It gives me great pleasure to reintroduce to you “DemFromCT,” who long ago gave me permission to use his writings. His mind is so far above mine that, while I don’t always understand what he writes entirely (or sometimes much at all in the details), I am fully honored that he allows me to use his material, and I think he’s “the greatest thing since sliced bread”.

Monday morning, and, well, the Jets couldn’t get it done. But Peyton Manning did. And the Jets are building for the future (strong running game, fundamentals.) Democrats, take heed.

NY Times editorial:

In calling for new limits on the size and activities of big banks, President Obama has given the effort to enact serious financial regulatory reform something it lacked: a rational starting point.

Better late than never.

Paul Krugman:

Given that, why not reject Mr. Bernanke? There are other people with the intellectual heft and policy savvy to take on his role: among the possible choices would be my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman, and Janet Yellen, the president of the San Francisco Fed.

But — and here comes my defense of a Bernanke reappointment — any good alternative for the position would face a bruising fight in the Senate. And choosing a bad alternative would have truly dire consequences for the economy.

Paul is always good, but when he recognizes that practical politics exist, he’s even better. A bright light in these dark times.

Ross Douthat: Clinton… yadda yadda… welfare state… Obama… too audacious…  sleepwalk…

Howard Kurtz:

“The national press, and frankly to some extent the local press, were taken by surprise,” says Mark Jurkowitz, the Boston Globe’s former media reporter. “The failure here was not to pick up on what was going on out there in the ether. A lot of journalists didn’t know who Scott Brown was or failed to take him seriously because he was a Republican running in an overwhelmingly Democratic state,” says Jurkowitz, now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

We were disappointed but not surprised. But the fact is that Coakley (a good person) had to run a bad campaign and have a poor debate performance to get where she was. It didn’t just happen, and therefore could not have been picked up too early.

The Economist: Stop the state!! Ignore the corporations!!

USA Today:

A gossipy, behind-the-scenes presidential campaign book once again illustrates how the public is poorly served by some in the political press corps.

Game Change, by John Heilemann, a writer for New York magazine, and Mark Halperin, a reporter for Time, raises the question for non-political junkies of why so much about candidates remains hidden from public view until after the vote.

So, if you knew this stuff, why didn’t you print it before the friggin’ election, boys???

*****

DemFromCT is a longtime member of the Daily Kos community with interests ranging from polling to Iraq to bird flu, and has graciously agreed to allow us here at Evans Liberal Politics to publish his articles on an ongoing basis. He is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (www.fluwikie.com) and its sister site, the Flu Wiki Forum (www.newfluwiki2.com). Since its inception in June 2005, Flu Wiki has grown into an international clearinghouse of pandemic influenza information and links.

You can view his diaries at Daily Kos, here. DemFromCT is a featured writer at Daily Kos, and you can read more about him here. You are invited to email DemFromCT.

Open Thread for Night Owls and Other Strays, Daily Kos, January 24, 2010, by Meteor Blades, quoted verbatim, comments invited:

Alison Kilkenny takes on a candidate for governor:

South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer

South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, has compared giving people government assistance to “feeding stray animals.”

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said.

Yes, they don’t know any better, do they?

It’s also considered culturally acceptable to euthanize suffering animals, so maybe that’s Bauer’s next idea for “helping” poor people. South Carolina can call the death chambers “Grandma Bauer’s Self-Sufficiency Ranch.”

The timing of Bauer’s comments is especially questionable considering that the state is currently experiencing the nation’s worst-ever recession, and has reported its jobless rate is now 12.6 percent. South Carolina is one of the poorest states, and also one of the most religious (as are most poor states, a trend also prevalent in poor countries). More than ever, South Carolinians need public assistance to survive.

“It amazes me how some Republican politicians claim a monopoly on Christianity and then go out and say and do some of the most un-Christian things imaginable,” said Charleston attorney Mullins McLeod (D), who participated in a candidates’ forum yesterday. He added, “Bauer’s comments are despicable and the total opposite of the Christian values Bauer espouses.”

