Limbaugh Misses Again

It's one thing to call the President of the United States a "moron" who "has a chip on his shoulder about this country." Personal criticism without evidence is silly and degrade the speaker far more than the object of the scurrilous attack.

And we expect such classness from Rush Limbaugh. But in between the attacks on a president's character, intellect, or race, Limbaugh actually makes baseless judgements. After claiming that the Administration's policies are "going to send us back into another recession," Rush on Friday declared

there isn't anybody with a half a brain of economic literacy who would be doing anything Obama is too good right now policy wise in the middle of a recession, nobody would dare say that what they are doing is designed to create jobs.

Apparently, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, does not have half a brain, given that she has pointed out (pdf)

the CEA found that the fiscal stimulus has raised real GDP growth by roughly 2 to 3 percentage points in both the second and third quarters. We estimated that as of August, it had raised employment relative to what otherwise would have occurred by approximately one million. We also showed that our estimates were very much in line with those of a broad range of private forecasters and the Congressional Budget Office. There is a widespread consensus (except perhaps on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal) that this aspect of the policy response has been highly effective at alleviating the real decline and counteracting the effects of the financial crisis.

Very dry, that. Here, though, an Associated Press reporter notes that as states cut their budget for combating domestic violence, money from the stimulus package keeps battered women's shelters open, preserving jobs and aiding victims of crime.

Fighting crime was one of the rationales for the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - but most of the focus has been on police, not victims.

A little over $76,000 in stimulus money helped save the job of Cindy Lyons, an advocate for the Domestic Abuse Project in Minneapolis, for the next two years. Lyons helps victims get their locks changed, handles paperwork for protective orders against their abusers and sometimes gets them out of town.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety's Office of Justice Programs got 72 applications for $2.4 million in stimulus money for violence against women.

"It's saving jobs," said Cecilia Miller, who administers crime victim services funding.

Obviously, the fairly timid economic program, crafted for bipartisanship, has not yet turned the economy around. Paul Krugman argues yesterday in his New York Times column "unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market.... will remain terrible for years to come." President Obama, as Krugman foresaw earlier in the year, has turned policy in the right (left, barely) direction, in part with a necessary, but fairly meager, stimulus package.

Conservative critics, however, made dire (if vague- details are not their strong suit) predictions about the disastrous impact they were confident Obama's plan would have. Inflation would run rampant, and soon, they implied; instead, recovery has been slow and sluggish, fairly ratifying the concerns of Krugman and some others on the left that Obama was being insufficiently bold.

It would be too much to expect that Limbaugh would commend President Obama for anything. Still, Minnesota's example is a reminder that stimulus funding has benefitted many Americans most in need of help- which may be yet another reason Rush Limbaugh is so exorcised about the economic recovery effort.

Reasonable Republican Statements

In the interests of objectivity- or being "fair and balanced," in the words of an apparently self-delusional* cable network- I am going to praise two Republicans.

Brian Bilbray is a very conservative member of the House of Representatives from California. A Republican, he talked to Ed Schultz of MSNBC on Thursday, October 1 about the comments on the House floor of Democrat Alan Grayson of Florida, who was (justifiably) extremely critical of the GOP stance on health care reform. And Bilbray told Schultz's audience:

He wanted to push the envelope far beyond what I know anybody would have to say that—a Congressman saying today that there‘s a Holocaust occurring in America on American soil today is going over the limit. I think anyone would agree. He went over that line.

There‘s a lot of times that goes over the line, but those of us in Congress have to remember with those special rights comes some responsibility.

Also on October 1, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, amidst an interesting (especially his comment about Obama not being a Muslim) interview, told Chris Good of The Atlantic that he hopes the GOP gives political cover to military action President Obama may take in Afghanistan. Whatever the merits of the case for that policy, Graham's expression of bipartisanship veered sharply from today's Republican style when he commented

There is a chance for the loyal opposition to become President Obama's biggest ally. The Republican leadership must stand behind this president, and if he loses that...he's in a bad spot when it comes to Congress....

Savor these remarks, folks. Given that Bilbray's remark could be turned against a few of his ideological brethren and Graham's remark was, for his party, uncharacteristically civil, there probably won't be many more like them.

Rachel Maddow And Joe Wilson

She did it again.

