Next year, Mississippi will make civil and human rights curriculum mandatory for public school students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. While civil rights is typically part of the Social Studies program, Mississippi will now be “the first state to require civil rights studies throughout all grades in its public school systems.” The subject will now be included in the assessment test students must pass to graduate. Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), who signed the requirement into law five years ago, praised the new requirement: “To learn the good things about Mississippi and America and the bad things about Mississippi and America is important for every Mississippian.” These comments, of course, came “just days” before he offered his own version of civil rights history.
While school districts and the state government are celebrating the progressive change, one state representative took up a curmudgeon’s mission to kill the measure, filing a bill to repeal the law nearly every year since it passed. Convinced that civil rights will somehow interfere with his grandchild’s ability to “write a complete sentence and do math,” Moore fears a civil rights curriculum will accuse “one group of people” and will be “somebody’s philosophical idea of what civil rights are”:
Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, has filed a bill to repeal the law nearly every year since 2006. Moore, who lives in a suburb of Jackson, said he wants to know who will write the textbooks and craft the materials students will be taught.
“I want schools to be teaching my grandchildren to read, write a complete sentence and do math,” Moore said. “I just want to make sure it’s teaching the truth and facts and not being accusatory of one group of people or the other. I don’t want it to be somebody’s philosophical idea of what civil rights are.”
In dismissing civil rights history as “somebody’s philosophical idea” about “one group of people,” Moore is articulating exactly why such curriculum is necessary. Indeed, Moore’s derision of civil rights is not just relegated to history. In considering current policy, Moore refused to support including sexual orientation in the state’s anti-discrimination laws and expressly rebuked any type of affirmative action. Future Mississippi policymakers may have a different perspective of discrimination if they understand its history from an early age.
One Mississippi student Perry Overstreet, who studied this civil rights curriculum, traveled to the town where Emmett Till was brutally murdered in 1955. Because he had learned about Till in class, Overstreet said “he was able to seek out landmarks associated with the case that sparked outrage and fueled the movement.” “It really opened my eyes to civil rights,” he said. “Mississippi has come a long way from back then.” No thanks, unfortunately, to those like Moore.
As Republicans prepare to defund parts of the Affordable Care Act in the new Congress, conservative columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer is warning conservatives that the strategy could lead to “chaos” and “incoherence” in the health care system. During an appearance on Fox’s Special Report on Monday, Krauthammer suggested that the GOP would be better off by holding hearings to “expose” the measure and orchestrating symbolic repeal votes:
KRAUTHAMMER: I am skeptical about taking away the funds because what it will do, it will poke holes in the system. It will make it more chaotic it will allow some things to be enacted, others to be more slowly or clumsily enacted and in the end, if healthcare collapses or if it becomes utterly unworkable, the Democrats will have a way of saying ‘well, it was all these injuries inflicted by the Republicans that made it not work.’ I think the smarter approach is to simply expose to the American people what’s in the bill….I think through hearings…you’ll expose that in a better way, whereas if you try to take away the funds, in the end you’re not going to succeed, but you may end up as the fall guy if the thing falls apart sort of in chaos and incoherence.
Watch it:
Whether Republicans take Krauthammer’s advice — a search on Critical Mention suggests that Fox has now re-broadcast his comments at least twice on other programs — is an open question, but the party will have to decide how to proceed as early as March, once the continuing resolution passed earlier this month expires. Republicans successfully defeated a larger omnibus spending package that included some $1 billion in funding for health reform.
For now, the House Republicans plan to vote on full repeal of the law and a series of other politically charged measures which would force vulnerable Democrats to back unpopular provisions and regulations. Yesterday, TPMDC’s Brian Beutler reported that the GOP is considering holding a vote on regulations that would “achieve the Obama administration’s goal of encouraging end-of-life planning,” in an effort to breathe new life into the “death panels” debate. Republicans have also said they would also hold a vote on the individual mandate and the 1099 reporting requirement, the one piece of the law which both parties now want to repeal.
Our guest blogger is Elon Green, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
During George W. Bush’s presidency, it was not uncommon for terrorism suspects to be tried, convicted and receive lengthy sentences in American courts. These numbers include Mohammed Jabarah, Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” Bryant Neal Vinas, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Shahawar Matin Siraj — all of whom will be imprisoned for decades.
It is therefore disappointing to see Rep. Lamar Smith, the incumbent chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, act as if trying terrorism cases on American soil is an idea devised by the Obama Administration. In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Smith suggests the conviction of Ahmed Ghailani is an unfortunate precedent and a reason to favor military tribunals over the courts:
HH: In terms of other oversight issues, Congressman Smith, with the border, with Gitmo not closing, and that fiasco we had in New York City, do you think your committee will be looking at stopping additional trials of terror suspects in the United States?
