February 11, 2012

Today is a big day for MA Senate candidate and thoroughly awesome person, Elizabeth Warren

Let's send her some solid DU vibes, shall we?

Warren faces test in Democratic caucuses
Front-runner aims to prevent opponents from getting enough votes to get on ballot

By Frank Phillips
Globe Staff / February 11, 2012

She has electrified the activists, but now, after her much ballyhooed entrance into electoral politics, US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren faces her first serious challenge: rallying enough state Democratic Party convention delegates to clear the primary field.

That test starts today as thousands of Democrats across Massachusetts begin the two-week process of choosing delegates to June’s state party endorsement convention.

The results of the more than 500 meetings of voters at local schools and town halls will measure whether Warren, whose candidacy has excited local Democratic activists and drawn widespread national attention, has harnessed that energy into an effective statewide political machine that she hopes can help her defeat Senator Scott Brown, a Republican.

Warren, a Harvard Law School professor whose public profile was forged in part during her battles in Washington as a consumer advocate, faces minimal opposition in her bid to win the party’s backing at the June convention and the nomination in the September Democratic primary. The question is whether she has the muscle to sweep the caucuses and gain enough slates of delegates committed to her to block the two other candidates in the race - Marisa DeFranco of Middleton and James Coyne King of Dover - from the ballot.

The rest: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2012/02/11/democratic_caucuses_may_start_to_narrow_senate_field/?p1=News_links

Run the table, and let's get Teddy's seat back.

February 10, 2012

When Clint Eastwood Mocks You, You're Officially Screwed

(Photo: Lars Kristian Flem; Edited: LP / Truthout)

When Clint Eastwood Mocks You, You're Officially Screwed
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Friday 10 February 2012

I ain't happy
I'm feeling glad
I got sunshine
In a bag
I'm useless
But not for long
The future
Is coming on...

- Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood"

You know the wheels have come off the GOP wagon when the Republicans feel compelled to accuse Clint Eastwood of being a shill for the president, but that is precisely what has transpired. Eastwood, who is nobody's Democrat by any stretch of the imagination, starred in a stirring Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler about the resurgence of Detroit's auto industry that was, in essence, a gravel-voiced pep talk for all of America. Speaking personally, the commercial made me want to run full-tilt through a stone wall...and then buy a Chrysler, which is quite a confession, as I pride myself on being utterly immune to advertising.

Reaction from the Republican Right was both swift and hilarious. Apparently, and according to the GOP, Dirty Harry is a dirty liberal hippy socialist communist who hates America and is in the pocket of our birthplace-questionable president...but the GOP found itself struggling to be coherent in its critique.

Take, as the prime example, the words of Karl Rove, who appeared on Fox News to denounce the ad. "I was frankly offended by it," said Rove. "I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising, and the, and the, and the best wishes of the management, which is benefitted by getting a bunch of our money that they'll never pay back."

Far be it from me to belabor a point, but these threads are worth plucking apart a bit.

"...when you have Chicago-style politics..." The Right has been deploying this particular slice of invective against Mr. Obama since the '08 campaign, to little effect. It might have had some impact, Mr. Rove, if your party hadn't spent the last three decades rampaging through the infrastructure of public education in all its forms; had you not done so, the people you're trying to convince might actually get the reference you're throwing out...but then again, by gutting public education in America, you might have spared yourself from grief, as under-educated voters won't say to you, "Um, the 'Mayor Daley' who cracked heads and enforced total obedience in Chicago has been gone for 40 years, you dimwit."

"... using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising..." Heh. Sounds like the entire "Defense" industry to me...remember when NBC and MSNBC became full-on shills for the Iraq war? I do.

"...the best wishes of the management..." So, you're telling me the GOP isn't on the side of management all of a sudden? I'll be sure to alert the Chamber of Commerce that you're on the side of the 99% now. I'm sure they'll enjoy the news.

"...which is benefitted by getting a bunch of our money that they'll never pay back..." Oh for the luvva crumbcake, Karl, the president you whored for gave us the TARP bailout to the tune of $700 billion, and the airline bailout...and oh yeah, wasn't another cerebrally-impaired Bush offspring centrally implicated in the S&L bailout that exploded the 1990 recession, which helped lead to the un-re-electability of Bush Sr. way back when?

You crack me up, Karl. Some of us remember.

P.S., the Detroit bailout worked, which is what pisses you off...that, and the fact that you and your ilk can't admit it when you're wrong. Detroit lives, you hate it, and all your tantrum will accomplish is to paint Michigan a bright, vivid Blue in November of 2012. Congratulations, genius.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/when-clint-eastwood-mocks-you-youre-officially-screwed/1328840046

February 8, 2012

Last night was all about turnout.

Evangelical GOP base voters always turn out, and they did so last night for Santorum, which bodes ill for Mitt and Newt.

But what's worse for all of them, and for GOP prospects in general, is the fact that the results are so skewed for Santorum because the evangelicals were practically the only ones who turned out last night. Rank-and-file GOP voters stayed home, likely because they're disgusted by their options.

