy in ignoring."

Recall, as Dionne reminds us, 2004, when "three weeks after the Supreme Court announced it would hear a case over whether the White House needed to turn over documents from an energy task force that Dick Cheney had headed, Scalia went off on Air Force Two for a duck-hunting trip with the vice president."

Then there was the speech Scalia gave at Switzerland’s University of Fribourg a few weeks before the court was to hear a case involving the rights of Guantanamo detainees:  "I am astounded at the world reaction to Guantanamo,” he declared in response to a question. “We are in a war. We are capturing these people on the battlefield. We never gave a trial in civil courts to people captured in a war. War is war and it has never been the case that when you capture a combatant, you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts. It’s a crazy idea to me.”

Dionne does not even mention how Scalia (as well as his fellow conservative justices Thomas and Alito) regularly attend right-wing events and political fundraisers.  (Indeed, Clarence Thomas, in particular, is far quieter, but similarly nakedly partisan and ethically challenged.  See, e.g., here and here.)

Scalia is 76 years old but despite the urging of E.J. Dionne does not appear to be leaving the bench any time soon.  What is of far greater concern is that Justice Ginsburg turns 80 next year and Justice Breyer turns 75.  When you throw in Justice Kennedy (75), you have what the New York Times points out is "among the oldest courts since the New Deal era."  As a result, "the winner of the race for president will inherit a group of justices who frequently split 5 to 4 along ideological lines," suggesting "the next president could have a powerful impact if he gets to replace a justice of the opposing side."

And while it is true that Chief Justice Roberts showed some modicum of sanity in voting to uphold the Affordable Care Act, he has not been magically transformed into the new swing justice.  It should be noted that while the outcome was welcome, his legal reasoning was, as Justice Ginsburg put it, "stunningly retrogressive."  (See 10 Ways John Roberts Is Still A Conservative's Best Friend.)

What shouldn't be lost in all the hoopla over the validation of Obamacare is that the Scalia and the other three dissenters (Thomas, Alito and Kennedy), as Paul Krugman points out, "did so in extreme terms, proclaiming not just the much-disputed individual mandate but the whole act unconstitutional. Given prevailing legal opinion, it’s hard to see that position as anything but naked partisanship."

As I have previously written, Romney's choice of Robert Bork as co-chair of his Justice Advisory Committee is a disturbing sign of the kind of radical jurists Romney would nominate.  (See Romney Gets Borked.)  In the wake of Roberts' "defection," there will be even more pressure on Romney to choose right wing extremists in the Scalia-Thomas mold, a fact he is essentially admitting on the campaign trail.  Dionne is right that Scalia should resign but that isn't going to happen.  But there remains an even more disturbing prospect than Scalia staying put.  It is that a President Romney will  add more right-wing ideologues to the Supreme Court (and throughout the federal judiciary), forming a solid block of partisan operatives.

Romney's Quiet Rooms: Where All The Money's Hidden?

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

DonkeyHotey

The incredible new Vanity Fair piece on Romney’s secretive off shore tax accounts and business practices at Bain immediately made me think of one of my favorite video clips of 2012, this one where Romney is talking about how issues related to the concentration of wealth should only be discussed in “quiet rooms”:



Mitt Romney undeniably likes his secrets, especially when it comes to money, and I have to admit that the revelations in Vanity Fair gave me a different take on the Quiet Rooms quote. I had always assumed it was just Mitt being Mitt, doing his classic Thurston Howell III imitation, another in a long line of Mitticisms (I like being able to fire people, I know a couple of Nascar team owners, did I tell you the funny story about how my dad laid off a bunch of people, etc) reminding us how cluelessly out of touch Mitt was. It was also the ultimate in big money Republicanism: we don’t talk about these issues in public because we don’t want people to get mad and start a class war. But now it occurs to me what Mitt was really trying to guard in his quiet rooms: all the millions he has secretly stashed away.

What Mitt, with his offshore accounts and his secretive business practices and his endorsement of the Ryan budget which gives even more advantages to Wall Street tycoons like himself, is trying to preserve is the ability to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. He wants a world where the wealthy have all these advantages and loopholes and secret deals and lower tax rates, precisely because that was his entire business model at Bain Capital. He wants a world where he doesn’t have to pay taxes on his accounts in Bermuda and the Caymans and Luxembourg and Switzerland. He wants a world where he can recruit any sleazebag overseas investor to invest in Bain. As Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon.com puts it: “This pattern of elusiveness is hardly confined to Romney’s finances, but rather defines his public life.”

Mitt’s entire career is defined by the secrets he has, and the fact that he didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else except for a few other well-connected Wall Street guys. The way Mitt made his money is exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about in this Presidential campaign- and not only because it relates directly to Romney’s character, experience, and values. We should be talking about this because we should be debating as a country whether we want a country whose economic system is structured primarily to benefit a small number of wealthy, well-connected insiders operating behind closed doors, manipulating the tax code and financial markets to become more and more wealthy; or whether we want a country where businesses make money the old-fashioned way, by manufacturing and selling quality products, and playing by the same rules everyone else has to play by. By and large, with only occasional exceptions where Bain actually created real new jobs, the way Romney became wealthy was to make other people poorer- manipulating the financial markets and tax code, off-shoring jobs, cutting wages and benefits, laying off people, driving companies into bankruptcy while still getting huge fees from them. He also ripped off the rest of us taxpayers through the outrageous carried interest loophole, though writing off the debt he loaded companies up with and then writing it off, and through taking advantage of the taxpayer-backed Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation’s obligation to pay off pensions when Bain’s companies went bankrupt. I guess it is not surprising that having made most of his money that way, he decided to keep so much of that money invested in secret overseas accounts.

No wonder Mitt Romney wants to keep this discussion confined strictly to “quiet rooms”. I would too if I had stashed so many of the millions I made from off-shoring jobs and all these other revolting business practices into secret off-shore accounts. But it is time for America to have this discussion- and not just in quiet rooms.

Mitt Romney And The Odor Of Mendacity

Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?... There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity... You can smell it.  -- Tennessee Williams from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Several months ago, Paul Krugman wrote about Mitt Romney's dishonest campaign and penchant for uttering false and fraudulent statements:  "Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right."

Krugman went on to predict that "Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods" but "most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement."