A few days earlier, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow had hosted a tremendous segment comparing subsidies to ACORN with those going to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman (ordered to repay the federal government $68 million and $500 million, respectively, for fraud); Blackwater (five employees charged with murder in the course of carrying out their government contract in Iraq); KBR (under investigation for electrocuting 16 American soldiers with shoddy electrical work in Iraq): ArmorGroup (under investigation for employees allegedly engaged in a prostitution ring in Kabul); DynCorp (employees involved in sex slave ring with underage girls); and Blackwater (five employees facing murder charges).

On Wednesday, Maddow took on (video below) the case of Representative Alan Grayson (D.- Fl.), who famously stated on the House floor

It‘s my duty and pride tonight to be able to announce exactly what the Republicans plan to do for health care in America. It‘s this. Very simply, it‘s a very simple plan.

Here it is. The Republicans‘ health care plan for America: Don‘t get sick. That‘s right, don‘t get sick. If you have insurance, don‘t get sick. If you don‘t have insurance, don‘t get sick. If you‘re sick, don‘t get sick—just don‘t get sick.

That‘s what Republicans have in mind for you, America. That‘s the Republican‘s health care plan.

But I think that the Republicans understand that that plan isn‘t always going to work, it‘s not a foolproof plan. So, the Republicans have a backup plan, in case you do get sick.

If you get sick in America, this is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly. That‘s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.

Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that if you have health insurance, we‘re going to make it better. If you don‘t have health insurance, we‘re going to provide it to you. If you can‘t afford health insurance, then we‘ll help you to afford health insurance.

So, America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan: Don‘t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.

Maddow noted the ludicrous statements about health care made by House Republicans Ginny Brown-Waite of Florida, Steve King of Iowa, Louis Gohmert of Texas, Paul Browun of Georgia, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, and the ever-entertaining Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. After making the obvious inference about the hypocrisy of members of their party demanding Grayson apologize, Maddow noted

Holocaust? Always a bad choice of words unless you‘re talking about the actual Holocaust—at least in my opinion.

It is always a bad choice of words, inappropriate, and bordering on the reprehensible. Loathe to take attention away from the double standard the GOP is insisting on, and the accuracy of Grayson's charges, Maddow was too polite to dwell on the common application by conservatives of the term "Holocaust."

But let U.S. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey explain. At the 31st Annual "March For Life" in 2004: "Like you, Americans want the abortion holocaust to end." Or Mike Huckabee in October 2007 at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C.: "Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce. It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973." (This quote has to be saved for posterity, and not only because of abortion.) And several activists and religious leaders have attempted to make an analogy between abortion and "h(H)olocaust" over the past several years.

So, yes, Representative Grayson should apologize, which House Republicans want him to do. He should apologize not for violating House rules (which, unlike Joe Wilson, he did not) and not for being wrong about Repub opposition to health care (he was not). He should apologize for trivializing the Holocaust. Right after Chris Smith and Mike Huckabee do the same.

Spreading Ignorance, One Broadcast At A Time

In the midst of one of his spasms of free association about health care, TARP, General Motors, and Kin Jong-il, Rush Limbaugh compressed four decades of urban deterioration into one entertaining paragraph. He ranted:

I don't care where you go, whatever they call themselves, progressives -- go to Detroit -- what do you see in Detroit? Abject poverty. What do you see in most of Michigan? Abject poverty. What do you see where liberal Democrat socialists anywhere in the world have total unchecked power to run things, be it a country or be it a city or be it a state? You see abject poverty. Marxism, socialism, create poverty. I know it's hard to believe that this is somebody's design. But it is.

He then went on to blame this on Barack Obama, having blamed a moment earlier the nation's ills on Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and unions, who "are scheming against the American people, as they have been all along."

If you're reading this blog- not just this post, but this blog at any time- you're interested enough to have heard along the way some of the explanations for the decades-long urban decay in the U.S.A. In the recent past, political corruption (of which Detroit has had its share), drug (including alchohol) use, street crime, poverty, poor education, and more.

There are deeper causes of the ills of urban America. Cities were flourishing when, according to Bradford Snell, president and general manager Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors had other ideas:

In 1922, according to GM's own files, Sloan established a special unit within the corporation which was charged, among other things, with the task of replacing America's electric railways with cars, trucks and buses.

A year earlier, in 1921, GM lost $65 million, leading Sloan to conclude that the auto market was saturated, that those who desired cars already owned them, and that the only way to increase GM's sales and restore its profitability was by eliminating its principal rival: electric railways.