LS: Well, as you say, they tried a terrorist in New York City. That was supposed to be their best case, they had their best witnesses. That was the one that they were going to use as an example and say you know, here, yes we can conduct a trial of a terrorist in the United States. And even if they get some rights as citizens, we’re still going to be able to find them guilty on all counts. Well as you know, this individual was found guilty on one count of, I think, 254. And even though he was found guilty of building the explosives, he wasn’t found guilty of killing, I think, 254 innocent people who were killed, among them several dozen Americans. So in that situation, it clearly did not work as the administration had planned, and it kind of blew up in their face, and the judge didn’t allow some of the evidence and some of the testimony that would have been allowed if this individual had been tried at Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, the so-called Gitmo.
It’s certainly true that Judge Lewis Kaplan excluded evidence and testimony. Unmentioned by Rep. Smith — rather conveniently — is Judge Kaplan’s reason for doing so: the evidence was obtained after Ghailani was allegedly tortured, rendering it fruit of the poisonous tree.
Furthermore, the notion that the excluded evidence would have been admissible in a military tribunal setting is misguided. Experts across the political spectrum, including former Bush assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith, disagree.
Rep. Smith displays a similar lack of awareness of current court cases. In addition to the convictions listed above, New York has been awash in terrorism cases for some time. As the Daily News noted nearly a year ago:
Pending right now in the Southern District of New York is a list of terrorism cases from around the world: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, North Africa.
In fact, a week ago, Manhattan’s 2nd Circuit upheld the conviction of Hassan Abu-Jihaad, “a former member of the U.S. Navy of leaking classified ship movements to a jihadist organization.”
The Ghailani case was not “an example” for future terrorism trials; it was simply one of many.
Earlier this month, audio tapes from the Nixon White House were revealed to the public that captured a shocking exchange between Nixon and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In the tapes, Kissinger responds to an appeal made by Israeli leader Golda Meir to Soviet leaders to allow the emigration of Russian Jews to her country. He tells Nixon that the “emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Since these comments were revealed to the public, there has been an uproar in the media, with the New York Times writing that the tapes showed that Kissinger was “brutally dismissive” of human rights concerns related to Soviet Jews.
The former secretary of state has gone on a media offensive, attempting to save his public image among the media furor. In an op-ed piece published Sunday, Kissinger wrote that he was sorry he “made that remark 37 years ago,” and argued that it was taken out of context. Curiously, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, while condemning the comments, also rose to Kissinger’s defense, saying, “I think what Kissinger said is horrendous, offensive, painful, but also I’m not willing to judge him. The atmosphere in the Nixon White House was one of bigotry, prejudice, anti-Semitism, the intimidation of the anti-Semitism, the stories, the bigotry.” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee offered a similar defense: “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay.”
But what both the press that is reporting about Kissinger’s comments and what his most passionate defenders are omitting is that these revealed remarks only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the former secretary of state’s complicity in human rights violations. The mentality revealed in his remarks about Soviet Jews are not an aberration but a major feature of his approach to foreign policy: disregarding human rights in pursuit of other strategic goals. Kissinger has a long history of complicity in major human rights abuses in every corner of the globe, one that is rarely reported on in the press in its reports on the former secretary of state. Here are just a few of these abuses:
- Bangladesh: In 1971, Bangladesh, which was at the time East Pakistan, declared its independence from Pakistan. The Pakistani military responded with a brutal military campaign that included massive killings and the estimated systematic raping of nearly 200,000 Bangladeshi women. When Daka Consul General Archer Blood and other American diplomatic staff began to protest the Pakistani army’s behavior to Washington, Nixon and Kissinger had him dismissed. During the height of the atrocities, Kissinger sent a message to Pakistan General Yahya Khan, congratulating him on his “delicacy and tact” in his military campaigns in Bangladesh. When Kissinger received word that massive famines were going to spring up in the country in 1971, he warned USAID to try to avoid helping, saying that Bangladesh was “not necessarily our basket case.” Soon after becoming secretary of state, Kissinger downgraded the American diplomatic staff who had signed onto a protest of Pakistani atrocities in 1971.
- Cambodia: Kissinger was one of the chief masterminds of the Nixon administration’s secret and illegal bombing campaign of Cambodia — he wanted the bombing of “anything that flies, on anything that moves” and warned that it must be secretly done to avoid congressional scrutiny — the extent of which was not discovered until President Bill Clinton declassified related documents in 2000. By the end of the American bombing campaign of Cambodia, the country was perhaps the “most heavily bombed country in history.” The bombings killed more than a half a million people, and were a major factor in the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
- Chile: In 1973, Kissinger aided and abetted a right-wing military faction that deposed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The faction then installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and/or murder tens of thousands of peaceful dissidents in the country. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” Kissinger said in rationalizing his actions, falsely accusing Allende of being a communist and essentially declaring that the United States should have the power to decide Chile’s government. Due to his complicity in bringing Pinochet to power, Kissinger was summoned for questioning and has arrest warrants out in his name in Chile, Argentina, and France. Since the warrants were issued he has not returned to any of those three countries.
- Indonesia and East Timor: In 1975, President Gerald Ford and Kissinger met with Indonesian’s leader, General Suharto. During the meeting, Ford and Kissinger essentially gave “full approval” to Suharto to invade neighboring East Timor. In the resulting invasion, hundreds of thousands of Timorese civilians were massacred. Kissinger repeatedly denied that he had such conversations with Suharto, but these denials were found to be false after the declassification of government documents in 2001.