Fast forward to last week's article in the New York Times, "Fact-Checking Obama and Romney," which stated that:

Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are filling speeches with facts and figures designed to enhance their case and diminish the other guy’s, in the process often making assertions fundamentally at odds with one another. Along the way, both candidates are at times stretching the truth, using statistics without context, exaggerating their own records and misrepresenting their opponent’s. 

A classic example of balance and false equivalence, the article concluded that "[d]etermining who is the worse dissembler can be a subjective exercise, even in an age when news organizations, blogs and partisan groups blitz out regular fact-checks.

But while the Obama campaign's rhetoric can be at times misleading, it cannot be compared to Romney's incessant lying.  Steve Benen at Rachel Maddow's blog has been chronicling Romney's lies for months.  (See his 23rd weekly installment here.)

As Michael Cohen of the Guardian summarizes Romney's "cavalcade of untruths" and concludes:

Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.

And how can Romney get away with it?  Cohen explains:

Now, in general, those of us in the pundit class are really not supposed to accuse politicians of lying – they mislead, they embellish, they mischaracterize, etc. Indeed, there is natural tendency for nominally objective reporters, in particular, to stay away from loaded terms such as lying. Which is precisely why Romney's repeated lies are so effective. In fact, lying is really the only appropriate word to use here, because, well, Romney lies a lot. But that's a criticism you're only likely to hear from partisans.

Pollsters and pundits seems to agree that the election will be extremely close.  Whether the media will ignore the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity that surrounds Mitt Romney will be a key factor in the outcome.

Bad Week For Bain-onomics

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars



When the Obama campaign started raising questions about the way Bain Capital operated when Romney was the CEO, some Democrats who are close to Wall Street immediately starting complaining. We shouldn’t be attacking “capitalism”, they said, or the financial industry. But those Democrats are looking pretty foolish after the stories that have come out over the past few days. It has never been capitalism or even the financial industry being attacked when Bain’s style of operating is the subject: it is the worst kind of vampire capitalism that the Obama campaign is going after.

The idea of questioning Bain has always been essential to this campaign, because Romney has made clear that his main qualification to be President is the work he did at Bain. As the New York Times put it in their story Saturday “Companies’ Ills Did Not Harm Romney’s Firm”:

“Mr. Romney’s experience at Bain is at the heart of his case for the presidency. He has repeatedly promoted his years working in the “real economy,” arguing that his success turning around troubled companies and helping to start new ones, producing jobs in the process, has prepared him to revive the country’s economy. He has fended off attacks about job losses at companies Bain owned, saying, “Sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.” But an examination of what happened when companies Bain controlled wound up in bankruptcy highlights just how different Bain and other private equity firms are from typical denizens of the real economy, from mom-and-pop stores to bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures.”

But now, with this major new NYT story, plus the Washington Post pioneer-in-outsourcing story, it is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone why the Obama campaign and people like me have been making a big deal about Bain for a long time. All capitalism is not the same, and Bain is right up there with companies like Goldman Sachs in the sleaziness with which they make their money. What Bain did in buying these companies was to create a structure where they made money no matter what. As the saying goes, it’s nice work if you can get it- but you can’t get it unless you are willing to be absolutely brutal in pursuing your own profits at the expense of everyone else. What Bain did wasn’t just capitalism, but the worst sort of capitalism. As the NYT and other media sources have so explicitly laid it out, at least 7 Bain-owned companies went bankrupt, but “Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds.” Bain loaded these companies with debt, in part so they could pay Bain millions (sometimes tens of millions) of dollars in fees. They then wrote off the debt on their taxes. In some cases (at least 4 times according the NYT story) Bain amassed huge short term profits before the companies, weighed down with the debt Bain forced on them, sunk under the weight of that debt.

Some of the companies Bain bought did better than that. Of course, some of those that did were out-sourcing and off-shoring pioneers. And others did better in great part by laying off huge numbers of workers and/or slashing the wages and benefits of many others. This is the track record that is “at the heart of [Romney’s] case for the Presidency”?

The debate over Bain-onomics is exactly the kind of debate this country should be having. We are at a make or break moment for the American middle class. What should our path forward be? Will it be the path of Bain and the biggest banks on Wall Street, which put profits over everything else, making millions because other people went broke and lost their jobs? Or will it be a path that invests in the health of our economy and the business sector from the bottom up? This is the fundamental choice for Americans: do we help and promote the kind of businesses that make and sell products and services here in America? Do we help the economy by investing in our people, giving them good education, college loans, and decent wages so they can buy goods from the small businesses in their community? Do we help our small businesses with start-up capital and giving them a fighting chance to compete with the big dogs? Or is our government going to be 100% geared toward the big incumbents who already have big money and market share and well-connected lobbyists who can get them sweetheart deals and tax breaks?

I think the Obama team has been absolutely right to engage all-out in this debate over Bain, and to frame this race as to who will fight for the middle class in their moment of need. This new ad shows they get it.

Relax 'Mitt,' Just Be Yourself

By Tina Dupuy, cross-posted from her website

Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff comments are starting to seem like Barack Obama’s bowling: Not good. Kind of spectacularly bad. Kitsch on a kind day.

Romney keeps on rolling gutter balls in front of the cameras: “The trees are the right height.” “I like being able to fire people.” “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” “I’m Mitt Romney—and yes Wolf, that’s also my first name.”

Normally the adage “a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth” applies. On the Jay Leno show, Obama famously compared his bowling skills to those in the Special Olympics. Many, including myself, were offended by the remark (mainly because the Special Olympics athletes are far better bowlers than Mr. Obama). The President apologized profusely for the statement.

But Romney’s greatest gaffes are less accidental nuggets of candor (like, “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”) and more what you’d call disquieting sound bites of misfired pandering. Moments that can be summed up by the phrase “cheesy grits.”

Yes, he told a crowd in Mississippi during the primary, he had “cheesy grits” (as opposed to cheese grits) for breakfast and he was learning how to say, “ya’ll.” He would have been better off saying sweet tea (a diabetic coma-inducing regional syrup served over ice) is best with Splenda and he was learning how to talk … real … slow.

(Rick Santorum won Mississippi, by the way.)

Yes, when Romney attempts to show how in touch he is with Americans…he ends up displaying exactly how in touch he is with Americans. Meaning: Not at all.