At the time, 90 percent of all trips were by rail, chiefly electric rail; only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile. There were 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways, a thriving and profitable industry with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.

General Motors sought to reduce competition from electric railways through a variety of measures, including the use of freight leverage. GM, for decades, was the nation's largest shipper of freight over railroads, which controlled some of America's most extensive railways. By wielding freight traffic as a club, GM persuaded railroads to abandon their electric rail subsidiaries.

With a pack of notorious mobsters, GM helped purchase and scrap the street railways serving Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Members of GM's special unit went to, among others, the Southern Pacific, owner of Los Angeles' Pacific Electric, the world's largest interurban, with 1,500 miles of track, reaching 75 miles from San Bernardino, north to San Fernando, and south to Santa Ana; the New York Central, owner of the New York State Railways, 600 miles of street railways and interurban lines in upstate New York; and the New Haven, owner of 1,500 miles of trolley lines in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In each case, by threatening to divert lucrative automobile freight to rival carriers, they persuaded the railroad (according to GM's own files) to convert its electric street cars to motor buses -- slow, cramped, foul-smelling vehicles whose inferior performance invariable (sic) led riders to purchase automobiles.

A few decades later, President Dwight Eisenhower would launch the interstate highway system, enabling the middle class to flee cities for more pastoral areas. This increased competition for the limited number of jobs in urban America. And the white middle class, lured to the suburbs by the mortage interest tax deduction, was encouraged to flee by private actors aiming to maximize income and only inadvertently helping destroy the city. Wendell Cox (pdf), who (over-) emphasizes the impact of urban renewal, attributes the description of the process to a W. Edward Orser, who explained

First, real estate operators would try to find a house for sale on an all-white block, often specifically alluding to the prospect of potential racial change in the area and to the threat of lowered property values for those not wise enough to see the handwriting on the wall. As an inducement to sell, the agent typically offered a buying price at or above the current market value. Second, having secured the first house by such means, he quickly installed a new African-American tenant in the house --- renter or buyer … Third, as soon as the new tenant had taken up residence, if not sooner, the operator moved on down the block, alerting homeowners to the initial sale, warning them of the prospect of increased African-American settlement and offering to buy their houses as well. Those who were among the first to sell might be offered prices above the market value; the next several sales might approximate the actual worth of the house; those who sold later suffered a considerable loss.

Not surprisingly, this tactic had a destructive influence on racial harmony as most homeowners suffered a financial loss and tensions among homeowners, and between races, suffered.

The decline in the nation's manufacturing base, particularly devastating in the early years to cities (now harming entire metropolitan areas) has been facilitated by outsourcing of jobs to the private sector, offshoring of jobs abroad, the euphemistically termed "free trade," and favorable tax treatment of corporations which engage in one or more of the above.

This decline, reflected in the near-dissolution of the domestic auto industry (before President Obama and the Democratic Congress recently revived it), is particularly obvious in Detroit, Michigan. Powerful demographic trends have played a role for generations,as Time Magazine, talking about the African-American migration northward, pointed out on October 27, 1961:

With little education or training, Detroit's new arrivals have had to scramble for any job they could get. But in their desperation to find work at any wage, they have crowded out thousands of the city's longtime residents; more than 70% of the 61,692 persons on relief have lived in Detroit since before 1950.

Disagree if you will, about the role of General Motors, the real estate business, white flight, or the federal government, but the deterioration of the American city was not precipitated by "liberal Democrat Socialists." This much is obvious.

The operative term is obvious. Obvious to anyone interested in public policy. Obvious to you, to me, and to Rush Limbaugh.

It is incomprehensible that Rush Limbaugh would be completely oblivious to all of these factors. Incomprehensible. Rush is not ignorant- merely manipulative and dishonest and completely contemptous of his listeners, given that he expects most of them to believe what he's selling.

There really are facts supporting the conservative worldview. There must be. But apparently the right-wing talkies believe conservatism cannot survive absent an atmosphere of ignorance. Their listeners, and American society, only suffer as a consequence.

Incredibly, Not A Joke

Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine recently interviewed Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State, in the GW Bush administration, at the close of that magazine's Most Powerful Women Summit. Inferring that Rice, with her "eloquent and elegant figure," would be a formidable contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Easton gushed

As Bush's national security adviser at the launch of the Iraq War, she will never appeal to hardcore Democrats. But to those millions of independents and soft Republicans who pulled Obama over the top in last year's election -- a familiar brand of voter at this Fortune gathering -- Rice has allure.