“Compassionate conservatism” had pretty much drawn its last gasp, but Bauer has now officially pulled the plug.

((COMMENT by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I would have to agree that Bauer is scraping the bottom of the barrel, however: this man, whatever he calls himself, is no compassionate conservative. Many of my neighbors ARE compassionate conservatives. Just because you are fiscally conservative and would prefer, for instance, to arrange assistance for the poor by means of private and church sources, or because you place such a strong emphasis on living a personally conservative lifestyle and want the society you live in to reflect those personal values, by no means indicates that you cannot be both a conservative and compassionate. I know many people who are. As for Bauer, after this, I don’t think he’s much of a threat to be elected as South Carolina’s governor, at least, I certainly hope not.))

• • • • • •

[goinsouth had a recommended diary on the subject.]

The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, provided a clear warning that the party, and President Obama’s presidency, are headed for an epic trouncing this November, when all members of the House and a third of the Senate face re-election.

But all the frantic strategizing within the sclerotic Democratic Party leadership ignores the bigger crisis yet to come for this party that once brought the nation Social Security, unemployment compensation, public jobs programs and Medicare. That crisis is the economy, which is now showing signs of falling off a second cliff instead of beginning to recover.

Thanks to the abject failure of President Obama to boldly order up a massive jobs program and a full-blown economic stimulus program of public investment at the beginning of his term last spring, and to his failure to attack the entrenched banking interests by smashing apart the meg-investment banks that had turned banking into a casino game, the economy has been left to stagnate for a year.

Unemployment has continued to rise, with the latest reports showing that layoffs have begun to re-accelerate. Unemployment rose in 43 states, including some of the biggest, in December and fell in only four. And we are only seeing the beginning of this new drive into the ditch. The most ominous, and totally predictable, trend is layoffs by the public sector–by towns, counties, states, and public bodies such as public universities, school districts, public hospitals and transit companies. These layoffs which could ultimately number in the millions and which will have a knock-on effect on all kinds of other jobs, were deferred because of aid provided last year by the federal government, but no more federal aid is likely to be forthcoming and the money already provided runs out this summer. Look for official unemployment this year to move past the 11 percent record set in 1982. Meanwhile, real unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for work, and those who have managed to get part-time work, is approaching 20%, and could eventually top 25%–a rate reminiscent of the Great Depression.

At the same time, the foreclosure crisis, and the related decline in home values which has put one-fourth of all homes “underwater,” meaning they’re worth less than the mortgage balance, continues unabated. Time Magazine, in its first issue of the new year, predicts that at least as many homes will go into foreclosure in 2010 as in the record year just ended–over 3 million houses. Equally bad, the magazine says that many housing experts are predicting that property values, which have lost an average of 30% since 2006, will continue to decline until into 2013! Already, American homeowners have lost over $7 trillion in wealth because of property value declines, and they will continue to lose more.

In an economy where 72 percent of all financial activity involves consumers buying stuff, it is impossible to imagine where any growth or recovery in the economy could come from when the American people are being so battered financially.

For almost a year, the government has hidden this disaster behind a rising stock market, which rose in seeming contradiction to all the bad news, as companies slashed costs to eke out profits from drastically reduced revenues. Many analysts say that this bizarre behavior of the equities markets was the likely result of behind-the-scenes government intervention in markets. Consider this: for the whole period between March 9, 2009, when the market began its rebound, and the present, a period during which the equities markets recovered roughly 60% of the ground they’d lost in the last crash, corporations were net sellers of their stock, and retail investors were basically out of the market. Foreign investors entered the market, but not in any huge way. Hedge funds, too, normally big players, were experiencing outflows of investor cash during most of the period, making it unlikely that they were investing either. Even pension funds, which were badly burned in the crash, were cautious investors over the past year. So who’s left? Suspicion falls on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. This might explain why stocks have continued to rise on very low trading volume, and also why most of the upside has come, especially since last September, in after-hours trading in S&P futures, not in direct buying of shares during regular trading hours. If true, what this means is that the federal government has been doing what it fines hedge funds and investment banks for doing: manipulating the markets.