This week, minutes after marveling at the 10-year-old touch screen technology at a Wawa in Quakertown, Romney was still stuck on regional sandwiches when he got to Cornwall, Pennsylvania. “By the way, where do you get your hoagies here?” he asked the crowd of supporters. “Do you get them at Wawas? Is that where you get them? No? Do you get them at Sheetz? Where do you get them?” According to reports the crowd booed until Governor Tom Corbett offered that the locals got their sandwiches at “delis.”

Here’s the thing: For a man whose book is titled “No Apology,” Mitt’s awkward Rand McNally riffing looks like he’s apologizing for not being from there. And in the case of Michigan (where he actually is from) not being enough like those who are from there. “Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” He’s telling us who he is by making it clear what he’s not: A man of the people … unless those “people” are corporations, my friends.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the unemployment rate would actually be a percentage point lower if the government employed as many people as we did in 2009. It’s a time when government IS shrinking—teachers and cops are being laid off and Mitt’s hoagie haven Pennsylvania lost 5,400 government jobs just this year. Mitt also does his best to seem obtuse. “[Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

Who could have guessed a rich man running for a government job would have the chutzpah (pronounced choots-paw if your last name is Bachmann) to stand up against more firefighters and teachers?

One minute Romney is touting his business experience and wealth as a qualification to be president—the next minute he’s trying to appear like he’s not (as Jon Stewart observed) the guy who just fired your dad.

President Obama should not bowl. Ever. And Romney, well, he should stop trying to relate to blue-collar living and just be the stuffy, privileged, Ivy League, over-educated, French-speaking, affluent Republican he is.

Mitt, if that is your real name (it isn’t), just be yourself.

Courting Disaster: What Romney Would Do To Our System Of Justice

As I have previously written, Romney's choice of Robert Bork as co-chair of his Justice Advisory Committee is a disturbing sign of the kind of radical jurists Romney would nominate to the federal bench.  (See Romney Gets Borked.)  Not to mention what Romney could do to the Supreme Court -- which is already the most conservative it has been since the 1930s -- if given the opportunity.  (See Supreme Court Matters.)  As the economy faulters and Obama's gaffes get picked apart, it is critical to focus on how disastrous a Romney Presidency would be for our system of justice.  -- Lovechilde

A Romney Presidency Could Mean A Hostile Takeover Of The Federal Courts

By Jessica Mason Pieklo, cross-posted from RH Realty Check

As it stands the state of the federal judiciary is one of crisis. More than 160 million Americans live in a community with a federal court vacancy. Additional funding cuts threaten to shut down courts or suspend trials in some areas which means individual seeking justice for claims must wait longer, if they have access to the courts at all. Judicial vacancies not only stress the functioning of the federal judiciary, they threaten the ideological stability as well. A significant reason the federal judiciary is chronically understaffed is because Congressional Republicans refuse to act on nominees out of partisan and ideological spite. The result is a federal bench significantly lacking in any diversity rendering judgments over an increasingly diverse population. Sounds bad, doesn't it? It is, and if Mitt Romney wins the presidency, it will only get worse.

Early in his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, Romney developed a reputation as a man with an eye toward good governance and transparency. His early judicial appointments reflected a wide array of ideologies and experiences and Romney even undertook more substantive structural reforms to combat the practice and perception of political cronyism in judicial nominations.

But it quickly became clear that in order to advance his political career Romney would have to embrace a harder-line conservatism in both ideology and approach to the courts. Chronicles of Romney's political evolution from moderate to hard-right plutocrat are not difficult to come by, but it is his approach to the courts, their independence and their function that deserves much closer scrutiny. And that scrutiny shouldn't be limited to simply the kind of judges a President Romney would appoint to the federal bench, but how his administration would help or hinder the function of the courts in its entirety.

If Romney's early judicial selections as governor of Massachusetts illustrate a belief in the necessity of an independent and ideologically diverse judicial system, his later selections show an embrace of rigid conservatism and the benefits of political payback. In Massachusetts Romney went from nominating openly gay judges to beneficiaries of Bain capital and from embracing oversight of the judicial nomination process to openly working against it.

Fast forward to Romney's current presidential run. Under any other political climate than the current one, having failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork as a judicial advisor would be considered a political liability at best and the end of any serious presidential wish at worst. After all, Bork's political and legal career first drew attention back in 1973 when as solicitor general and under direct order from then-President Nixon, he fired Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the Watergate cover-up. Bork's views on civil rights, including the idea that because women make up a majority of the population gender discrimination is an impossibility, and his belief that integrating public accommodations under the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an "unsurpassed ugliness," would eventually go on to shape a belief that the judiciary must bend its will to that of the people unless expressly prohibited by the Constitution.


If that sounds a bit obtuse let's ground it in the current debate on women's reproductive rights. At least one sitting U.S. Senator is calling on conservatives to simply ignore the mandates of Roe v. Wade and establish fetal personhood via the 14th Amendment. That call to ignoring the rule of law because it is an affront to the will of the "people" is directly out of the Robert Bork playbook.
Combine Bork's ultraconservative orthodoxy when it comes to the federal courts, his shared religious conservatism with Romney and add Romney's deep ties to the private equity world and we could expect most judicial nominations would fit the mold of Samuel Alito – social conservatives with deep and loyal ties to the monied world.

Declaring that a President Romney would appoint staunch conservative judges and practitioners to the federal bench is admittedly not much of a declaration. Place those ultra-conservative justices in a system already structurally strained and stressed from a decade of political attacks and suddenly the federal courts start to look an awful lot like those businesses Romney the private equity baron would take over and kill off.

The obvious problem with that scenario is that we're talking about the federal courts and not a private company on the verge of bankruptcy and prime for a hostile take-over.

Romney may have started his political career in Massachusetts as an advocate of judicial reform, but he did not end it as one. And with the state of our federal judiciary already in crisis the last thing this country can afford is an administration that drives the law further right while dismantling the courts from within.

The Big Lie Coup d'Etat

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

JP Morgan Chase,  Goldman Sachs, BP, Chevron, WalMart, and billionaires Charles and David Koch are launching a multi-million dollar TV ad buy Tuesday blasting President Obama over the national debt.

Actually, I don’t know who’s behind this ad because there’s no way to know. And that’s a big problem.
The front group for the ad is Crossroads GPS, the sister organization to the super PAC American Crossroads run by Republican political operative Karl Rove.

Because Crossroads GPS is a tax-exempt nonprofit group, it can spend unlimited money on politics — and it doesn’t have to reveal where it gets the dough.