- Iraq: In 1975 Kissinger both encouraged a Kurdish revolt against Saddam Hussein and then abandoned the rebels to be killed following invocations from the Shah of Iran. Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial revealed that Kissinger was a major Iraq policy advisor to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. He warned Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson of the same analogy he used during the Vietnam years, that troop withdrawals would be like “salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Woodward writes that when Gerson asked Kissinger why he supported the war, he replied, “Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,’ … In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. ‘And we need to humiliate them’ … In Manhattan, this position got him into trouble, particularly at cocktail parties, he noted with a smile.”
- Vietnam: Kissinger, in a possible violation of the Logan Act, helped scuttle peace talks in 1968, prolonging the Vietnam War to advantage Richard Nixon in the presidential election. This extension of the war cost thousands of American lives and those of more than a million people in Indochina.
Viewed with the context of Kissinger’s actions while he was a senior official in multiple American administrations, his comments about Soviet Jews are hardly surprising. Unfortunately, most of the major media’s reporting about Kissinger’s comments does not include this history of complicity in human rights abuses.
In fact, despite his complicity in these abuses, the former secretary of state continues to be a lauded public figure in the United States. He is regularly uncritically featured on major news programs, was recently honored at the State Department, and was even cast as a cartoon character’s voice on a children’s TV show. If history is any judge, this latest revelation about Kissinger will soon be forgotten by major media and elites in the public sphere. But that does not change the actual facts and Kissinger’s long, sordid history of human rights abuses.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, incoming energy chair Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) joined Americans For Prosperity (AFP) president Tim Phillips, a global warming denier, to support the lawsuits by global warming polluters against climate rules. One of the companies leading the charge against the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding is Koch Industries, the private pollution giant whose billionaire owners have been directing the Tea Party movement through its AFP front group.
Upton once considered a “moderate on environmental issues,” but has worked hard to refashion himself as a hard-right defender of pollution in recent months. Some Tea Party groups tried to block Upton from taking the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, attacking his past support for energy-efficient light bulbs. Upton previously claimed that “climate change is a serious problem” and that “the world will be better off” if we reduced carbon emissions. However, in the course of the past two years — as he received $20,000 from Koch Industries — Upton has shifted to oppose not only cap-and-trade legislation but any form of limits on climate pollution whatsoever, instead supporting investigations against climate scientists and lawsuits against the EPA and its supposed “unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs”:
April 2009: Climate change is a serious problem that necessitates serious solutions.
June 2009: We have a unique opportunity and a responsibility to reduce emissions and preserve our economy – the American public is desperate for solutions, but a national energy tax is not the answer.
December 2009: I think we can lower our emissions. I think the world will be better off if we did that, and we can do it without cap and trade.
January 2010: No matter what we did between now and 2050, it, there was no real science to verify that it would reduce the temperature rise that some predicted. And that’s why we do need hearings.
December 2010: Moreover, the principal argument for a two-year delay is that it will allow Congress time to create its own plan for regulating carbon. This presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced.
“We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama’s EPA,” Upton and Phillips wrote in the Wall Street Journal, invoking the grisly image of the president murdering his fellow citizens. The world would be better off if Upton went back to believing instead in serious solutions to serious problems.
The religious right has grown apoplectic over what it sees as the harbingers of its demise: gay conservatives. The emergence of the GOProud, a right-wing group of conservatives that support gay rights, is spurring a civil war between conservative bigwigs. This summer, WorldNetDaily publisher and proud “birther king” Joseph Farah and right-wing ranter Ann Coulter launched into a hyperbolic squabble after Coulter agreed to keynote GOProud’s inaugural “Homocon” conference. Fearful of GOProud’s impending “coup” of the conservative movement, Farah even called for extra security at his WND conference panel “is GOProud conservative?” because, as his loyal followers noted, GOProud could bring its “radical gay” supporters to help in its “infiltration of the conservative movement.”
Ever vigilant against “twisted and dangerous” threat of gay conservatives, right-wing groups are now repudiating any person, place, or thing that may associate with these wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing, most notably the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Despite receiving flak last year for their association with GOProud, CPAC organizers recently confirmed that GOProud will be a “participating organization,” at next year’s conference, “the second highest level of participation. As a ‘participating organization,’ GOProud has a voice in planning the conference.”
The possible presence of gay people sparked the far-right American Principles Project to instigate a growing boycott of CPAC in November. Yesterday, WND announced that the Family Research Council and the Concerned Women for America are now the most high-profile conservative groups to join the boycott:
Two of the nation’s premier moral issues organizations, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in February because a homosexual activist group, GOProud, has been invited.
“We’ve been very involved in CPAC for over a decade and have managed a couple of popular sessions. However, we will no longer be involved with CPAC because of the organization’s financial mismanagement and movement away from conservative principles,” said Tom McClusky, senior vice president for FRC Action.
“CWA has decided not to participate in part because of GOProud,” CWA President Penny Nance told WND.