So much for all that GOP voter enthusiasm we heard about last year, eh?

My 2 cents.

February 8, 2012

*ching...ching...ching* (<---sound of spurs)

February 7, 2012

Why Obama’s Super PAC Decision Is The Best Way To Fight Citizens United

Why Obama’s Super PAC Decision Is The Best Way To Fight Citizens United

Last night, the Obama campaign announced that it would not “unilaterally disarm” in the face of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashing a flood of unlimited corporate campaign spending and paving the way for unaccountable Super PACs. In an email to supporters, the campaign emphasized that President Obama opposes Citizens United and supports strong action “by constitutional amendment, if necessary” to roll back its license for wealth individuals and corporations to buy elections.

In a perfect world, the president’s campaign would never make this announcement, and Obama’s supporters should not be naïve about what this means. When casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife spend $10 million in an attempt to buy Newt Gingrich the presidency, it is impossible to imagine that Adelson isn’t also buying himself special access to the president in a Gingrich Administration. Likewise, when big oil companies pump $1.2 million into Mitt Romney’s Super PAC, it is impossible to imagine that they don’t expect some quid for their pro quo. President Obama is somewhat immunized from this kind of influence buying because, as a second term president, he won’t need to worry about needing his big donors again to get reelected. But, at the very least, every policy a second term Obama supports that benefits a big dollar supporter will now open him up to allegations of corruption.

(snip)

By 2017, when the winner of November’s election will step down, three sitting justices will turn 80. Justice Ginsburg, one of the four dissenters in Citizens United is both the oldest justice and a cancer survivor. If a President Romney has the opportunity to replace just her, it could entrench Citizens United for a generation or more. Conversely, if President Obama can replace just one member of the majority in that case, he could eradicate this blight upon the Constitution and ensure that no future president needs to base his campaign strategy on how hard the likes of Sheldon Adelson is breathing down the back of their neck.

So President Obama didn’t just make the right decision, he made the right decision for people who believe that American democracy cannot be sold to the highest bidder. His decision to play upon the uneven field the Supreme Court laid for him is also America’s best chance to ensure that no candidate will play this same rigged game again. None of this will take away the cloud his decision will raise over a potential second term, but the blame for that cloud rests firmly in the laps of five Supreme Court justices.

Link: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/02/07/420245/why-obamas-super-pac-decision-is-the-best-way-to-fight-emcitizens-unitedem/

February 3, 2012

This Is What I Know

Author's Note: I just passed my ten-year anniversary as a writer for Truthout. They asked me to write about it. This is what I came up with. - wrp



Truthout Columnist William Rivers Pitt. (Photo: Michael Nashawaty)

This Is What I Know
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Thursday 02 February 2012

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

- Mark Twain

A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

I'm not going to lie and say this particular combination hasn't come together before on my desk, but it has been rare enough to be considered special, and here we are. You see, something struck me out of the clear blue a while ago: the very first article of mine Truthout ever published happened somewhere in early 2002, so I did a little digging with the help of my Facebook friends, and hot damn, there it was: "Hell to Pay," published on January 17, 2002.

I missed marking my ten-year anniversary with this extraordinary organization by two weeks and two days. I suppose, by normal standards, the fun of it is ruined to a degree: you celebrate your birthday on your birthday, your anniversary on your anniversary, so running this up the flagpole as a special day two weeks late is kind of a bummer, but I really don't care all that much.

I was busy.

Ten years, a bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

God a'mighty, how the days go by. For the record, and I don't give a wet damn if you agree or not, but it is my opinion that Stephen King is the best storyteller of the latter half of the 20th century. In "'Salem's Lot," he wrote, "Ah God and sonny Jesus, Time is a river," and he was both right and beautiful in the telling. Time is a river; you can never put your foot in it in the same place twice.

Ten years, folks.

Back then, on that day ten years ago, I wrote this:

Whichever part of the nation that never heard of the energy giant Enron Corporation has recently been introduced to the company in odious context. The story thus far is nothing less than astounding: Enron, a company valued in the billions on Wall Street, suddenly filed for the largest bankruptcy claim in the history of the known universe. 4,000 employees were abruptly shown the door after having been barred from dumping the company stock, meant to fund their retirement, while it was worth something. Meanwhile, Enron executives in the know were able to dump the stock, back when it was the gold standard on the Street, for a cool $1 billion.

All this could simply be chalked up as yet another story of corporate greed run amok, until the umbilical political and financial connections between Bush and Enron are illuminated. Enron's capo, Kenneth Lay, was perhaps the best financial friend George W. Bush has ever known. Lay and a number of Enron employees essentially bankrolled Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, going so far as to lend Bush an Enron corporate jet for trips between whistle stops. Before Bush got White House stars in his eyes, he worked very closely with Enron on energy policy in Texas.

