The Commentariat -- October 6

The Party of Racists. Andrea Nill of Think Progress: Republicans Sharron Angle & David Vitter use the same photo of menacing-looking young Hispanic men in their scary video ads. In Angle's ad she seems to be attacking Harry Reid for his support of the DREAM bill which would offer a path to citizenship for young people who served in the military or went to college (the ad copy is so misleading, tho it's hard to tell what she's talking about). Igor Volsky of Think Progress posts the ad pictures ...

     ... then writes that beneficiaries of the DREAM legislation would look more like this:

     ... "Angle's 'Willie Horton' Ad. Adam Serwer, writing in the Washington Post, elaborates.

Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "The process of banks hiring people to break into homes, even when occupied, is just the latest oddity of the messy foreclosure crisis in Florida.... It is illegal for any bank representative to enter a property if they have not yet retaken it at a foreclosure sale, especially if there is any sign the home is occupied, foreclosure experts say." In one instance, renters returned from an outing to find the locks changed & their valuables stolen by bank reps.

More Domestic Dirt. Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle: Jill Armstrong, who worked as a nanny for Meg Whitman & her husband while undocumented immigrant Nicandra Diaz Santillan was employed as the Whitmans' maid, says she believes Diaz Santillan's story. Although Armstrong quit working for Whitman after two months, she says she had trouble collecting the salary she had earned. ...

... Meanwhile, Seema Mehta & Carla Hall of the Los Angeles Times report that Diaz Santillan is "filing a claim with the state seeking unpaid wages and attorney Gloria Allred [is] denying claims that her involvement has been funded by Whitman's political enemies.... Diaz Santillan ... said she chose to come forward to shed light on the plight of undocumented workers who live in the 'shadows.'"

Matt Bai of the New York Times: when pollsters conduct focus groups of self-identified "independent" voters in a small town in New Jersey they discovered that the "underlying perception, that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as the kids throwing chicken casserole in the lunchroom, may well be the principal emotion behind the electorate’s propensity to vote out whoever holds power."

David Leonhardt of the New York Times: "should the litmus test for American health care really be better than nothing?" Mini-med plans, like the ones McDonald's is threatening to cancel, demonstrate that "the real problem [with U.S. health care plans] was the status quo."

"The incumbent president -- I won't call his name * -- said, 'In the next week or two, I'm going to the most dangerous place on Earth: the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea.' I said, 'Rosalynn, that's where we were building homes last week.' -- Jimmy Carter

* George W. Bush, our bravest President ever

Susan Page of USA Today: ": Independent analysts predict that the number of women in Congress — currently 56 Democrats and 17 Republicans in the House, and 13 Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate — will decline for the first time in three decades."

Dana Milbank offers a quasi- (okay, very quasi-)statistical evidence that today's conservatives' standards for political purity have moved far rightward. "Comparing the [American Conservative Union] ratings of [Lisa] Murkowski [of Alaska] and [Bob] Bennett [of Utah] with those of other Republicans in the House and Senate going back to 1971 (the first year in the ACU online ratings archive), I discovered that if conservatives were to employ the purity standards they applied to Murkowski and Bennett, they would have rejected many, if not most, of the leading Republican lawmakers of the past 40 years.

Bob Woodward says an Obama-Clinton ticket in 2012 is "on the table":

     ... BUT. Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post: "The White House, not surprisingly, flat-out denies it. 'There's absolutely nothing to it,' senior adviser David Axelrod said Tuesday night." AND ...

Tom Friedman: California's Proposition 23, an effort to kill the state's clean energy legislation, is being financed -- surprise! -- by big oil on the fake premise that the clean energy law is a job killer.

Michael Fletcher of the Washington Post: "Faced with deep budget deficits and overextended pension plans, state and local leaders are increasingly looking to trim the lucrative retirement benefits that have long been associated with government employment. Public employees are facing a backlash that has intensified with the nation's economic woes, union leaders say, because of their good job security, generous health-care and pension benefits, and right to retire long before most private-sector workers."

Toljaso. Glenn Greenwald reminds readers that Tom Daschle's revelation (which he partially retracted later) that the Obama Administration took the public option off the table in early July 2009 won't be news to them. ...

... David Dayan of Firedoglake has another good post on the same subject. ...

... Here's Igor Volsky's post on the Daschle's book, interview & walk-back.

An endorsement from Sarah Palin has strings ropes chains attached. Gawker has one of the many takes on an e-mail exchange between Todd Palin, Alaska Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller & others. Mudflats (Jeanne Devon) originally published the e-mails.

The Commentariat -- October 5

Susan Crabtree of The Hill: John Boehner has warned some male members of the House to avoid the appearance of impropriety by not drinking with female lobbyists or meeting with women behind closed doors. "But female lobbyists are raising new concerns that access to male Republican lawmakers has been further hampered...."