While the Fed and Treasury can theoretically manipulate the stock market, they cannot do this forever, and this past week, we have seen indications that the bull run in the market, whatever caused it, may have run out of steam.

If the economy does take a second plunge similar to what happened in late 2008 and 2009, Obama and the Democrats will have to accept the full blame. They had the opportunity last year to strike hard at the root causes of economic decline and at the sinister, greedy and corrupt activities of Wall Streets banks and investment banks. Because they chose instead to try and paper over the problem and accomodate those banks–even helping them to become bigger and more powerful– they will deserve the electoral drubbing that is coming.

It would be a huge and historic mistake for Democrats to listen to the advice of people like White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who are claiming that the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat to a Republican means it is necessary for the party to hew even further to the right. Yes, Massachusetts voters were voting for a guy who said he would kill the health bill in Congress, but polls suggest that his winning margin came from 7% of self-described liberal Democrats who told exit pollsters that the health bill was terrible and they wanted it killed. That seven percent is a huge number, when you consider how hard it would be for most Democrats to vote for a hard-line conservative candidate–someone who openly advocates waterboarding of terrorist suspects, and who is adamantly anti-abortion rights.

What really turned the trick for the GOP candidate, Scott Brown, though, was the economy. The rank-and-file working person (Republican or Democrat), both in Massachusetts and in the US at large, has seen enough over the past year to conclude that the Democrats in Congress and the Man-o-Change in the White House do not have their interests at heart. They clearly see that this government’s actions in support of the banks, the insurance companies, and the other giant industries in the US, from autos to utilities, are not being taken in the cause of bringing benefits to the people, but are simply being done for the benefit of those industries and their leaders and key investors. It’s not even “trickle down” anymore. It’s just catering to the rich and powerful–the people who make all those fat campaign contributions.

This is why Obama’s sudden “pivot” (people who have real values don’t “pivot”) to a tacky “populist” rhetoric about “fat-cat bankers” is falling on deaf ears. It’s why Democratic leadership calls for Congress to just pass the wretched Senate version of the health bill are being viewed with disgust by the public.

Everyone realizes it’s all just image-mongering. Nobody in power in Washington, Democrat or Republican, is there to help the little folks.

It’s all about making the rich richer.

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

At least 80 Guantanamo detainees would be brought to the United States to face trial, military commissions or continued imprisonment without charge under recommendations from a presidential task force, two government officials said Friday.

The two officials said that a task force has recommended 35 Guantanamo Bay detainees for prosecution. Attorney General Eric Holder has already decided that five of those will be tried in New York federal court for their alleged roles in the 2001 terror attacks.

Another six have been chosen to face military commissions. A venue for those commissions has not been decided yet, but the most likely place is a planned prison facility in Illinois to house terrorism-era detainees. The Obama administration still needs money from Congress to renovate that facility.

As part of President Barack Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the task force has recommended 47 detainees be held indefinitely without charge. Another 17 detainees who are Yemenis are likely to be held for some time to come, until U.S. counterterrorism officials can find a secure place in their home country or other foreign countries to send them, the officials said.

They also said that a total of about 110 detainees have been approved for transfer.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the findings of the task force. The new figures were first reported in Friday’s editions of The Washington Post.

The group’s conclusions are not binding, and could be changed by the National Security Council.

There currently are 196 detainees remaining at Guantanamo. In the past year, the administration has transferred more than 40 inmates, but has fallen far short of its goal of closing Guantanamo by its one year deadline, which came Friday.

See, Biden Says U.S. Will Appeal Blackwater Case Dismissal, The New York Times, January 23, 2010, by Anthony Shadid, excerpt quoted verbatim:

BAGHDAD — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised Iraqi leaders on Saturday that the United States would appeal the dismissal of manslaughter charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security contractors involved in a deadly shooting here that has inflamed anti-American tensions.

