Donald Trump, a reality show host and savage parody of post-industrial Great Stagnation-era capitalism, is pretending to run for president, as a sort of performance art piece mocking the contemporary fad among elites of celebrating plutocrat billionaires as our wise superiors and pretending their vanity campaigns for elected office are some sort of charitable selfless “public service.”
And he’s really going all-out. What began as a sort of through-a-glass-darkly reimagining of the Bloomberg-for-president chatter added a dose of Gingrichian “false run to promote unrelated money-making endeavors” as he ramped up his “campaign” at precisely the moment the new season of his television show premiered.
Today Trump even became a pseudo-birther, in an interview with ABC News, which was for some reason taking part in an extensive marketing campaign for a television show that airs on a rival network:
“Everybody that even gives a hint of being a birther … even a little bit of a hint, like, gee, you know, maybe, just maybe this much of a chance, they label them as an idiot. Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy,” he said.
[…]
He explained the source of his doubt: “He grew up and nobody knew him. You know? When you interview people, if ever I got the nomination, if I ever decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten. They’ll remember me. Nobody ever comes forward. Nobody knows who he his until later in his life. It’s very strange. The whole thing is very strange,” he added.
Yes, very strange, very strange.
Funny story! In 1990, Spy Magazine actually took a trip to Trump’s boyhood home in Queens. And while Trump wrote of being “something of a leader” in his old neighborhood, the owner of the local candy store said: “I’ve been running this store for 28 years, and I don’t remember him.” Strange, very strange.
Trump went on to say that you should take him seriously as a candidate because he’s very rich and would be able to give himself $600 million if for some reason his fake campaign needed $600 million.
That actually gets at the heart of why Trump would never run for anything: He’s spent his entire career in the public eye scrupulously hiding how much money he actually has, in real life. He’s sued people for saying his net worth is less than he says it is. But lots of people have their doubts about whether or not he’d actually be able to give himself $600 million at the drop of a hat. And if he ran for real, as Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman say, “at some point he’d actually be required to disclose his assets.”
Which is obviously not going to happen, because it would ruin the whole joke.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 17, 2011
March 19, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Birthers, Elections, Ideologues, Liberatarians, Politics | Capitalism, GOP, Lawsuits, Queens, Reality TV, Republicans, Wealthy |
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Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are the “laboratories of democracy.” Oft repeated over time, the aphorism has helped impart legitimacy to the rough and tumble of state lawmaking. We’ve heard “laboratory” and we’ve imagined staid scientists in white coats rigorously testing forward-thinking theories of societal advancement. It’s certainly a reassuring picture – but there is a darker side of the metaphor. States are indeed laboratories. The problem is that today, those laboratories are increasingly run by mad scientists.
We’re not talking about the usual Dr. Frankensteins trying to bring alive new corporate giveaways through harebrained cuts to social services (though there are those, too). We’re talking about true legislative sadists looking to go medieval on America. Behold just five of the most telling examples:
The Anti-Life Pro-Life Act: After anti-abortion Republicans in Congress tried to narrow the legal definition of rape, Nebraska Republican State Sen. Mark Christensen took the assault on women’s rights one step further with a bill to legitimize the murder of abortion providers by classifying such homicides as “justified.”
The Let Them Eat Corporate Tax Cuts Act: As poverty rates and hunger have risen, so too have corporate profits. The Georgia legislature’s response? Intensify the inequity with a bill to create a regressive sales tax on food that would then finance a brand new corporate tax cut.
The Demoralize the Workforce Act: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker didn’t just threaten to deploy the National Guard against state workers unless they accept big pay and pension cuts. Apparently, that was too Kent State and not enough Ludlow Massacre for him. So he pressed to statutorily bar those workers from ever again collectively bargaining.
The Child Labor Act: Missouri State Sen. Jane Cunningham’s proposal to eliminate child labor laws would allow corporations to employ any kid under 14 and would terminate restrictions on the number of hours that kid can be forced to work. The legislation is proof that when Tea Party ideologues refer to “the ’50s,” some of them aren’t referring to the 1950s – they are referring to the 1850s.