The Party of No Ideas. Five minutes of Republicans claiming they're going to cut spending, then being unable to come up with a single program they would cut. Thanks to Think Progress:

This commentary by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Daily, is a week old, but the Rabbi's remarks on the President's failure to understand liberal disappointment in his Administration are still current:

It’s easier for [Democrats] to believe that their liberal and progressive base is naïve than to acknowledge that we are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate legislation, but for their failure to fight for such legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he didn’t accomplish what he couldn’t accomplish, but that he didn’t do the one thing he could do: consistently speak the truth, tell us and the country what was really happening in the corridors of power and what the constraints are that he was facing.

Noam Levey in the Los Angeles Times: "The insurance industry is pouring money into Republican campaign coffers in hopes of scaling back wide-ranging regulations in the new healthcare law but preserving the mandate that Americans buy coverage." ...

... David Lightman of McClatchy News: "Half a billion dollars from independent groups with strong but unofficial connections to Republicans and Democrats is flooding into congressional campaigns across the country this year.... The Center for Public Integrity found that Republican-allied groups are likely to outspend their Democratic-oriented rivals by 3 to 2, and maybe even by 2 to 1.... While big money in politics is hardly new, there never have been sums of this magnitude in midterm elections." ...

... Secret Donors. Ken Vogel of Politico: "A massive $4.2 million ad buy announced Tuesday by American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS erases any doubts that the groups, conceived by veteran GOP operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, have the cash to be major players in next month's election. And with nearly 75 percent of the buy paid for by undisclosed donors, the expenditure highlights a trend that has shaped the midterm campaigns and could have far-reaching consequences in American politics: the shift to anonymous political activity." ...

     ... This news item bears on Vogel's story. Washington Post: "Two campaign-finance watchdogs [Democracy 21 & the Campaign Legal Center] asked the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday to investigate Crossroads GPS, the big-spending conservative group supported by Republican guru Karl Rove, for allegedly violating U.S. tax laws limiting the political activities of nonprofit groups."

... Lee Fang of Think Progress: a significant amount of the anti-Obama Chamber of Commerce financing comes from outside the U.S.

Ben Pershing of the Washington Post: "For all the fanfare and publicity that accompanied the release of the pledge, relatively few Republican candidates across the country appear to be adopting it as a guiding vision, much less incorporating it into their campaigns. That stands in stark contrast to the document the pledge is most often compared to, the 1994 'Contract With America.' ..."

David A. Fahrenthold & Kimberly Kindy of the Washington Post: "... nine men ... have died inside U.S. coal mines in the six months since the Upper Big Branch mine disaster in West Virginia, in which 29 men were killed on April 5. This string of accidents has revealed key shortfalls in a push by the Obama administration to improve mine safety."

We’ll probably get all our money back. -- Jim Millstein ...

... Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times: last week Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced a complicated plan for the government to divest itself of its interest in insurance giant AIG, a deal in which he & Jim Millstein, Treasury's chief restructuring officer, believe the taxpayer will break even. Sorkin explains the math (CW: which is over my head).

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times: Sunday Rahm Emanuel announced that he was preparing to run for mayor of Chicago, but legal experts say he does not meet the residency requirement that he live in the city for a year prior to the election. ...

     ... Ben Smith: as if to highlight his Chicago residency problem, Emanuel taped his "glad to be home" video for Chicagoans -- in Washington, D.C. Includes video. CW: I'm really not going to cover the Chicago mayoral race unless it remains hilarious. So far, it's pretty funny.

CW: last week one of the Democrats' biggest losers - Michael Dukakis -- went to the White House to give President Obama campaign strategy advice. Now another huge Democratic loser -- Walter Mondale -- has more advice for Obama on how to punch up his speaking style. (With video.)  Is this really helpful?

Billboard by Stinque.com.Second-String Bozo. Mark Leibovich of the New York Times: after writing in a profile of the candidate that Christine O'Donnell's father Daniel played Bozo the Clown on the teevee, a reader questioned Leibovich's assertion & the quality of his research. Stinque.com writes, “Anybody who would lie about a cherished childhood icon is unqualified to serve in the United States Senate. Really. It’s in the Constitution. Look it up.” In a conversation with Daniel O'Donnell, Leibovich learns that he sometimes filled in for the "real" Philadelphia Bozo on out-of-town gigs....

... More on the daughter of the second-string Bozo on the Delaware page.

The Commentariat -- October 4

AP: "Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware said in a 2006 debate that China was plotting to take over America and claimed to have classified information about the country that she couldn't divulge." CW: later O'Donnell revealed that the CIA sends her classified information via coded radio transmissions which her teeth pick up. (Perhaps I made that last bit up.) ...

     ... the ever-so-level-headed Jim Fallows of The Atlantic: "... the 'privy to classified information' riff ..., to anyone who knows anything about the world of politics, instantly signals, 'I am completely insane.'" ...

     ... Steve Benen: "even for a Senate candidate who's lied repeatedly about her educational background, is suspected of campaign embezzlement, is suspected of tax fraud, rejects modern science, hates gays, has crusaded against masturbation, has talked about stopping Americans from having sex, and embraces a hysterically extreme political worldview, this is pretty extraordinary." More on O'Donnell on the Delaware page.