At the end of our interview, as I stood to shake Rice's hand, I glanced over my shoulder at this audience of women-CEO's and senior business and government leaders, media opinion-makers and entertainment stars, ground-breaking academics and committed philanthropists. It was an audience I knew, first-hand, viewed the Bush administration with doubts and, in some cases, outright hostility. So what I saw was telling.

Every single woman in that San Diego hotel ballroom was on her feet-giving Condi Rice a standing ovation.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on September 8, 2002

We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought -- maybe six months from a crude nuclear device. The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who pretended, testifying before the 9/11 Commission, that she was unaware that the Iraqi regime had destroyed its cache of biological and chemical weapons.

This couldn't be the same Condoleezza Rice who skillfully ignored warnings about the threat of terrorism, according to the New York Time's Phillip Shenon, author of THE COMMISSION: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission, who observed

Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante — specifically on foreign policy — and to simply translate his words into action.

No one ever alleged that Miss Rice's area of expertise is economic policy. Or trade policy. Or health care policy. Or anything but foreign policy (Russian studies, specifically). Nonetheless, nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in September of 2001 at the World Trade Center. Far more than that now have been killed in a war (Iraq) that shouldn't have been launced and in a war (Afghanistan) which was thoroughly bungled by the administration she served as Director of the National Security Council and as Secretary of State. She was, and remains, a complete failure, as well as someone with nary an acquaintance with the truth. And any suggestion that she would be a legitimate candidate for a major party's nomination for President of the United States is, really, fairly disgusting.

Prospects: Not Bright

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was blunt, and starkly realistic, in the 66-page document he submitted to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on August 30. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward reported McChrystal arguing "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months)-- while Afghan scurity capacity matures-- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."If he doesn't receive the increase in troop strength he is requesting, McChrystal contends, the mission "will likely result in failure." He concludes

Failure to provide adequate resources also risks a longer conflict, greater casualties, higher overall costs, and ultimately, a critical loss of political support. Any of these risks, in turn, are likely to result in mission failure.

General McChrystal implies that if additional soldiers are not committed to the war, the mission will fail. If proper resources are committed, it may fail. With Republicans poised to charge Obama with having "lost Afghanistan," the President is left with no good options.

How did we get to this place? Defense Secretary tells us in this exchange on Sunday with CNN's John King:

GATES: Well, I will tell you, I think that the strategy that the president put forward in late March is the first real strategy we have had for Afghanistan since the early 1980s. And that strategy was more about the Soviet Union than it was about Afghanistan.

KING: You served in the Bush administration. That's a pretty broad damnation of the Bush strategy.

GATES: Well, the reality is, we were fighting a holding action. We were very deeply engaged in Iraq. I increased -- I extended the 10th Mountain Division the first month I was on this job in January of '07. I extended -- I put another brigade into Afghanistan in the spring of 2007. And that's all we had to put in there. Every -- we were -- we were too stretched to do more. And I think we did not have the kind of comprehensive strategy that we have now.

KING: And if it comes to the point of sending more, this time, if the president agrees and General McChrystal gets -- maybe it's 20,000, 30,000, or 40,000, do we have the troops now? If you needed 40,000, could you find it?

GATES: Well, I think, if the president were to decide to approve additional combat forces, they really probably could not begin to flow until some time in January.

Having toppled a genocidal dictator in Iraq, George W. Bush had a choice: commit adequate resources to fight a war in a nation strategically nearly irrelevant- or to fight a war on terrrorism in Afghanistan. He chose the low-hanging fruit. Barack Obama, and the nation, are now left suffering the consequences of appallingly bad judgement.

Double Standard In Awarding Contracts

If you missed this last week, watch it. In its entirety. On Friday, Rachel Maddow continued her series on the trumped-up war on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. A partial transcript of the segment is here; the video is below; transcript of the program is available here. She began by noting that the amendment to the bill recently passed by Congress defunding ACORN is probably unconstitutional because, as an apparent bill of attainder, it targets one specific organization. She continues

So giant government defense contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, it looks like you‘re out of luck. Lockheed Martin has been forced to pay at least $68 million for getting caught 11 separate times committing government contract fraud. Northrop Grumman has had to pay around $500 million for getting caught nine times for contract fraud. Sorry, guys, but if we‘re going to nail ACORN here, you‘ve got to go.

