“Rove’s New Game; Split Warren & Clinton”: Typical Rovian Dishonesty, Using Warren’s Words Out Of Context To Attack Clinton
So now, America’s most overrated political consultant has decided that the foundation that has handed out free AIDS medications to millions of Africans and done far more in a few years to reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world than the Republican Party has in its entire history is Hillary Clinton’s great Achilles’ heel. I’ll admit that time might prove Karl Rove right, although I don’t really think so. More on that later.
But one thing Rove has accomplished with his new web ad that uses Elizabeth Warren’s words to attack Clinton is to show us that Warren, while she may not be running for president, is definitely out to maximize her leverage over the presumptive nominee. Here’s the story.
The ad, in case you’ve missed it, shows both Clintons posed for photos with various be-keffiyehed petro-garchs with flash cards announcing that the Clintons’ foundation has accepted millions from “foreign governments.” This is not illegal, and if the governments in question had been Iceland and Lichtenstein, the ad wouldn’t even exist. But they were the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, a “prominent backer of Hamas,” which has given the foundation “potentially millions.” Uh…potentially?
But here’s where the ad gets cute. There is a voice-over, a woman’s voice, which warns that “the power of well-funded special interests tilts our democracy away from the people and toward the powerful.” That voice, of course, is Warren’s. Boom!
The ad wants to make the viewer think that Warren was inveighing against the Clintons when she spoke. But Warren was not, when she said those words, thinking about the Clinton foundation taking oil money at all. In fact, the ad cobbles together Warren quotes from different occasions. For example, the line I quoted above was taken from a September 2013 event of the Constitutional Accountability Center about the dangers of Citizens United and other Roberts Court decisions (here’s a video of that; the line comes at 11:28). In other words, she was lambasting the people Rove loves—two of whom, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, he helped elevate to the Court.
And get this. The full quote as Warren spoke it isn’t quite what you get in the ad. The full quote goes: “The power of well-funded special interests to blanket our politics with aggregate contributions tilts our democracy away from the people and toward the powerful.” Doesn’t sound to me much like a denunciation of nonprofit cup-rattling, even on the Clintons’ operatic scale.
In another of the ad’s sound bites, Warren cries out that “action is required to defend our great democracy against those who would see it perverted into one more rigged game where the rich and the powerful always win.” Did she wake up enraged that morning that the Clintons were perverting our democracy by funneling Saudi dollars into childhood nutrition programs? Not quite. She was on the floor of the Senate in September 2014 speaking in support of a constitutional amendment that would give Congress and states the authority to regulate campaign finance.
So it’s typical Rovian dishonesty. Nothing new there. Warren was lambasting a system of corruption that Rove supports, indeed lives and breathes, and has done far more than his part to advance.
But here’s an interesting thing. Warren hasn’t denounced this misuse of her words. Why not? I was on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show Monday night with David Axelrod and others talking about this ad, and O’Donnell raised the point of Warren’s silence, and Axelrod said yes, “that’s surprising to me. I would think she would speak out. The last place I’d think she’d wanna be is narrating a Karl Rove Crossroads ad.” You might think that Warren would be anxious to say hey, bub, I wasn’t talking about the Clintons! I was talking about you and your kind!
But she hasn’t. I emailed Warren’s office asking about this and got silence. I emailed Clinton’s office asking if they had asked Warren to issue a statement and got the same silence. So it seems on some level Warren doesn’t mind being used in this manner. She probably figures something like: To the extent that ads like this create pressure that pulls Clinton in the direction of eschewing special interests, she’s all for them. That may increase her leverage over Clinton in the near term. But undoubtedly other Republicans are going to notice her silence, and they’re going to try to drive a wedge between her and Clinton, and she’s not going to be able to stay silent forever.