FRC and CWA join the American Principles Project, American Values, Capital Research Center, the Center for Military Readiness, Liberty Counsel, and the National Organization for Marriage in withdrawing from CPAC.
The far-right Americans for Truth about Homosexuality president Peter LaBarbera, who is also boycotting CPAC, finds it “gratifying to to see FRC and CWA respond appropriately to CPAC’s moral sellout of allowing GOProud as a sponsor.” “By bringing in GOProud, CPAC was effectively saying moral opposition to homosexuality is no longer welcome in the conservative movement.”
This increasingly popular censure of CPAC is not just limited to GOProud itself, but to lawmakers as well. As Right Wing Watch notes, CPAC isn’t just “one of the largest gatherings of right wing activists,” but a long-standing, popular “platform for Republican presidential candidates.” Indeed, possible 2012 GOP presidential candidates Gov. Haley Barbour (MS), Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN), Rep. Mike Pence (IN), and Sen. John Thune (SD) are slated to speak at CPAC next year. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Thune have already come under fire for their association with GOProud.
GOProud has dismissed this kind of far-right thinking before as “clearly out of the mainstream.” However, given the GOP’s number one priority and its penchant for “out of the mainstream,” Republicans may not have room for GOProud’s brand of thought, no matter how conservative.
Thanks to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), taxpayers are footing a $500 million bill for a NASA rocket that the agency has no plans or desire to continue developing. The Orlando Sentinel reports that pork legislation inserted into a spending bill by Shelby earlier this year is requiring NASA to spend millions on the canceled Ares I rocket program through March, even while the agency can’t find funds to begin a much-needed modernization of the famed Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida:
At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later. [...]
But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language.[...]
The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.
His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.
Nearly all of the money for the program will go to two defense contractors building the Ares rocket, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and Lockheed Martin, with ATK receiving the bulk. Defense contractors have been a consistent source of financial support for Shelby’s campaigns, contributing to him at higher rates than to other politicians in his state. In particular, Shelby’s 2010 reelection campaign was the top recipient of funds from ATK’s PAC, receiving the maximum $10,000. And the company’s employees appear to have given more to Shelby than to any other politician in the 2010 election cycle.
Shelby certainly has a flair for the dramatic when it comes to extracting pork money for defense contractors in his state. In a “nearly unprecedented” move in February, Shelby placed a blanket hold on every single presidential nominees being considered by the Senate — more than 70 in total, including “top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon” — in order to pressure to Obama administration to do the bidding of Northrop Grumman on a $40 billion contract for which they were being considered.
In 2005, when President Bush was nominating judges, GOP senators almost universally denounced filibusters of judicial nominees as unconstitutional. Four years later, when a Democratic president moved into the White House, the GOP conveniently forgot about its previous stance on the Constitution — wielding the filibuster to block an unprecedented number of President Obama’s judges.
At least one member of the incoming GOP caucus, however, believes that his party was right in 2005 and is wrong today. In an interview with right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, Senator-elect Mike Lee (R-UT) argued against applying the filibuster to judges:
HH: What about as to judicial nominees? I was one of those who urged the Senate to use the Constitutional option in 2005-06, because I really believe that the Constitution commits to the entire Senate the advice and consent process, not to a supermajority. But I know it has its role in legislation. Do you have an opinion yet on whether or not it’s legitimate to filibuster judicial nominees?
ML: Yeah, that’s one of the things I was referring to when I said if the effort is one to clarify instances where the filibuster may properly be invoked, and other instances where it shouldn’t be. I think that’s one area we ought to look at, because I think we can make a strong argument that the filibuster ought not apply with respect to judicial nominees. And so perhaps out of this discussion will come a rule clarifying that point. If so, I’ll be happy.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Lee will begin to tow his party’s line-of-the-moment once he actually gets into the Senate and is pressured to join the GOP’s crusade against Obama’s judges. Lee’s short political career has been characterized entirely by his willingness to pretend that the law requires whatever outcome conservatives happen to prefer. Among other things, Lee has previously claimed that the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development and even Social Security are unconstitutional.
In any event, Lee will have an opportunity to show his true colors on filibuster reform when the new Senate convenes next week. A long line of Supreme Court decisions establish that a newly seated legislature cannot be bound by rules set by previous lawmakers, so the new Senate will have a brief opportunity to reform its rules next week. If Lee is serious about ending future obstruction of judicial nominees, he should join that reform effort.
Fox News personality and former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) recently began appearing in television commercials calling for viewers to dial a 1-800 number to sign a repeal petition against health reform called “Repeal It Now.” The ad, a “project of Restore America’s Voice” (RAV), a political action committee run by Huckabee’s friend Ken Hoagland, also directs viewers to a website that solicits donations. “Well now, we’ll do our spanking on the Congress,” says a cheerful Huckabee before claiming that Americans will “rule” again if the petitioned is signed.
Huckabee, who has a history of using his ubiquitous media presence to fundraise for political groups benefiting himself and his family, is again associating with a shady political venture. ThinkProgress has learned that Huckabee is working with a firm notorious for defrauding families facing foreclosure with false promises and predatory fees.