Bush's own dealings within the energy industry carry a disturbingly familiar echo to the Enron situation: once upon a time, he was a high-ranking officer of a petroleum interest called Harken Oil. On June 22, 1990, Bush sold his Harken stock and made $848,560, earning him a 200% profit. One week later, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and its stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. Bush made a bundle while the other investors lost millions. Harken was Enron in miniature, and might have served as a warning to the American people if the press had chosen to pay any attention to it during the 2000 Presidential campaign.

The connections between Bush and the Taliban became so close that the Taliban went so far as to hire an expert on U.S. public relations named Laila Helms, so as to smooth the way between the two regimes. Meetings between the two nations continued at a high level, the last of which occurred in August, scant weeks before the September 11th attacks. All of these actions were taken to exploit the vast energy reserves in Turkmenistan for the benefit of American energy corporations.

The cozy relationship between Bush and the Taliban frustrated the investigative efforts of former Deputy Director of the FBI John O'Neill. O'Neill was the FBI's chief bin Laden hunter, in charge of the investigations into the bin Laden-connected bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of an American troop barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the attack upon the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.

O'Neill quit the FBI in protest two weeks before the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. He did so because his investigation was hindered by the Bush administration's connections to the Taliban, and by the interests of American petroleum companies. O'Neill was quoted as stating, "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as head of security for the World Trade Center. He died on September 11th, 2001, trying to save people trapped by the attack, when the towers came down on top of him. The irony in this, simply, is horrifying.

It is one thing to coddle and court a corrupt energy company for political and financial gain. It is quite another to coddle and court a murderous terrorist-supporting regime, hindering anti-terrorism investigations in the process, for the purpose of exploiting valuable natural resources. The former cost a number of people their retirement funds. The latter has cost thousands of people their lives. One is criminal. The other is abominable. George W. Bush is deeply implicated in both. There will be hell to pay.

Ten years. A bottle of whiskey. A shot glass. An article to write.

Same as it ever was.

I started writing about these things during the Clinton impeachment, on websites I created with my own two bare hands and a passing comprehension of HTML: the first one was called The Rotten Core, the second was called WillPitt.com, both of which have been lost to the intervening years. Truthout asked for my services ten years ago nearly to the day, and I oh-so wisely responded in the affirmative.

Since then? A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

And Enron, stupid budget-shattering tax cuts, September 11 and the nonsense behind "No one could have imagined," anthrax as assassination attempts against Democrats, Mr. Bush standing up at the State of the Union to claim Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is one million pounds) of sarin and mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, aerial drones to spray the aforementioned stuff, uranium from Niger for use in Iraq's robust "nukular" program...and let's not forget the outing of deep-cover CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was exposed because her husband dared to tell the truth about the Bush administration in the public prints.

And the idea that Hussein was allied with bin Laden was laughable because Osama wanted Saddam's head on his battle standard for decades, and that the true source of world terrorism is Sunni Wahabbist extremism out of Saudi Arabia, but this all goes completely unaddressed because the Houses of Bush and Saud have been partnered for decades. Oh, and never mind that the people our Iraq war empowered are responsible for killing more than 200 Marines at the Beirut airport in 1983...yes, Iran. We gave them the nation of Iraq on a platter, on your dime, and now apparently the powers-that-be want to bomb them, too. And Katrina. And Haditha. And the NSA tapping everyone's phones. And the new guy, Obama, ducking the health care fight and screwing us by degrees, doubling down on Afghanistan, and, oh yeah, declaring that he has the power to kill Americans "suspected" of terrorism. You might want to duck, because, well, you never know.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

These things happened, these things matter, and by God, it has been my job to chronicle these events. It has cost me dearly, in ways I will assume you understand, because you've been here with me every step of the way. My hair is bright white now, and I don't sleep much. It is what it is.

Ten years.

There are days when I take on my keyboard and wonder if that old rage is still there, the rage that drove me to blaze out 15,000 words a week, like I did back when Truthout had a blog I was in charge of, and I was expected to write two articles a week at least on top of that.

And then I read about Mitt Romney saying he doesn't worry (read: care) about poor people. I read about the Komen Foundation abandoning Planned Parenthood to prove their bona fides on the anti-abortion front. Thanks, you despicable frauds, for cutting off cancer-screening programs to prove you are pro-life.

Yeah, we have plenty of work to do yet.

The rage is still there.

I said this a long time ago, many times over, but it is worth repeating: I do not expect to see the things I fight for happen in my lifetime. Matters have gone far beyond that. I expect to fail, to die in defeat. That does not matter to me. The fight is worth waging because these things matter, and I intend to give the years I have left to that fight, no matter the outcome. Sooner or later, we will prevail. Write it down; I just did. I probably won't be here to see it, but victory is its own reward, because a better world is possible, and that is all that matters.

A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

Here's to you, to us, to this.

Here's to getting it done.

Here's to the next ten years. May they be better than the last.

http://www.truth-out.org/what-i-know/1328142871

February 1, 2012

"Thank you for cutting off funding to cancer screening programs in order to prove you are pro-life"

Hammer meet nail.