On the broader question of the foundation: As I said on O’Donnell, sure, the Republicans will hit it hard, and it will remind some voters of some of those Lincoln Bedroom-y aspects of Clintonist politics. And they’ll raise questions about whether all of Bill’s glad-handling and hustling might compromise his wife’s White House in some way. But A, the Clintons can and should counter with the massive amount of good the foundation has done in the world, and B, unless some hot new smoking gun emerges that blossoms into an actual scandal, as opposed to a Fox News Scandal, the foundation is probably a second-tier issue.
A lot of voters can be troubled by something like the Clintons’ fund-raising. But most of them still like old Bill fine and know how he rolls. Elections are about the state of the economy and the alternate futures of the country the two candidates present to voters. Those are both matters the Clintons have always understood better than Rove, whose vision of America’s future was so wobbly that he was predicting a permanent conservative realignment shortly before the bottom fell out of George W. Bush’s presidency. That is reality. He can splice all the dishonest sound bites he wants.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 25, 2015
“New GOP Meaning Of Terrorist Warnings”: What’s A ‘Credible Threat’ In Wisconsin? Unions
On Tuesday evening, a Republican committee chairman in the Wisconsin state senate, Stephen Nass, cut short a hearing on an anti-union bill, citing a “credible threat” that union members were about to disrupt the proceedings.
Credible threat? That’s the phrase used in terrorist warnings. But the only union members in Madison were the estimated 1,800 to 2,000 workers, many of them wearing hard hats and heavy coats, who’d gathered peacefully in and around the Capitol during the day to oppose the bill. They believe it’s an attack on working families designed to weaken organized labor – which it is.
So who was credibly threatening whom?
The Service Employees International Union, which represents low-wage service workers, had planned to protest the committee’s scheduled hard stop of testimony at 7 p.m., because the cut-off was too early to accommodate everyone who wanted to be heard. To avoid that, all the committee chairman had to do was extend the hearing. Instead, by ending it abruptly, dozens of people who had been waiting all day for the chance to speak were deprived of that opportunity – even as the Republican majority on the committee hastily voted to send the bill to the full Senate.
Not surprisingly, when the meeting ended early those who had been waiting erupted in anger and indignation, shouting profanities and “shame,” according to the A.P., and creating so much noise that the roll call vote could not be heard. The result — 3 Republicans in favor, 1 Democrat against and 1 Democrat who didn’t vote because he wanted more debate — was announced later. For someone so concerned about avoiding a disruption, Mr. Nass didn’t seem too concerned about causing one.
Mr. Nass later said he didn’t want protestors to disrupt the meeting the way they did hearings on Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s measure in 2011 to strip public unions of collective bargaining rights. Leaving aside the fact that those rallies lasted for weeks and drew up to 100,000, Mr. Nass said the protestors were trying to “take over the process of representing all of the people of this great state.”
Where does one start to unpack that? The protestors are the people of the great state. The bill in question threatens their pay, their jobs and their values. They were trying to participate in the process. Democracy, anyone?
By: Teresa Tritch, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editor’s Blog, The New York Times, February 25, 2015
“He Must Not Merely Lose, He Must Be Humiliated”: If Mitt Romney Insists On Running For President, Then He Needs To Be Trounced
The main reason democracy works is not the ballot box. It is accountability.
Humans are weak and prone to corruption, and one problem with authoritarian regimes is that there is no mechanism for holding people accountable when corruption inevitably occurs. In a democracy, there is. It’s far from perfect, but in the long run accountability leads to democratic countries being more prosperous, peaceful, and powerful. Just look at the rampant corruption and pollution in China, or Russia’s slide into fascism.
The ballot box is just a mechanism for accountability. I suspect that the U.S. would more or less achieve the same results if it had a computer that replaced one clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates with another clique of megalomaniacal Ivy League graduates every time GDP growth and unemployment hit a certain number — this is essentially what the ballot box does.
Accountability is a different phenomenon. If you have the ballot box without a culture of accountability, you get Iraq’s chaos or Hugo Chavez’s bread lines. Only culture generates and sustains accountability — the rules of the game are the product of a culture that is willing to enforce them. Such a culture creates secular saints like John Profumo, who, after resigning from the British government over a sex scandal, didn’t join a private equity firm, but instead spent years mopping toilets at a charity.