According to disclosures filed with the FEC, RAV’s campaign is managed by a firm called the 949 Media Group. 949 has been paid tens of thousands of dollars to set up RAV’s website and Google search optimization, and receives a regular commission of $10,000 for related media work from RAV. ThinkProgress spoke to a representative from RAV, who told us that 949 is run by an individual named Derek Oberholtzer. According to the representative, Oberholtzer has worked with RAV since the PAC formed in October.
Oberholtzer is well known as a scam artist who has used a myriad of tricks to defraud people out of their money. In addition to 949 Media Group, he started a number of companies, including “Apply 2 Save” (A2S) and Giant Media Works. Consumer report websites are rife with complaints about Oberholtzer’s odious business practices. In one scheme, Oberholtzer paid for radio and other advertisements telling distressed homeowners to contact his company A2S to pay a flat $595 fee to receive assistance in renegotiating their loans or to block a bank foreclosure. The Federal Trade Commission has prosecuted Oberholtzer for deceptive practices. In numerous cases, Oberholtzer took the $595 payment, and never did anything to stop a foreclosure or even contact the mortgage company in question. In many instances he continued billing his customers further fees totaling nearly $1,000 without lifting a finger to actually renegotiate their mortgage or halt a foreclosure, as his “Apply 2 Save” company promised.
On message boards discussing mortgage fraud, story after story details A2S’s trickery. There are heartbreaking tales of families spending their last savings on a lifeline promised by Oberholtzer’s company — only to be defrauded and forced out of their homes.
After receiving over 150 complaints about Oberholtzer’s companies charging up-front fees of over $1,500 without delivering on any foreclosure assistance, the Idaho attorney general banned Oberholtzer from engaging in the home loan business in his state. “Apply 2 Save operated for less than a year, signed up hundreds of clients, and took in millions of dollars,” said Lawrence Wasden, Idaho’s attorney general. “Yet few consumers ever received the mortgage modification services they purchased.” After a successful lawsuit, Wasden was able to win $45,000 from A2S to distribute to Oberholtzer’s victims. In Maryland, Oberholtzer has been served an order to cease and desist after the state commissioner of financial regulation received multiple complaints about Apply 2 Save’s fraudulent scheme. Eventually, A2S was forced into bankruptcy and a wave of legal action in Idaho spurred Oberholtzer to move to California. Oberholtzer also agreed to pay $4 million to settle a civil suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
Once he was driven out of the business of defrauding already desperate people facing foreclosure, Oberholtzer became active in Republican politics. The “Repeal It Now” campaign set up by Restore America’s Voice and 949 Media Group claims endorsements from Huckabee, Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher, and somehow from deceased president Ronald Reagan. Olberholtzer also owns inactive domains called electmichele.org (presumably for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), repeality.biz, electme2012.com, and ravpac.info. The “Repeal It Now” campaign Huckabee stars in does nothing to accurately discuss health reform or address the health care crisis. It only exists to rake in donations and spread right-wing hysteria.
As ThinkProgress has reported, there are a number of right-wing consultants who appear to orchestrate campaigns simply to enrich themselves. For example, one of the well-paid leaders of the Tea Party Patriots made a career before the Tea Party movement concocting pyramid schemes with herbal nutrient products and the Tea Party Express is run by an infamous Republican consulting firm known for starting front groups to funnel donations back to themselves. Similarly, people like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich seem to be willing to say or do anything to earn a quick buck. However, Huckabee’s central role in legitimizing fraudsters like Oberholtzer might be a new low, even for the radical right.
Responding to Rep.-elect Andy Harris’ (R-MD) hypocritical demand for government-sponsored health coverage last month, Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) circulated a letter among his colleagues calling on Harris and other members of Congress who want to repeal President Obama’s health care law to forgo their own government health care plans. At least four GOP congressmen have already announced they will turn down their congressional benefits, and a recent poll found that a majority Americans “think incoming Congressmen who campaigned against the health care bill should put their money where their mouth is and decline government provided health care now that they’re in office.” In an interview with the New York Times published yesterday, Rep.-elect Joe Walsh (R-IL) has said he too will forgo government health coverage:
And get this: he’s turned down the usual congressional health care, pension and retirement packages.
“I don’t think congressmen should get pensions or cushy health care plans,” he said. His wife is not exhilarated with the latter decision; she has a pre-existing medical condition and is now forced to hunt for a plan.
Walsh’s decision to forgo government coverage is noteworthy because it is extremely unusual. Of the eighty-plus incoming Republican congressmen, all of whom ran campaigns railing against the Affordable Care Act, and the hundreds of incumbent GOP lawmakers, ThinkProgress has been able to identify only five who are willing to put their money where their mouth is and turn down government health care for themselves. This translates to just 2 percent of the 242 GOP House members of the 112th Congress. Moreover, those who have turned down their congressional health plans are either covered by other government programs, such as veterans benefits, or are wealthy, like Walsh, and can afford to pay for their own coverage.