By law, all it has to do is spent most of the money on policy “issues,” which is a fig leaf for partisan politics.
Here’s what counts as an issue ad, as opposed to a partisan one. The narrator in the ad Crossroads GPS is launching solemnly intones: “In 2008, Barack Obama said, ‘We can’t mortgage our children’s future on a mountain of debt.’ Now he’s adding $4 billion in debt every day, borrowing from China for his spending. Every second, growing our debt faster than our economy,” he continues. “Tell Obama, stop the spending.”
This is a baldface lie, by the way.

Obama isn’t adding to the debt every day. The debt is growing because of obligations entered into long ago, many under George W. Bush – including two giant tax cuts that went mostly to the very wealthy that were supposed to be temporary and which are still going, courtesy of Republican blackmail over raising the debt limit.

In realty, government spending as a portion of GDP keeps dropping.

As I said, I don’t know who’s financing this big lie but there’s good reason to think it’s some combination of Wall Street, big corporations, and the billionaire Koch brothers.

According to the reliable inside-Washington source “Politico,” the Koch brothers’ network alone will be spending $400 million over the next six months trying to defeat Obama, which is more than Senator John McCain spent on his entire 2008 campaign.

Big corporations and Wall Street are also secretly funneling big bucks into front groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that will use the money to air anti-Obama ads, while keeping secret the identities of these firms.

Looking at the all the anti-Obama super PACs and political fronts like Crossroads GPS, Politico estimates the anti-Obama forces (including the Romney campaign) will outspend Obama and pro-Obama groups by 2 to 1.

How can it be that big corporations and billionaires will be spending unlimited amounts on big lies like this one, without any accountability because no one will know  where the money is coming from?

Blame a majority of the Supreme Court in its grotesque 2010 Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission decision — as well as the IRS for lax enforcement that lets political front groups like Crossroads GPS or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce pretend they’re not political.

But you might also blame something deeper, more sinister.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist (you can’t have served in Washington and seriously believe more than two people can hold on to a big story without it leaking), but I fear that at least since 2010 we’ve been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d’etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful — who haven’t been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

Its technique is to inundate America with a few big lies, told over and over (the debt is Obama’s fault and it’s out of control; corporations and the very rich are the “job creators” that need tax cuts; government is the enemy, and its regulations are strangling the private sector; unions are bad; and so on), and tell them so often they’re taken as fact.

Then having convinced enough Americans that these lies are true, take over the White House, Congress, and remaining states that haven’t yet succumbed to the regressive right (witness Tuesday’s recall election in Wisconsin).

I desperately hope I’m wrong, but all there’s growing evidence I may be right. 


Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage

The Ginned Up Race War Of 2012

By Sally Kohn, cross-posted from Colorlines

“The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done.”
—Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast

Nothing stirs up white racial anxiety in an election year like a black-against-white race war. Never mind the fact that there isn’t one. When has that ever stopped the inventive right wing?

Those of us living in the world of objective facts and reality might be mistaken for thinking that the United States remains an at best well-intentioned, but nonetheless deeply hostile nation toward its communities of color. In New York City, reports have shown that in 2011, police conducted 685,724 street stop and frisks (up from 97,000 in 2002). Young black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6 percent of those stopped—although they are only 4.7 percent of the city’s population. In Missouri, a black man named George Allen has been in prison for almost 30 years for allegedly murdering a white woman, a crime that mounting evidence suggests Allen did not commit. Last month, a black woman named Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing a single warning shot into the kitchen ceiling of her home to warn off her abusive husband and protect her three children.

But according to conservative media, exactly the opposite is occurring. Conservatives allege there is a growing but underreported black-versus-white race war in America.

There’s no data, of course, just some strung together anecdotes—namely, one about two white newspaper reporters who, while driving through Norfolk, Va., were attacked by a group of young black kids. The media didn’t pounce on the story—even the reporters’ own newspaper, the Virginian-Pilot, only mentioned the incident in an opinion piece two weeks later. Conservatives, who actually love to talk about race and racism when they can do so with their fingers pointing at people of color and liberals, pounced on the story as evidence of media bias. The lamestream media was all over the Travyon Martin story but ignored the beating of whites by black kids. That, conservatives screamed, is racial bias.

Mind you, the two reporters in the Virginia incident weren’t hospitalized for their injuries, let alone killed. Local police moved quickly to investigate and three days after the incident was first reported by the paper, police arrested one teen, charging him with throwing a rock at the reporters’ car (a felony) as well as related misdemeanors. By comparison, George Zimmerman wasn’t arrested until almost two months after he shot Trayvon Martin, and only then as a result of community pressure. Only those desperate to distract from productive conversations about racial bias and injustice and return American attention to reinforcing racial stereotypes and hierarchies could manage to find anything comparable between the Trayvon Martin case and the Virginia incident.

Even most white conservatives know better than to use the term “race war” to describe this concocted, black-against-white threat. Fortunately, conservatives have Thomas Sowell. In a widely circulated, syndicated column for the National Review entitled “The Censored Race War,” the black conservative wrote:

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

Sowell is either intentionally feeding the idea that blacks like himself are more dangerous and violent than whites or unwittingly providing cover for those who seek to do so.

The root of inequality is the simple but sinister idea that some people are inherently inferior to others. I’ll give Sowell and other conservative media figureheads the benefit of the doubt that they do not personally believe young black men are inherently more dangerous and violent, but that’s all the more reason not to play into such biases and fan the flames of white racial anxiety. Sowell and others should understand that, in America today, this is how racism operates—not primarily through explicit epithets and force but through subtle winks and nods to the prejudices on which our society remains built.

The Virginia case specifically and the manufactured race war in general conveniently feed a larger conservative narrative this election year—reminding white America of how dangerous and scary black men are and how white people, especially white men, are the victims. Despite the fact that, yes, a lot of white folks voted for President Obama in 2008, most didn’t and according to a post-election study by a researcher at Harvard, racial animus cost Obama anywhere from three to five percentage points in the 2008 popular vote. In what is shaping up to a be a tight re-election battle, a few percentage points can really matter.

In addition, the 2012 election will likely be less about independent voters (who polls indicate may split fairly evenly between Romney and Obama) than about voter turnout in each party’s base. Republicans know they have an enthusiasm gap—even now that the primaries are over, Republicans say the main reason they support Romney simply because he’s “not Obama.” Yet in 2008 exit polling, 24 percent of American voters said they were “scared” by the prospect of Barack Obama being elected president. Of those, 95 percent voted Republican. Gin up fear, win the election.