** Robbing from the Bereaved & the Taxpayer to Give to -- Prudential. David Evans of the Washington Post: "... Prudential [Financial] is investing - and profiting from - death benefits owed to service members' families, using money provided by the government.... The government has paid Prudential $1.7 billion for these benefits since 2003, when the war in Iraq began." Prudential holds & invests money due to survivors, setting them up with "quasi-checking accounts" while Prudential retains profits on the remaining balance for itself rather than for the survivors. 

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) writes a great op-ed in USA Today: "... rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged." Read it all. ...

... ** Paul Krugman writes a terrific column about how Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" & the billionaires club have co-opted the Republican party for their own gain. ...

... "A Spending Frenzy Conducted Largely in the Shadows." T. W. Farnam & Dan Eggen of the Washington Post: "Interest groups are spending five times as much on the 2010 congressional elections as they did on the last midterms, and they are more secretive than ever about where that money is coming from. The bulk of the money is being spent by conservatives, who have swamped their Democratic-aligned competition by 7 to 1 in recent weeks. The wave of spending is made possible in part by a series of Supreme Court rulings...." ...

... AND Ben Smith found out why Rupert Murdoch sent $1 million each to the Republican Governors' Association & the anti-Obama Chamber of Commerce, thus putting the last nail in the coffin of the "fair & balanced" pretense:

A person close to News Corp. told me this week the company didn't realize its $1 million to the RGA would become public. And the $1 million to Chamber of Commerce was supposed to be secret as well.

Philosopher J. M. Bernstein applies a Hegelian model to the Wall Street fiasco. Hegel explained why Dodd-Frank should have been a lot stronger. Fairly easy-to-follow.

In his New Yorker Commentary, Steve Coll reads Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars & paints a portrait of a President who brings "realism & intelligence" to the Afghan-Pakistan conundrum. ...

... Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: "Obama has chosen a sensible middle course in Afghanistan, trying to devote significant time and resources to that country, degrading the Taliban but also letting the U.S. military know that this is not an unlimited engagement and that America has other interests in the world.... Americans are chronically disappointed by the way their wars end. This is because while waging wars, Americans refuse to think through the political and military tradeoffs needed to get to a reasonable outcome."

Richard E. Cohen of Politico: "In an unprecedented letter to all congressional candidates in both parties, more than 130 former members of Congress" urged the current crop ... "to find common ground to solve problems” & show some "decency and respect toward opponents."

Kathleen Hennessey in the Los Angeles Times: Democrats are throwing some Republican candidates off-message, "Rarely has a set of candidates given opponents so much to work with."

The Republicans have lost their standards, they’ve lost their principles.... Really that’s why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me.... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government. -- Nevada Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle, in a closed-door meeting with a tea party opponent

Scoop! Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun obtained a tape of a meeting among Sharron Angle, her Tea Party of Nevada opponent Scott Ashjian, & their minions. Pretty raw stuff. Includes audio of the meeting. ...

     ... Update from Shira Toeplitz of Politico: "Nevada Tea Party candidate Scott Ashjian admitted Sunday that he secretly recorded a conversation with Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle, at a meeting in which she asks him to get out of the race, and that he leaked the tape to a journalist." The recording, according to a Harvard Law professor, was illegal. ...

     ... Update: or maybe Ashjian isn't a teabagger at all. Here's an  the Tea Party Express produced:

     ... AND Christiana Bellantoni of Talking Points Memo adds, "Cleta Mitchell, a top Republican lawyer representing Sharron Angle's Senate bid in Nevada, told TPM ... that the meeting [with Ashjian] ... was 'a setup.'" See more on the Nevada senatorial race on the Nevada page.

Barry Friedman & Dahlia Lithwick in Slate: how the Roberts Court has used deft magicians' tricks to shove the law to the right without the public's noticing it. ...

... Half-Time Justice. Robert Barnes of the Washington Post: Elena "Kagan's old job as solicitor general - the '10th justice' - is initially making it hard to do her new job as the ninth justice. Kagan, 50, has recused herself from 25 of the 51 cases the court has accepted so far this term, all as a result of her 14-month tenure as solicitor general, the government's chief legal representative in the Supreme Court and the nation's lower appellate courts."

** Here's the Huff Post's sign-up sheet for bus rides from New York City to Washington, D.C. for Jon Stewart's "Sanity Rally." The deadline for sign-up is this Friday, October 8.

News You Can Use (Maybe):

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times: "As some of the nation’s largest lenders have conceded that their foreclosure procedures might have been improperly handled, lawsuits have revealed myriad missteps in crucial documents." ...

... Ylan Mui of the Washington Post: 675 colleges & a pricey credit card company collaborate to fleece students in a deal that falls outside reform legislation. ...

... Candice Choi of the AP: "... a federal study last year found that about one in four U.S. households skirts banks and relies on services such as check-cashing and payday loans. Many of these households bring in less than $30,000 a year." Choi, who tried living in the non-bank world herself, found it to be both costly & fustrating.