Walsh’s wife, however, may have a hard time finding coverage no matter what she’s willing to pay due to her preexisting condition. If only Congress has passed some sort of law barring insurance companies from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions…
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, recently embroiled in controversy after praising a white supremacist organization, now faces another scandal. Politico reports that Barbour, a rumored presidential candidate, has used the state plane of Mississippi for personal trips, racking up a huge bill that has been dumped on the tax payers of Mississippi — the poorest state in the union. A Politico analysis found:
Much of the time, he has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match — travel that has a less obvious connection to what Barbour, a former top lobbyist in Washington, has cast as his lobbying on behalf of his state. … The flight logs obtained by POLITICO indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour’s air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. [...]
Barbour has reimbursed the state for a handful of flights, but he has more often scheduled obscure official business to coincide with the business of politics, according to the manifest and logs.
Prior to becoming Governor of Mississippi, Barbour was a lobbyist in Washington D.C. and no doubt got used to the lavish lifestyle. He even “brush[ed] off suggestions from Mississippi Democrats that he give up” his Citation jet “in favor of a more modest propeller plane for his travel.” But the massive bill he has racked up by using the state’s plane as his own personal private jet also stand in direct opposition to his public persona.
During his many appearances on national television, Barbour has positioned himself as a deficit hawk. He attacked the stimulus bill and has insisted that the president’s proposed tax cuts for lower and middle class families be paid for. Yet Barbour in reality is a deficit fraud. As the Wonk Room’s Pat Garafolo has pointed out, after attacking the stimulus and claiming Mississippi would refuse the money, Barbour took advantage of stimulus funded bonds. While he has insisted that tax cuts for the lower and middle class be paid for, Barbour has given tax cuts for the rich a pass.
Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) plans to pursue an aggressive pro-oil agenda as the incoming chair of the House Science and Technology Committee. In an interview with the Dallas Morning News this month, the “unconditional champion of fossil fuels” described his zeal for the “holy grail” of the oil industry — the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — discussed issuing subpoenas to interrogate climate scientists, and explained why the BP disaster “didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for offshore drilling.” Hall described the BP explosion that killed eleven men, injured dozens, and led to the despoilment of the Gulf of Mexico as a “tremendous,” “blossoming” flower of energy:
As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out – all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week – that was tremendous to me. That we could deliver that kind of energy out there – even on an explosion.
In an extensive report yesterday, the New York Times describes the explosion differently: “Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck. . . . Crew members, certain they were about to be cooked alive, scrambled into enclosed lifeboats for shelter, only to find them like smoke-filled ovens.”
A few days ago, incoming Agriculture Chairman Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) announced the hire of Ryan McKee as the senior staffer to oversee the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. McKee is currently a lobbyist working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s division dedicated to deregulating complex derivatives products. In her new role working for Lucas, McKee will be liaising with regulators in charge of implementing new rules under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law to overhaul the over-the-counter derivatives market.
As ThinkProgress reported, the Chamber, which is funded by AIG, JP Morgan, CitiGroup, and other financial interests, took the lead role in fighting to defeat Wall Street reform efforts. Last year, the Chamber organized a conference call with other financial industry lobby groups and bank lobbyists to coordinate their efforts. As Tim Fernholz reported, McKee made clear that she was fighting to “kill” financial reform:
“We want to make sure that we hold all the Republicans and are able to influence enough Democrats to have a working majority to kill this thing outright or modify it to the point where it’s palatable to the business community,” Jason Matthews, the Chamber’s director of congressional affairs, told the callers. Ryan McKee, a senior director at the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets, was even more direct in response to a question from an caller: “We’re fundamentally trying to kill this,” she said.
To undermine the new rules created by the Dodd-Frank law, the Chamber recently launched a new website dedicated to smearing the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.
The Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo has noted that Lucas and other Republicans on the Ag Committee have already signaled that they will seek to delay implementation of new derivatives regulations. Republicans raised eyebrows recently by proclaiming that they intend to “serve the banks” rather than regulate them. By hiring bank lobbyists like McKee to oversee reform, it’s clear Republicans plan on fulfilling that promise to undermine reform.
Earlier this month, after President Obama made a deal with congressional Republicans, Congress passed a bill to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years, in exchange for a 13-month unemployment insurance extension. Obama and most Democrats begrudged giving the rich more tax breaks, but Republicans rejoiced. Before the deal, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) fiercely advocated for extending the cuts for the rich. Despite the more than $800 billion cost to extend them, Coburn argued that tax cuts don’t have to be paid for.
Today on Fox News Sunday, the Oklahoma senator repeatedly said the federal government should reduce spending. Host Chris Wallace pressed for specifics, but Coburn couldn’t offer up much. “That remains to be seen,” he said, and, “We haven’t even done the hard work of identifying all the duplications in the federal government.” To his credit, Coburn noted that the Pentagon needs some auditing help, but he repeatedly threw out some random amounts of money that could be cut ($50 billion, $100 billion, $200 billion, and $350 billion) without saying exactly where that money would come from. But now that the tax cut deal is done and the President signed it into law, it appears that Coburn now thinks the rich are going to have to start sacrificing too:
COBURN: We could certainly cut $100 to $200 billion and help ourself. [sic] …There cannot be anything that’s not put on the table. There will not be one American that will not be called on to sacrifice. Those that are more well to do will be called on to sacrifice to a greater extent.