All of which brings us to Willard Mitt Romney.
In the political realm, you want a culture that says you can only be a major party’s presidential nominee once (unless you win the presidency, of course). Why? Because. Because it allows new blood to emerge. Because otherwise you risk becoming a place like France, where the same politicians have been playing musical chairs for decades. Both Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand ran for president twice on a major party ticket before being elected to the top job, and the country would have been better off if their parties had held them accountable instead. Party machines run like feudal systems, doing everything to protect the Boss, including tolerating a culture of corruption. Healthy political parties realize that the cemeteries are full of indispensable men and rotate their troops.
This means that if Mitt Romney is to run for president, which it increasingly looks like he will do, he must not merely lose — he must be humiliated. This is not only because he would be a terrible standard bearer for the GOP (although that’s certainly true), but also because an example must be made of him. He must suffer a defeat so stinging that it will deter anyone else who might try that trick in the future.
Romney’s candidacy is clearly an exercise in self-delusion. For the GOP to nominate a painfully wooden private-equity baron — at a time when its biggest problem is its image as the party of rich white men — was excusable the first time; a second time, it would be a joke. No American would take the party seriously. And if Romney thinks talking about poverty — an issue on which no mainstream journalist would give him the benefit of the doubt — will change his public perception, he clearly has departed from reality. Even without the accountability aspect, a Romney candidacy would be a disaster.
I personally find it impossible not to have sympathy for Mitt Romney, the man. But there seems to be two Romneys. There’s “Mitt,” the fair-dealing businessman, the talented technocratic governor, the Christian man deeply involved in his church, the devoted husband and father. And then there is “Candidate Romney,” a man who seems to be so consumed by his self-regard, his unshakeable faith in his own world-historical significance, that he is willing to say anything, and do anything, to reach the highest office in the land. The question was always which one would end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if elected. But now it is moot.
What was most endearing about Mitt Romney was what seemed like a genuine, basic human decency. But this selfsame decency should have told him that, no matter how great a president he thinks he would be, he could not run again, for the good of his party and country. Since he seemingly does not understand this, the country must make him understand.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, January 15, 2015
“Enough”: The NYPD’s Dangerous, Disgraceful Game
Over two weeks of foot-stomping is enough, don’t you think?
On second thought, maybe that was already far too much.
Of course, I’m talking about the overwrought indignation roiling the New York Police Department since the horrific murder of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by a deranged psychopath on Dec. 20.
But first, a concession.
It’s been a tough several months for the police. Their work is often dangerous — sometimes intensely so, requiring heroic acts of valor that go far beyond what the rest of us will ever be called to do in our jobs. They deserve our respect and gratitude for risking their lives and well-being to ensure public safety. Police officers usually receive a decent wage and pension, but they aren’t rich. A significant part of their compensation comes from the honor, deference, and respect they are shown by elected officials and the public at large. It feels good to wear a uniform and carry a weapon, especially when unarmed civilians respond with admiration to both.
That’s the main reason why things have been so tense in the months since the unarmed Michael Brown was gunned down by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. For the first time in decades, the police have come in for widespread, sometimes harsh public criticism. That criticism got harsher after the non-indictment of Wilson — and it got exponentially worse after a grand jury in Staten Island failed to indict the cop who strangled the unarmed Eric Garner to death in a separate incident.
After weeks of loud and angry protests, with large numbers of law-abiding citizens (including some politicians, and myself) raising tough questions about whether cops are shown too much deference in our culture and legal system, tension were running high. Which is why the cold-blooded murder of officers Ramos and Liu was especially shocking. When news of the shooting first broke, it was perfectly understandable for cops to wonder in their grief and fear if it had now become open season on the police.
What is not understandable — or justifiable — is for officers days later to show outright and repeated disrespect to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by turning their backs on him at public events. Or for them to engage in a dramatic two-weeks-and-running work slowdown that has led to a 50 percent drop in arrests, and a 90 percent decline in parking and traffic tickets, from the same period a year ago.