Mr. Biden, tasked by the Obama administration to oversee policy in Iraq, made the statement after a day of meetings with Iraqi leaders that dealt, in part, with a political crisis that has erupted over the March 7 parliamentary elections. American officials view the vote, a barometer of the durability of Iraq’s political system, as a crucial date in American plans to withdraw tens of thousands of combat troops from Iraq by the end of August.

The vice president expressed his “personal regret” for the Blackwater shooting in 2007, in which contractors guarding American diplomats opened fire in a crowded Baghdad traffic circle, killing 17 people, including women and children.

*****

Commentary by Paul Evans: Increasing liberal consensus is correct: President Obama’s policies on the war on terror, intelligence and intelligence gathering, secrecy and military affairs has a pretty fair similarity to the policies of George W. Bush. You really, really need to ask yourself, why would a strong liberal such as Obama adopt these policies? There simply can be no other reason but that they are exactly what is required and necessary at the present time. This puts our President in a terrible situation. Liberals, and almost all progressives, are increasingly opposed to the President and have such opinions – I want to make perfectly clear – because they are approaching the central problems of our time with strong ideological blinders. And so are the Republicans. For them, even though essentially, since Obama is in fact a very patriotic American and puts doing the right thing ahead of any partisan or ideological rigidity, and so is basically doing the same thing as Bush, basically, they (the Republicans) have decided Obama must be “the devil” and are also in lockstep opposition.

I ask you, I ask both my progressive brothers and all Republicans, is this sort of stance on your part patriotic? Is it the right thing to do, to so demonize such a good, patriotic and selfless man? If you look at it this way, the answer is, of course not! As the owner of a liberal politics website with essentially liberal views on many things, I have kept silent up until this point, but I can do so no longer. It is DEAD WRONG to demonize or oppose President Obama out of some silly ideological blinders. He is doing – is it not obvious? – everything he is doing out of patriotism and concern for all of our citizens, without consideration of whether it will be popular or what the reaction will be. Our President, I maintain, is a wonderful, selfless man, a man of the strongest, most decent principles, and I for one am tired of standing by and watching both “sides” increasingly oppose and thwart his policies. Insofar as I can see, those policies are exactly what is right for America, and they were arrived at selflessly and without concern for their popularity, for one reason and one reason only: they were the right thing to do. I wish so strongly that a lot of Americans would wake up and see this, and support our — to me — absolutely correct and selfless President. God Bless Barack Obama. America sure isn’t, are we?

Water Saves Lives in Haiti.

The Court’s decision is far, far more dangerous to U.S. democracy.
Think: Manchurian candidates.

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be treated the same as “natural persons”, i.e. humans. Well, in that case, expect the Supreme Court to next rule that Wal-Mart can run for President.

The ruling, which junks federal laws that now bar corporations from stuffing campaign coffers, will not, as progressives fear, cause an avalanche of corporate cash into politics. Sadly, that’s already happened: we have been snowed under by tens of millions of dollars given through corporate PACs and “bundling” of individual contributions from corporate pay-rollers.

….

I’m losing sleep over the millions — or billions — of dollars that could flood into our elections from ARAMCO, the Saudi Oil corporation’s U.S. unit; or from the maker of “New Order” fashions, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Or from Bin Laden Construction corporation. Or Bin Laden Destruction Corporation.

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Right now, corporations can give loads of loot through PACs. While this money stinks (Barack Obama took none of it), anyone can go through a PAC’s federal disclosure filing and see the name of every individual who put money into it. And every contributor must be a citizen of the USA.

But under  today’s Supreme Court ruling that corporations can support candidates without limit, there is nothing that stops, say, a Delaware-incorporated handmaiden of the Burmese junta from picking a Congressman or two with a cache of loot masked by a corporate alias.