We could save about $50 billion a year by eliminating programs. … [W]e have a realm of about $350 billion that will not truly impact anybody in this country that we could eliminate tomorrow.
Watch it:
There is one sure way that the federal government could save hundreds of billions of dollars “tomorrow”: eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which of course Coburn would never advocate doing. The Joint Committee on Taxation said that the Obama-brokered tax cut deal — most of which go to the rich — will cost the federal government more than $400 billion over the next two years.
But if Coburn needs help with ideas on specific spending cuts, the Wonk Room’s Pat Garofalo notes that the Center for American Progress has identified $100 billion in defense programs (that won’t compromise national security), $45 billion in subsidies to oil companies, $1 billion in tax expenditures for big agricultural firms, $2 billion in unnecessary stock ownership incentives for the rich, and hundreds of millions in redundant or duplicative education programs that could be cut.
For the past two years, conservatives have repeatedly attacked President Obama for supposedly endangering American lives by not being aggressive enough in going after terrorists. But a year after the failed bombing attempt on Christmas Day for which Obama received immense criticism from the right, a key Bush intelligence official refuted these right-wing attacks today on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley. Retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, who served as the Director of National Intelligence under President Bush, said the Obama “administration has been as aggressive, if not more aggressive in pursuing” terror threats:
MCCONNELL: Both general Hayden and I served in the previous administration and we got a lot of criticism for being aggressive, and so on. … My observation is that the new administration has been as aggressive, if not more aggressive in pursuing these issues, because they’re real. And so, regardless of which side of the political spectrum –
CROWLEY: And you commend them for that?
MCCONNELL: I do commend them for that.
Watch it:
Meanwhile, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as the head of the CIA under Bush and appeared along with McConnell on CNN today, warned against overreacting to the “low threshold” attacks that Al-Qaeda and their ideological allies now employ. “We cannot allow our response to that kind of event to turn a tactical success for Al-Qaeda into a strategic defeat for us,” Hayden said, by “overreacting to it by suppressing our commerce and our convenience.”
With the strong backing of the tea party movement, Maine Gov.-elect Paul LePage (R) rode a wave of discontent over bull semen taxes to a surprising victory last month, telling President Obama to “go to to hell” and warning a reporter that he would punch him in the face. On the campaign trail, LePage raged against a what he considered a corrupt state government and “pledged to surround himself with ‘the best and the brightest’ and to avoid political cronyism.” But on Thursday, LePage announced that he had hired his own 22-year-old daughter for a position in the “upper echelon of his administration,” with a salary of $41,000, the Bangor Daily News reports:
Lauren LePage, 22, will serve as assistant to the governor’s chief of staff, John McGough — a position that administration officials describe as entry-level and is commensurate with her experience, work history and education.
LePage, a recent college graduate, will be a salaried political appointee earning approximately $41,000 a year, according to Dan Demeritt, incoming director of communications in the LePage administration. [...]
Maine governors have wide discretion in creating staff positions within their offices, filling those positions and setting salaries. Because such appointments are political positions — known as “special assistants to the governor” — there are no rules barring Maine’s chief executive from hiring family members.
“According to the current administration, the average entry level salary is $30,000.” Indeed, the minimum starting salary for a certified teachers in Maine is only $30,000, and that requires extra study. Meanwhile, the entry-level salary for a Maine State Police officer is just $36,000 after graduation from the police academy.
And as Maine progressive blog Dirigo Blue points out, LePage’s daughter will also be moving into the governor’s mansion with her father. With taxpayers footing the bill for her rent, utilities, food, and other expenses, “Not only will Lauren be earning $41,000 in direct income, but she’ll be making another $12,000 or more indirectly.”
Maine Democrats Executive Director Mary Erin Casale called the hiring a “brazen display of political nepotism,” but LePage aides said the position is “entry-level and is commensurate with her experience, work history and education.” It’s worth noting that Lauren LePage received her education in Florida, where she paid in-state tuition — not studying politics — because LePage’s wife violated tax laws by claiming residency in both Maine and Florida. (She was eventually ordered to pay back taxes).
The Senate adjourned earlier this week, even though it confirmed only half of the 38 judicial nominees awaiting a vote on the Senate floor. And the overwhelming majority of the blocked nominees cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee without a single negative vote.
This failure to confirm even many of the most uncontroversial nominees is the culmination of a concerted GOP strategy to delay as many of President Obama’s judges as much as possible, and it leaves Obama with fewer judges confirmed than any recent president:
The Senate’s failure to even hold a vote on these nominees leaves the federal judiciary with record vacancies — approximately one in nine federal judgeships are now vacant.