I’m not saying racial animus is the only way to stoke white conservative fear in an election. But it’s sure a popular choice, one we have already seen that Republican Super PACs are pursuing. And we can see this at play in other campaigns too, including the fact that Scott Brown has tried far harder to portray Elizabeth Warren as a person of color than she ever did herself, desperately hoping to increase his own margin of the racial animus vote.

Things really are bad for most white men in America today, just like they are for the rest of us. Jobs are disappearing and so are the public benefits that have traditionally supported them in times of need. And if the present seems bad, the future seems even worse, as public schools implode and college tuition gets further out of reach. Anger is a powerful motivator.

Republicans can’t risk white voters realizing that conservative policies have caused their suffering. And though President Obama’s own record isn’t strong, for the majority of voters middle class tax cuts, affordable health care and fairly centrist policies from education reform to the military aren’t exactly the stuff of fire and brimstone. But the president is black. I’m not arguing that conservatives are attacking the president only because of his race, but they are certainly guilty of tapping into and fanning racial resentment to ignite their critiques. In that sense, sadly, by inventing a fake black-versus-white race war, conservatives are reinforcing and exploiting the divisive white-versus-black racial dynamics in America that they should be instead helping to fix.

 Sally Kohn is a progressive activist, writer, Fox News contributor, and a regular contributor to Colorlines.com.

What The Bain Debate Is Really About

By Terrance Heath, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

DonkeyHotey

The 2012 presidential election may go down as one of the strangest political seasons in recent memory, for the simple reason that the influence of the financial sector in politics, policy and the economy has caused Republicans to sound like Democrats and Democrat to sound like Republicans — usually with confounding results.

When Republicans sound like Democrats, like Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital, they tend to start arguments they can't win. When Democrats start sounding like Republicans, like Cory Booker defending Bain Capital, they tend forfeit arguments they could win. That's because, in both cases, the politicians are arguing about the wrong things, in order to avoid the real argument  — the one America needs to have, and Americans need to win; the argument over what kind of economy we will have going forward.

Gingrich's attack on Romney's record confused many conservatives, who equated it with an attack on capitalism itself. Newark Mayor Cory Booker echoed the concerns of confused conservatives when he called the Obama campaigns ads attacking Romney's record at Bain Capital a "nauseating" attack on private equity, labeling them a distraction. "It's either going to be a small campaign about this crap or it's going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about," Booker said.

What Booker, Democrats like him, and conservatives now lauding his diatribe ignore or don't realize is that the issues affecting voters don't come much bigger and don't get much more real than the kind of capitalism Bain represents.

Bain Capitalism

As Digby said, if Romney is going to run on his Bain Capital record and tout his private equity background as his main qualification for the presidency, then his track record at Bain is fair game. I summed up that track record in my original post about his brand of "vulture capitalism."

A former managing partner at Bain, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, made it clear that job creation was never the point at Bain.

Bain managers said their mission was clear. "I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation," said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. "The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors."

Under Romney's leadership, Bain certainly created wealth for its investors, no matter what happened to the companies it acquired or the the people worked for them. The Wall Street Journal's revealing look at Romney's time at Bain shows that 22% of the companies Bain invested on under Romney's watch either filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, or closed their doors — sometimes with substantial job losses. As Pat Garofalo pointed out, that's nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in.



Some failed so badly that Bain lost its investments. That didn't put a damper in returns, though. Bain produced about $2.5 billion in returns for its shareholders, out of just $1.1 billion invested. (Romney did alright, too. His campaign estimates his take during his term at Bain as anywhere from $190 million to $250 million. That's enough for a lot of $10,000 bets.)

The LA Times piece makes it clear that Bain and its investors profited, no matter what happened to the companies in its portfolio. According to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of Bain's returns came from just 10 deals. The LA Times article notes that "Four of the 10 companies Bain acquired declared bankruptcy within a few years, shedding thousands of jobs." Still, Bain profited in eight of those ten deals, including three of the four that went bankrupt.

That's the way "vulture capitalism" (as I like to call it) works. Bain and its shareholders profited in the end, no matter what else happened.

That's the part of the story that the Gingrich movie seems to tell: what else happened. We know what happened on Wall Street when Mitt Romney came to town. A few people — Mitt Romney included — made a lot of money. Now we know what else happened on Main Street when Mitt Romney came to town.

What happened to those companies and the people who worked for them begins to read like a casualty list: 1,700 jobs lost at Dade International, more than 700 jobs lost at GS Industries, 200 jobs lost at American Pad and Paper (Apmad). After a while, it's easy to forget that these numbers represent the lives of real people, whose job loss sent shock waves through their families and communities; people like Donny Box and Randy Johnson.

It's also easy to miss the point that this is just how the brand of "head I win, tails you lose" capitalism Bain practiced under Romney's leadership is suppose to work; as the Obama campaign illustrates in a new video and slideshow about how Bain made $100 million on its $5 million investment in Ampad, even while sending the company into bankruptcy and its 1,500 employees to the unemployment line. Bain Capital made profits no matter what happened the companies in its portfolio. Nearly one fourth of the companies Bain invested in during Romney's tenure either went bankrupt, reorganized, or simply shut down — often with significant layoffs. Seventy percent of Bain's profits came from just 10 deals, four of which resulted in bankruptcy.

"Extracting Value"

Romney's factually challenged, incredible shrinking claims of being a "job creator" at Bain notwithstanding, his former Bain colleague got it exactly right. Bain wasn't in the business of creating jobs, and Romney wasn't in the business of creating jobs. Bain's mission, and Romney's job as its chief, was simply to "create wealth" for its investors. Period.

Bain Capital and Mitt Romney were in the business of creating even more wealth for its already-wealthy investors. They were apparently very good at it, too. But the kind of wealth Bain and Romney worked to create isn't the kind of wealth that leads to more widely shared prosperity. It's not the kind of wealth that grows the economy, according to the CBO. Nor is it the kind of wealth that leads to job creation, according to Moody's Analytics, because it doesn't get put back into the economy to support existing jobs or spur job creation by boosting demand. The wealthy don't spend their tax cut windfalls, but save them and invest them in the stock market instead; putting their money to work making money, rather than putting their money to work keeping people working and putting people to work.