The Endorsing Your Own Demise Act: Between trying to legalize hunting with hand-thrown spears and pressing to eliminate education requirements for those seeking the office of State Superintendent of Schools, Montana’s Republican lawmakers are also considering legislation to officially endorse catastrophic global climate change. That’s right, in the face of a Harvard study showing that climate change could destroy Montana’s water supplies, agriculture industries and forests, State Rep. Joe Read’s bill would declare that “global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.”
If you don’t live in one of these states, it’s easy to tell yourself that these bills don’t affect you. But history suggests that what happens in one “laboratory” is quite often replicated in others – and ultimately, in the nation’s capital. That’s why we should all hope saner minds cut short these experiments before they get even more out of control.
March 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Abortion, Climate Change, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Education, Ideologues, Politics, State Legislatures, States, Unions, Womens Rights | Anti-abortion, Child Labor Laws, Corporations, Gov Scott Waler, Laboratories, Montana, Nebraska, Republicans, Scientists, Social Services, Taxes |
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Suzy Khimm on the dilemma facing House Speaker John Boehner:
The House passed yet another short-term extension of the budget on Tuesday. But John Boehner faced a revolt by 54 Republicans who voted against the bill for not going far enough to slash spending, effectively forcing the GOP Speaker to rely on Democratic votes for the stop-gap measure to pass. As Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler explains, the vote now puts Boehner between a rock and a hard place: either he makes concessions to Democrats to pass a final budget, risking provoking greater fury from the tea party right, or he gives in to the GOP’s right flank—risking a government shutdown, as the Democratic Senate is unlikely to pass any bill that guts spending to satisfy hard-line conservatives.
I think Boehner’s problem here is pretty obvious, so there’s no point in belaboring it. The more interesting question is: which way does he jump?
My guess is that he sides with the tea partiers and forces a government shutdown. I don’t have any special insight here, just a feeling that, in the end, the hardcore right holds the whip hand in the Republican Party these days. If this is correct, though, it leads to a second question: how does this end? Obviously Republicans can’t keep the government shut down forever, and eventually this means that Obama will win some kind of compromise and it will get passed by a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans. The tea partiers will lose.
Given that this almost has to be the case, wouldn’t it make more sense for Boehner to compromise in the first place and avoid the humiliation of giving in down the road? In a rational world, sure. But in the tea party universe, he can’t. The forces working here will force Boehner into the worst of both worlds: he won’t assert control over the tea party faction from the start, which is bad, and then he’ll end up caving in to Democrats a few weeks or months down the road, which is worse.
But maybe I’m missing something here. Is there some other scenario for Boehner that works out better for him?
By: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, March 16, 2011
March 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Economy, Federal Budget, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Politics, Right Wing, Tea Party | Compromise, Democrats, House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner |
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Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin, including Gov. Scott Walker, have yet another decision to make in the wake of a state trial judge’s ruling Friday that temporarily blocked enforcement of Wisconsin’s controversial new public union law. And none of their paths are certain to bring them back to where they want to be.
Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi created the headache for Walker and company when she ruled that Wisconsin’s “open meetings” law required more public notice of a legislative vote than was given by Republican lawmakers on the evening of March 9th. That was the night GOP lawmakers took their surprise vote, in the absence of their still-in-hiding Democratic counterparts, and passed the divisive measure which undercuts collective bargaining rights in the state.
Gov. Walker subsequently signed the law and it was scheduled to be published — a requirement for implementation — on March 25th. But because the measure was enacted in violation of the 30-year-old transparency law, Judge Sumi ruled, it could not yet go into effect. The Wisconsin State Journal quoted her as saying: “This was something that would and did catch the public unaware… what ended up being a closed session of a body in propelling legislation forward.”
Her procedural decision had nothing to do with the legal or political merits of the fight over collective bargaining rights. But it will likely affect those merits anyway, in whole or in part. Here’s part of what the state statute says about how other state statutes are to be lawfully enacted:
“Public notice of every meeting of a governmental body shall be given at least 24 hours prior to the commencement of such meeting unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical, in which case shorter notice may be given, but in no case may the notice be provided less than 2 hours in advance of the meeting.”