And if—and if fraud is going to be the new issue in our newfound enthusiasm for defunding people, then Blackwater is going to have a problem, too. In just one of Blackwater‘s many government contracts, they were recently found to have defrauded the government to the tune of $55 million. And that‘s just one Blackwater contractor, and they‘ve got lots of contracts.

But if fraud is not bad enough for you, how about murder? Because five Blackwater employees have been charged with murder during the course of their government contracted duties in Iraq. Is murder enough to defund Blackwater?

How about if people they‘re killing, the contractors killing aren‘t just Iraqi civilians or somebody else we don‘t know, how about if they‘re U.S. troops? Because KBR, with its government contracts, is under investigation for killing 16 American troops who were electrocuted through KBR shoddy works supposedly building and maintaining living quarters for our troops in Iraq.

I mean, to be fair, I will admit that if we are talking about behavior by contractors that warrants them being defunded by an outrage Congress, none of those things I just described from those other contractors are prostitution specific, like the Republican and conservative media ACORN case has been. Ever since two activists dressed up in pimp and hooker costumes and then went from ACORN office to ACORN office with a hidden camera until they got a reaction out of ACORN employees that would play well on FOX News.

If the hidden camera stunt induced prostitution angle is what it takes to get a government contract defunded, then I guess we‘re going to have to talk about prostitution broadly and the government contractor known as ArmorGroup, part of Wackenhut, in Afghanistan. Their employees, you‘ll recall, were made famous earlier this month after the release of these pictures that show the contractors barely clothed and shooting vodka out of places you wouldn‘t expect.

The same ArmorGroup personnel who, again, were being paid by you and me were also allegedly engaged in a prostitution ring in Kabul. That‘s according to an ArmorGroup whistleblower. The State Department is investigating ArmorGroup now.

But if we‘re going to talk contractors and prostitution, we‘re also going to have to talk about DynCorp, which is always been one of those horror movie U.S. contractor cases. In the year 2000, at least 13 DynCorp employees were sent home from a U.S. government contract in Bosnia after they were found to be taking part in a Bosnian sex slave ring involving underage girls, not a fake prostitution ring that never actually existed like the one in the activist hidden camera costumes stunt, but an actual forced child prostitution ring, an actual U.S. government contractors from DynCorp.

In the absence of any defund DynCorp uprising, DynCorp still gets a lot of government money. In fact, today, DynCorp landed a brand new $230 million contract with the U.S. Air Force. That‘s on top of the $915 million contract they got from the State Department in June.

ArmorGroup, the prostitution/vodka-shooting contract in Afghanistan at the Kabul embassy, they still got that nearly $200 million contract in Afghanistan with the State Department. But that is currently under review.

Blackwater still has multimillion dollar contracts with the State Department, the Defense Department, as well as the CIA, even as five of their employees face murder charges.

KBR was just awarded a new $19 million army contract in February, despite being investigated in the deaths of those 16 U.S. troops.

Not only have these contractors not been defunded by outraged members of Congress, they all continue to get spectacularly lucrative government contracts even after all of these things have been exposed. I‘m not reporting any of these things for the first time. They‘re all known.

So, sure, if you want to defund ACORN, go for it. ACORN has definitely done some indefensible stuff over the years. They are an imperfect organization, to be sure. But if this isn‘t just a witch-hunt against ACORN, if Congress is actually just going after government contractors who commit fraud and worse, then we can all look forward to the explanation from the fake outrage Republicans and the cowering Democrats about why nothing ever inspired them to defund anyone before ACORN. After that, by all mean, cut them all loose.

In politics, it is often said, once you start to defend yourself, you have lost. So it probably will have no effect on media coverage or public opinion to explain that singling out ACORN is illegal; that the video "evidence" against ACORN consists of one tape which has not been released in its entirety and which resulted from the visit to one of the many ACORN offices (perhaps after no one took the bait at any of the others visited); or even that the Repub campaign against ACORN is aimed at stopping its efforts at registering poor voters, disproportionately minority, who inconveniently vote Democratic. Unfortunately, the only viable option, as this installment, at least, suggests, is to remind voters that there are far, far greater crimes being committed in government contracting.

Finally, on one program on one cable network, some context is brought to the hand-wringing over (sarcasm alert)the evil behemoth ACORN. Elsewhere? The "liberal media" once again is playing its role as front man for corporate and GOP interests.

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