The success or failure of the companies in its portfolio were beside the point. When he's not claiming the mantle of "job creator," Romney casts himself and Bain as "fixers" who acquired "broken" companies and made them better —more efficient, and more profitable. But that wasn't the point at Bain. To some extent, Bain and Romney profited from practices that were more about extracting value from its acquisitions than "fixing" them. (The language about "extracting value" is even repeated in some of Bain's own material.)

That's what Bain Capitalism is about: "extracting value" with no investment in the fate of the companies in its portfolio, the people who work from them, or the communities that rely on them.

 "What This Job Is All About"

Cory Booker called the debate over Bain Capital a "distraction" that threatened to make the election a "small campaign" about small ideas, instead of a "big campaign" about "the issues the American public cares about." In his remarks at yesterday's NATO summit, President Obama made the case for why Romney's record at Bain Capital is relevant to a "big campaign" about "issues the American public cares about." (And he managed it without even calling Booker a "jackass.")

… [T]he reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be President is his business expertise. He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying, I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it, and this is his business.

And when you’re President, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how are we paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so that they can attract new businesses. Your job as President is to think about how do we set up a equitable tax system so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us then to invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so, if your main argument for how to grow the economy is I knew how to make a lot of money for investors, then you’re missing what this job is about. It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity, but that’s not what my job is as President. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

So to repeat, this is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about -- is what is a strategy for us to move this country forward in a way where everybody can succeed? And that means I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.

The president is off to a good start on taking the debate where it needs to from here; from the particulars of Romney's record at Bain Capital to what it represents, and the economic choices facing America. But, as I pointed out before, the business practices of companies like Bain mean profit for the investor class, and pain for the 99%. Now, president Obama needs to make it personal.

This is pretty good, but I think it's going to have to get a lot more forceful. Obama has this habit, which you learn as a writer over time is really unconvincing. He very often makes an assertion without illustrating it, without saying why. It leaves listeners confused because he hasn't really put meat behind the assertion.

But he is on the right track here. I don't think this is such a difficult needle to thread. In fact he could get a lot more emotional mileage out of this sort of thing. Like how? Like so:

"The people who lost their jobs because of Mitt Romney's creative destruction, those are precisely the people the president has to think about most. Those are the people who write the letters that I read every night before I go to bed. Those are the people who need my help the most of all. Mitt Romney and his fellow investors will mostly be just fine. I think about the other people. Governor Romney says, explicitly, has said many times, of lost jobs, that's capitalism, that's just the way it goes. Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

Choosing Capitalism

"Do you want a president who watches an American factory shut down and says, 'Well, that's capitalism?'"

It recasts Romney's answer to questions about bankruptcies, shutdowns, and layoffs Bain left in its wake as a Rumsfeldian "stuff happens" response to the economic consequences of Bain's practices. Stuff doesn't just happen. Stuff happens because other stuff happens. The debate is basically about whether we should regulate some stuff in order to keep it from happening, and what we should do about the stuff that happens as a result.

We are, as E.J. Dionne writes, not in the middle of a national argument about capitalism versus "socialism," but a much needed discussion about what kind of capitalism we want.

The Bain conversation has already been instructive. Romney’s friends no less than his foes have had to face the fact that Bain’s purpose was never about job-creation. Its goal was to generate large returns to Bain’s partners and investors. It did that, which is why Romney is rich.

Romney wants to focus on the positive side of his business dealings that did create jobs. He wants to brag about the companies Bain helped bring to life, among them Staples, Sports Authority and Domino’s.

That’s fair enough. But having made an issue of Bain on the plus side, he also has to answer for the pain and suffering — or, as defenders of capitalism like to call it, the “creative destruction” — that some of Bain’s deals left in their wake.
This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

What's the alternative to the "vulture capitalism" practiced by firms like Bain Capital? What it's called varies, I've heard it called "Inclusive Capitalism" and "the New Economy movement." It's components are just beginning to take shape, as more people envision a capitalism that better spreads the benefits of the "productivity revolution," that regulates the worst of capitalism's "creative destruction," and incorporates a safety net to catch those left behind by the market.
This may be another debate in which President Obama could benefit from following Vice President Biden's lead.

Vice President Biden’s speech last week in Youngstown, Ohio, drew wide attention for its criticism of Romney as someone who just doesn’t “get it.” But when Biden moved beyond Romney, he offered an energetic broadside against the new world of finance, and he picked the right venue to make his case: a noble blue-collar town that has been battered by the winds of globalization and economic change.

“You know the difference between having an economy that makes things that the rest of the world wants, and having an economy that is based on financialization of every product,” Biden told his listeners. “You know the difference between an economy . . . that’s built on making things rather than on collateralized debt, creative credit-default swaps, financial instruments like subprime mortgages. That’s not how you build an economy.”

This campaign isn't just about Bain, or Mitt Romney's past. It's about our future. It's about the kind of new economy we want to build.

Wall Street, Romney, And Obama

By Mike Lux, cross-posted from Crooks and Liars

The most critical battle in this election year is the battle over Wall Street. Candidates all over the place, from the high profile candidates like Elizabeth Warren to a slew of others all over the country, are battling over who is on Wall Street’s side, who wants to keep bailing them out, and who is pushing them to go to jail. But nowhere is this battle being played out more prominently than in the race for the White House.

The Obama campaign is doing a major push in the coming weeks on Mitt Romney’s sordid history at the helm of Bain Capital. His fellow Republicans called it vulture capitalism, and they were right. Mitt bought companies (many of them doing just fine at the time he bought them), loaded them up with massive amounts of debt that Bain could write off on their taxes, in many cases destroyed and outsourced jobs and cut pay and benefits, and then frequently carved them up and sold off the pieces to maximize short-term profits. A few of these companies ended up surviving this brutal process and becoming more profitable, and we will hear a lot from Mitt about those examples. But way too many times, Mitt and Bain left these companies, and especially their workers, far worse for the wear, leaving behind a lot of shattered lives in the process, while Mitt and his fun-loving pals stuffed money in their pockets and walked away. High School wasn’t the only place Mitt brutalized those weaker than him, and he enjoyed doing it.