Candidate Barack Obama was one sharp speaker, but he would not have been heard, and certainly would not have won, without the astonishing outpouring of donations from two million Americans. It was an unprecedented uprising-by-PayPal, overwhelming the old fat-cat sources of funding.

Well, kiss that small-donor revolution goodbye. Under the Court’s new rules, progressive list serves won’t stand a chance against the resources of new “citizens” such as CNOOC, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. Maybe UBS (United Bank of Switzerland), which faces U.S. criminal prosecution and a billion-dollar fine for fraud, might be tempted to invest in a few Senate seats. As would XYZ Corporation, whose owners remain hidden by “street names.”

George Bush’s former Solicitor General Ted Olson argued the case to the court on behalf of Citizens United, a corporate front that funded an attack on Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary. Olson’s wife died on September 11, 2001 on the hijacked airliner that hit the Pentagon. Maybe it was a bit crude of me, but I contacted Olson’s office to ask how much “Al Qaeda, Inc.” should be allowed to donate to support the election of his local congressman.

Olson has not responded.

The danger of foreign loot loading into U.S. campaigns, not much noted in the media chat about the Citizens case, was the first concern raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who asked about opening the door to “mega-corporations” owned by foreign governments. Olson offered Ginsburg a fudge, that Congress might be able to prohibit foreign corporations from making donations, though Olson made clear he thought any such restriction a bad idea.

Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles.

Malloy also noted that under the law today, human-people, as opposed to corporate-people, may only give $2,300 to a presidential campaign. But hedge fund billionaires, for example, who typically operate through dozens of corporate vessels, may now give unlimited sums through each of these “unnatural” creatures.

And once the Taliban incorporates in Delaware, they could ante up for the best democracy money can buy.

In July, the Chinese government, in preparation for President Obama’s visit, held diplomatic discussions in which they skirted issues of human rights and Tibet. Notably, the Chinese, who hold a $2 trillion mortgage on our Treasury, raised concerns about the cost of Obama’s health care reform bill. Would our nervous Chinese landlords have an interest in buying the White House for an opponent of government spending such as Gov. Palin? Ya betcha!

The potential for foreign infiltration of what remains of our democracy is an adjunct of the fact that the source and control money from corporate treasuries (unlike registered PACs), is necessarily hidden. Who the heck are the real stockholders? Or as Butch asked Sundance, “Who are these guys?”
We’ll never know.

Hidden money funding, whether foreign or domestic, is the new venom that the Court has injected into the system by its expansive decision in Citizens United.

We’ve been there. The 1994 election brought Newt Gingrich to power in a GOP takeover of the Congress funded by a very strange source.

Congressional investigators found that in crucial swing races, Democrats had fallen victim to a flood of last-minute attack ads funded by a group called, “Coalition for Our Children’s Future.” The $25 million that paid for those ads came, not from concerned parents, but from a corporation called “Triad Inc.”

Evidence suggests Triad Inc. was the front for the ultra-right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers and their private petroleum company, Koch Industries. Had the corporate connection been proven, the Kochs and their corporation could have faced indictment under federal election law. As of today, such money-poisoned politicking has become legit.

So it’s not just un-Americans we need to fear but the Polluter-Americans, Pharma-mericans, Bank-Americans and Hedge-Americans that could manipulate campaigns while hidden behind corporate veils. And if so, our future elections, while nominally a contest between Republicans and Democrats, may in fact come down to a three-way battle between China, Saudi Arabia and Goldman Sachs.

(Note by Paul Evans: Don’t say Evans Liberal Politics didn’t warn you. We wrote about this “threat” to everything democratic over a month ago.)

See It’s Time for a Shareholder Protection Act, Robert Reich.org, January 22, 2009, by Robert Reich, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Five members of the Supreme Court have defied logic by assuming that corporations are people. They are not. They are legal fictions, nothing more than bundles of contractual agreements. They are owned by their shareholders.

So what do we do now, other than wait for another Supreme Court opening, and for the President to appoint another Justice who understands this?

Push Congress to enact the “Shareholder Protection Act.” ….