After a brief hearing on the matter, Judge Sumi said Friday in court: “It seems to me the public policy behind effective enforcement of the open meeting law is so strong that it does outweigh the interest, at least at this time, which may exist in favor of sustaining the validity of the (law).”
So the GOP in Wisconsin now has a few options. The GOP can go back to the start of the legislative process and seek to enact the measure in more traditional circumstances. This could mean more Democratic walkouts. It could mean more protests at the State House in Madison. It could mean some sort of political compromise. Or it could mean the passage of an exact but newer version of the new collective bargaining law. And there’s no point in betting on which option is more likely because no reasonable person would lay odds on any of it given Wisconsin’s recent political history.
The GOP can slug it out in court and hope that a majority of the justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court have a different view of the open meetings law (and what happened on March 9th) than did Judge Sumi. The problem with that option is that it requires the state’s appellate judiciary to undercut the open meetings law not just in these circumstances — which everyone concedes were unusual — but in more conventional scenarios as well. No one (yet) is claiming the law itself is unconstitutional or otherwise beyond the power of state legislators. The state supreme court could require a do-over at the Statehouse while promising its ruling has nothing to do with the politics of the law.
Or, the GOP can pursue both paths at the same time and hope for success in either one. The problem with that scenario is that it would require politicians to spend more time and energy in pitched legislative battle over an issue — new collective-bargaining legislation, properly noticed — which may subsequently be rendered moot by an appellate ruling that recognizes the legitimacy of the existing collective-bargaining law. I suspect few politicians in Wisconsin would want to go through the ordeal again even if they were assured that it would mean something in the end. But to ask them to do so when the existing law may ultimately be revived may be a bit much.
There are other lawsuits pending against the legislation. Judge Sumi herself is involved in another one of those. What emerged from political chaos looks now to be heading toward a period of legal chaos.
By: Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic, March 18, 2011
March 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Politics, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Unions | Gov Scott Walker, Judge Sumi, Open Meetings Law, Wisconsin, Wisconsin 14, Wisconsin GOP, Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin Supreme Court |
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The success of the Tea Party movement and legitimate concern over the size of the deficit raise a serious question: What does it mean to promote small government?
The pious commitment to keeping big government out of people’s lives—or championing local control—was a common theme among Republican candidates last election season, particularly among those who professed sympathies for the Tea Party element. But local control and small government sound remarkably like pure lawlessness, as Dana Milbank brilliantly reports in Wednesday’s Washington Post.
Milbank—often amusing, always readable—with this most recent and very well-reported column, an absolute must-read, chronicles some of the anti-federal-authority efforts by state legislators:
When Louis Brandeis called state legislatures “laboratories of democracy,” he couldn’t have imagined the curious formulas the Tea Party chemists would be mixing in 2011, including: a bill just passed by the Utah legislature requiring the state to recognize gold and silver as legal tender; a Montana bill declaring global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”; a plan in Georgia to abolish driver’s licenses because licensing violates the “inalienable right” to drive; legislation in South Dakota that would require every adult to buy a gun; and the Kentucky legislature’s effort to create a “sanctuary state” for coal, safe from environmental laws.
U.S. News’s own Robert Schlesinger also recently questioned the mental stability of some of these local lawmakers.
Setting aside the pure absurdity of some of those ideas, the philosophical underpinnings are pretty disturbing. Where did these local officials get the idea that any community standard—be it a proven ability to make a left turn (if not parallel park) or to avoid poisoning the environment for generations who might come after us—is some egregious infringement on their own rights?
If the anti-big-government, local-control camp wants to prove its sincerity, it can help out right here in the District of Columbia. Still the last place in the country where citizens are denied the right to full representation in Congress, the nation’s capital is again experiencing attempts by members of Congress to make decisions about school vouchers and other matters. The same lawmakers who say they want the federal government to have less control over people’s lives are using Washington as Congress’s personal lab rat. If they really believe in local control, the lawmakers will let the city of Washington alone.
By: Susan Milligan, U.S. News and World Report, March 16, 2011
March 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Deficits, Democracy, Liberty, Politics, Republicans, State Legislatures, Teaparty | Anti-Government, Congress, District Of Columbia, Extremist, Federal Government, Homerule, Washington |
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