Bain Capital was Wall Street at its worst. But the cutthroat, anything-goes-in-the-pursuit-of-one-more-dollar culture at Bain has infected our entire banking system. The Obama campaign is right to attack on Bain and on the culture of Wall Street; it is in my view their single most powerful attack line. However, that attack will be undercut unless they buttress their own credibility on taking on Wall Street. Republicans aren’t going to hesitate coming after Obama hard on his ties to Wall Street (ironically with a lot of Wall Street money) in order to weaken the campaign’s credibility when they attack Bain, and we are seeing signs of that right now.

Look at how the issue has played out in recent days. Over the course of the last week, we have seen Jamie Dimon twisting himself into a pretzel trying to explain why his bank’s dangerous and irresponsible trades don’t merit any regulation, stories on how the Obama campaign is being hurt by not being tougher on Wall Street, like this one from Politico, a major new ad campaign by a Republican group attacking Obama for his ties to Wall Street, and new polling paid for by an anti-Wall Street coalition showing Obama’s numbers on housing/banking issues in swing states being pretty bad. These issues are clearly going to be huge in this campaign, and the Republicans will do everything in their power to exploit any Obama weakness in this area.

The Obama team, in the White House and in the campaign, in order to win on the Bain attack, needs to face—and turn around —the perception that the administration has been weak on Wall Street. They need to be willing to shed past caution and take Wall Street titans head on.

One of the toughest problems they have to work through is that the most visible vehicle for action on holding Wall Street accountable is the financial fraud task force announced with great fanfare at the State of the Union. This task force raised hopes that an aggressive investigation was forthcoming, that perhaps some of the big bankers who intentionally pumped up the housing market and then dumped the securities, would be brought to justice. But the best case scenario (and that is only if things really start moving) is that indictments won’t start rolling out until September, and that is a very long time to wait given the narrative being written as we speak on the Wall Street issue. And even in terms of that best case scenario, unfortunately questions continue to be raised by sources I am talking to about whether the DOJ is slow-walking this investigation, whether enough resources are being given to the task force, and whether key staff at the White House are paying enough attention. Those questions ultimately won’t be answered until the task force starts to produce something tangible, and if we have to wait until the fall, these questions are going to keep building.

The administration should act right now to give the DOJ much more in the way of staff resources to the task force, and the President and White House senior staff need to send signals that they care about what is going on and that this is a high priority for them. If, for example, the DOJ is slow-walking, the White House needs to lean hard on the DOJ to make sure they aren’t. It seems like politics 101 to me to make sure the task force has the person-power to be successful in its work, but they are failing the test.

Given that (even with extra resources, by the way) the task force isn’t going to be moving fast enough for any of us who care about the political calendar, the entire Obama administration needs to show every day that they are willing to take on the big banks on behalf of homeowners, students, credit card consumers, and everyone else who is getting taken advantage of every day by bankers. Their reaction to the JP Morgan news, for example, has been far too low key. They should be banging away on Dimon and the other speculative bankers every single day, using this news to drive and build a narrative about reckless bankers rather than being restrained in their messaging about it. When a retiring bank CEO mentions in passing that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had something to do with the banking collapse, they should have used that as part of their narrative, too. Same when a trader at Goldman Sachs quits because the ethics at the firm have gone so far south. In every case, these were tailor-made opportunities for the White House and campaign to jump in with both feet and build that narrative about how this is why we need a President willing to take on bankers rather one who was the worst kind of one at Bain Capital.

Speaking of message restraint, though, there is some major restraint they do need to employ, and that is on their lame duck Treasury Secretary. In recent weeks, Geithner has stabbed the task force in the back by downplaying banker fraud, has rejected the idea that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a problem in the 2008 collapse, and has similarly dismissed credit default swaps as a big problem. He seems more like a spokesperson for Wall Street than a member of the Obama administration. He needs to be shut up or eased out before he destroys any chance of the President getting re-elected.

Team Obama is on the knife’s edge right now. The economy is still too slow, with too many bridges out along the way, to build up much if any speed as we head down the home stretch to the election. Even if it does pick up a little bit, voters are still in a very bad mood because things have been so slow for so long. Focusing voters’ ire on the people who set off this crisis, the Wall Street pump-and-dump gang, is our best shot at winning this election, most especially with one of their ultimate homies, Mitt Romney, as the Republican candidate. But for that to work, the White House and campaign need to be focused like a laser beam at telling the story of how Wall Street greed brought us down, and how putting Wall Street’s guy in the White House would be the ultimate mistake—and they need to have their own credibility in terms of holding Wall Street accountable built up considerably. Getting resources to the fraud task force and making sure everyone at the DOJ knows it is a priority is a huge deal in that regard. Bottom line: Team Obama needs to be focused on the Wall Street credibility dynamic every single day.

Bain Capital shows that Mitt Romney’s high school career was no fluke: He has proven himself to be the ultimate pick-on-the-weak bully. His Wall Street values are definitional about the kind of man he has always been. Obama needs to show that his values are the opposite by being tough on Wall Street, while Romney is shown to be the personification of it.

Mitt Romney's Commencement Advice: WWCCD (What Would Charles Colson Do)?

Mitt Romney, in an attempt to assure the Religious Right of his social conservative bona fides, delivered the commencement address at Liberty University, the Evangelical Christian University founded by Jerry Falwell.

The reviews are in and it appears that he was a hit with the white Evangelicals he was trying to win over.  As the Christian Science Monitor reports, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, praised Romney's "well-delivered speech," which "accentuated the core values issues that are essential to a strong nation and of great importance to evangelicals . .  that America's financial greatness is directly tied to moral and cultural wholeness.”  And Richard Land, the Baptist pastor from Tennessee who heads The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, agreed, finding shared "values and a similar worldview" on marriage and abortion.

It was this common worldview which Romney stressed in trying to bridge the gap between his Mormon faith and that of these conservative Christians:  

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life - people like the late Chuck Colson.

Yes of course, "always the example" of the late Charles Wendell Colson, former hatchet man for Richard Nixon, whose ruthlessness was captured by his oft-quoted remark that he would "walk over my own grandmother" if it would help Nixon get re-elected.  H.R. Haldeman wrote that Colson “encouraged the dark impulses in Nixon’s mind and acted on those impulses instead of ignoring them and letting them die.”  Among his many dastardly acts was compiling Nixon's infamous "enemies list," orchestrating the effort to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, and hiring E. Howard Hunt, who later led the Watergate break-in.