Notably, three of these vacancies are on just one court. Of the four active judgeships on the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois, three are presently vacant, leaving the court’s chief judge as its only active member. Two of President Obama’s nominees to this court, James Shadid and Sue Myerscough, were unanimously approved by the Judiciary Committee for this excessively overburdened court. Yet none of Obama’s nominees to the Central District of Illinois received a vote in the 111th Congress.
This failure to confirm anyone to this Illinois court may be the most reckless legacy of the right’s obstruction of Obama’s judges, but it isn’t even the most absurd. One of the president’s blocked nominees, District of Oregon nominee Marco Hernandez, was previously nominated for the exact same job by President George W. Bush. Somehow, now that he’s an Obama nominee, the GOP has suddenly decided to throw up roadblocks before his confirmation.
Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.
Rick Scott
“According to [former U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Alan] Krueger’s research, the amount of time people on UC spent looking for a job averaged only 20 minutes a day! Within 2 weeks of UC ending, that increased but to only 70 minutes a day,” states the document, noting that the median duration of unemployment benefits receipt has increased nationally from 10 weeks to 18.7 weeks.
The team’s recommendations: tighten job-search requirements for people getting benefits, cut off assistance for those who don’t comply and assign community work for those who don’t get a job in 12 weeks. Goals: increase employment and reduce the payout of unemployment benefits, as well as the unemployment compensation tax burden on businesses.
Krueger, who is a well-regarded professor of economics at Princeton University, took issue with the characterization of his research.
First, he said, the research — which was conducted during the stronger economic period of the mid 2000s — actually shows that the average amount of time spent job-searching is double what the report says — more than 40 minutes a day, not 20.
Secondly, “the unemployed in the U.S. devote more time searching for a job than unemployed workers in other countries,” Krueger wrote in an e-mail, “yet they [Scott's team] make it seem that the unemployed put little effort into finding a job.”
And lastly, he added that the real problem faced by the unemployed today “is lack of jobs, not overly generous benefits.” The team, he said, “misspelled my name and misused my study!”
Unemployed Floridians reacted with disgust when told of the Scott team’s assertion. “That’s stupid,” said Freddy Pacheco, an unemployed 61-year-old woman. She told Tampa Bay Online that she spends about four or five hours a day, three days a week, looking for work. Unemployed Florida resident Laura Mroczko also dismissed the report. “Look around,” she said, pointing at a line of people at the Tampa Bay Workforce Alliance jobs agency searching for work. “These people are here looking for work. You can’t survive on what unemployment pays you.”
The Fusion Center’s Internet map is part of a national map maintained by globalincidentmap.com. Information is provided by agencies across the U.S. It includes various blinking icons. The map’s label originally was titled Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity.
Near Nashville, a blinking hexagon-shaped symbol with an exclamation point read “ACLU cautions TN schools about ‘observing one religious holiday.’” The hexagon symbol, when clicked on, originally stated “suspicious activity.” But it later was changed to say “general nonincident terrorism news” after inquiries by reporters.
Mike Browning, a spokesman for the state’s Office of Homeland Security, acknowledged that listing ACLU’s letter as a terrorist incident “was a mistake.” ACLU-Tennessee Executive Director Hedy Weinberg responded, “I will take at their word that they made a mistake by posting it under terrorism activity…[but] I have not heard a good explanation for why school resource officers, who have a very important job in schools, would at all be interested or need to know about the letter we sent to local school superintendents about the need to keep holiday celebrations all inclusive.”
59-year old Manuel Lara Lopez has been a legal U.S. resident for 20 years, immigrating to Texas from Mexico like many immigrants to seek a better life. After being diagnosed with severe intestinal cancer, Lara pronounced his “dying wish was to become a U.S. citizen, and that wish was granted this week in his South Austin backyard.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agreed to come to his home and administer the citizenship exam ahead of his scheduled Jan. 2011 test date. After passing the exam, the USCIS granted Lara his Christmas wish by naturalizing him the following day — a rare occurrence. Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman for the agency, said, “because of his condition and it being so close to Christmas, we wanted to conduct a ceremony as soon as possible.” The Austin American-Statesman described the scene:
With his wife, two sons, grandchildren, other relatives and friends applauding, Lara proudly held up his certificate of citizenship and a small American flag as he sat at a table in his backyard. He waited until every camera had recorded the moment before he put them down.
“He talked about it for a long time,” said his wife, Adelina Hernandez Lara. She wiped tears as she spoke of his love for America and the bittersweetness of his dream finally becoming a reality so late in his life. [...]
“I wanted to be buried in the United States,” he said.
After the ceremony, Lara pronounced himself “muy feliz” (very happy). Watch it:
For decades, Lara worked in restaurants around Texas, cooking Mexican food for customers. He told the media that receiving U.S. citizenship was an important lesson he wanted to impart to his Mexican-born sons, who he hoped would follow his example and “learn from Papa.”
Lara’s story — which is representative of millions of undocumented immigrants who come to America — highlights the need for comprehensive immigration reform. As Andrea Nill notes, the process of legal immigration and naturalization in the U.S. is unduly burdensome and restrictive. With reform, perhaps more hard-working and responsible immigrants can achieve Lara’s Christmas miracle.
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