Hunter S. Thompson described Colson as "the guiding light behind Nixon's whole arsenal of illegal, immoral, unethical 'black advance' or 'dirty tricks' department."  (See Fear and Loathing at the Watergate, where HST writes about his "abortive plot" to "seize Colson out of his house and drag him down Pennsylvania Avenue tied behind a huge gold Oldsmobile Cutlass" and "cutting him loose in front of the White House Guard Gate," an idea hatched out of frustration that Colson -- at that time -- appeared to be "the only one of Nixon's first-rank henchmen who would probably not even be indicted."  But I digress.)

Turns out Colson was indicted on obstruction of justice charges for leaking information to the press about Ellsberg, for which he served seven months in federal prison.  By then he had become an Evangelical Christian, and while serving time founded a prison ministry.

He thus became, as Sarah Posner writes, "the original culture warrior," who "helped forge the Catholic-evangelical alliance against abortion."

He was nothing short of a battle commander in the cosmic culture wars, the manufactured showdown between the “Christian worldview” — the only “true” way to see things — and other “worldviews” he insisted were antithetical to it.

Put another way, as Ed Kilgore does, Colson

was for many years the chief advocate among conservative evangelicals of a “united front” with other conservative Christians (notably Catholic “traditionalists”) to pursue an aggressive cultural agenda wrapped in claims that those enemies of the “Christian worldview” were threatening religious liberty, which happens to have become the battle-cry of Christian Right opposition to Barack Obama. 

So what better role model could young conservative Christians have than Chuck Colson because, as Hunter at Daily Kos writes

when you think about how to be a good, upstanding Christian, you should be thinking about convicted Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who did nasty things for partisan political gain, got caught, got sent to prison, and then discovered that mentioning Jesus was a fine way to make a generation of religious conservatives consider your own felon-for-your-party path through life as a decent career choice. Be like Chuck!

Of Boardrooms And Bedrooms

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

Mario Piperni

The 2012 election should be about what’s going on in America’s boardrooms, but Republicans would rather it be about America’s bedrooms.

Mitt Romney says he’s against same-sex marriage; President Obama just announced his support. North Carolina voters have approved a Republican-proposed amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. Minnesota voters will be considering a similar amendment in November. Republicans in Maryland and Washington State are seeking to overturn legislative approval of same-sex marriage there.

Meanwhile, Republicans have introduced over four hundred bills in state legislatures aimed at limiting womens’ reproductive rights – banning abortions, requiring women seeking abortions to have invasive ultra-sound tests beforehand, and limiting the use of contraceptives.

The Republican bedroom crowd don’t want to talk about the nation’s boardrooms because that’s where most of their campaign money comes from. And their candidate for president has made a fortune playing board rooms like checkers.

Yet America’s real problems have nothing to do with what we do in our bedrooms and everything to do with what top executives do in their boardrooms and executive suites.

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.y and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us.

It is immoral that top executives are richly rewarded no matter how badly they screw up while most Americans are screwed no matter how hard they work.

Regressive Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes while railing against government intrusions on big business.

They don’t hesitate to hurl the epithets “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “contemptible” at private moral decisions they disagree with, while staying stone silent in the face of the most contemptible violations of public trust at the highest reaches of the economy.

We must protect and advance private rights of individuals over intimate bedroom decisions. We must also stop the abuses of economic power and privilege that are characterizing so many decisions in the nation’s boardrooms and executive suites.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

GOP = Cognitive Dissonance

Jon Stewart brilliantly connects the dots:

The Daily Show
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Obama Plays The Republican "Macho" Game

As Peter Bergen reported in the Sunday Times, President Obama is "one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades."

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Nevertheless, the "American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter."  So, I understand why Obama believes that he needs to tout his national security chops.  And the one-year anniversary of bin Laden's death provides the perfect opportunity to do so.  This may be good politics, but it is nonetheless distasteful.

As Digby puts it:

I get why the Democrats are doing it. I'm sure it's extremely satisfying to land those punches on the right wing blowhards after all the years of taunting and jeering about liberal cowardice. To be able to say they killed the evil mastermind where the swaggering codpiece failed is probably too much of a temptation for them to pass up. I get it.

But I hate it. I hated it when the Republicans did it and I hate it now. I don't believe the most powerful nation on earth should be running its democracy via schoolyard power plays. This is how we ended up stuck in Vietnam and how we have found ourselves floundering about in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It's why we can't stop spending trillions on useless weapons systems, why we "have" to continue to fund ridiculous programs like Star Wars and why everyone in the political establishment assumes that the only answer to budget problems is to cut the so-called "entitlements."

I know we live in a dangerous world. But this nation is extremely rich and extremely powerful and its most important assets are morality and mystique. I'm not going to argue about the morality of killing Osama bin laden, but it should be remembered that our unilateral wars,torture regimes and insistence on imperial prerogatives have already taken a toll on America's reputation for moral behavior.

As for mystique, well let's just say that schoolyard taunts and manly chest beating doesn't leave much to the imagination. I don't expect the macho worshiping conservatives to ever change this. It's fundamental to their very identity. I was hoping for something a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more mature from the so-called "reality-based community."

That said, Romney's response -- that he or any other President, even Jimmy Carter for Gawd's sake, would have done the same thing with regard to bin Laden -- was not only asinine but contravenes earlier remarks that he wouldn't focus on hunting down bin Laden and that candidate Obama was misguided in asserting that he would unilaterally go into Pakistan to get bin Laden.

And hey, shouldn't the media be all over Romney for criticizing our foreign policy successes?  Shouldn't they be asking why he hates America? 

As Greg Sargent points out:

Back in 2004 and 2006, when Republicans were showcasing George W. Bush’s war-on-terror routine as central to their case for reelection, and Dems were responding by attacking Republicans for politicizing national security and pointing to Bush’s failures, Dems were widely described as the ones taking the big political risk then, too.

We were told again and again during the 2004 and 2006 campaigns that Dems risked coming across as not rooting for American military success; there was little discussion of any danger for Republicans in playing up Bush’s “war president” routine. Now the situation, roughly, is reversed — and this time we’re talking about the Obama administration’s successful targeting of America’s number one global arch-enemy — yet again it’s Dems who are seen to be playing with political fire here.

This remains the Republican's game.  As Sargent concludes, "there’s still a strong built-in presumption of political dominance for Republicans on national security, and [] any gains Dems have made on the issue are not deeply felt by Beltway establishment types."

For better or worse, that's not going to prevent Obama from trying.