Such actions are unjustifiable for several reasons.
First, because Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who gunned down Ramos and Liu after shooting his girlfriend and before killing himself, was a lunatic. His crime was not an act of politics; it was an act of madness, however he may have rationalized it to himself in the midst of his homicidal-suicidal rage. In case there is any doubt of this, we have the additional fact that no one in the protest movement views Brinsley as a hero advancing its aims. Far from it. The expressions of anguish, outrage, and disgust at the shooting have been nearly universal and entirely sincere.
That much is obvious to anyone who’s paying attention.
Which means that the cops who are acting out in counter-protest are either behaving like children throwing an irrational temper tantrum or cynically using a tragedy to forestall public criticism and browbeat protesters into silence.
Either way, their actions are disgraceful.
They’re also dangerous.
Liberal democratic government depends on several norms and institutions, including rights to free speech, worship, and assembly, free and fair elections, private property rights, an independent judiciary — and civilian control of the military. Make no mistake about it: the NYPD — with roughly 35,000 uniformed officers, as well as a well-funded and well-armed counterterrorism bureau — is a modestly sized military force deployed on the streets of the city.
It is absolutely essential, in New York City but also in communities around the country, that citizens and public officials make it at all times unambiguously clear that the police work for us. In repeatedly turning their backs on the man elected mayor by the citizens of New York, in refusing to abide by the police commissioner’s requests to cease their protests, in engaging in a work slowdown that could lead to a breakdown in the public order they are sworn to uphold — with all of these acts, the NYPD has demonstrated that it does not understand that the residents of New York City, and not the members of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association or its demagogic leader Patrick Lynch, are the ones in charge.
When police officers engage in acts of insubordination against civilian leadership, they should expect to be punished. Just like insubordinate soldiers.
The principle of civilian control of the military and police depends on it.
It also depends on cops who kill unarmed citizens being tried in a court of law. And on cops respecting the right of citizens to protest anything they wish, including the failure of the judicial system to hold police officers accountable for their use of deadly force in ambiguous situations.
All of this should be a no-brainer. That it apparently isn’t for many police officers and their apologists in the media is a troubling sign of decay in our civic institutions.
The mourning is over. Respect has been paid to the victims of a senseless act of violence. Now it’s time for the NYPD to go back to acting responsibly — and for the rest of us to continue expressing our justified outrage at the recklessness of bad cops and the prosecutors and jurors who enable them.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 7, 2015
“What Donors Want”: They Helped Elect A New Class Of Congress Members; Now What?
When the 114th Congress convenes on Tuesday, lawmakers won’t merely be thinking of the voters who put them in office. They’ll also be mindful of the donors who helped them reach those voters in the first place.
The 2014 midterm elections cost some $3.7 billion, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a lot of moneyed interests to consider, and sometimes they aren’t pulling lawmakers in the same direction. What’s a senator to do, for example, if the small-government Koch groups see a federal spending plan as too lavish while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks of it as a win for business?
Scott Reed, a top political adviser for the Chamber, had this take on donor expectations: “We don’t expect the candidates we endorsed to line up 100 percent with us, but we’d like to get them in the 80 percent range.”
Here’s a look at what’s on some donor wish lists—and how they intersect and conflict with each other.
The Koch brothers want an authentic spending fight
Billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch have a network of advocacy groups that sunk at least $150 million into last year’s elections. They want their senators to be soldiers for less government spending.
“What I want these candidates to do is to support a balanced budget,” David Koch told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview in December. “I’m very worried that if the budget is not balanced that inflation could occur and the economy of our country could suffer terribly.”
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the most active nonprofit in the Koch alliance, said his group won’t be shy about calling out lawmakers who take their eye off this spending ball. Phillips predicted chafing between deficit hawks like his group and others that might be willing to sacrifice purity if it means getting their preferred projects funded.
The Chamber of Commerce wants the government to invest in infrastructure
That makes the Chamber, which put up $35 million to usher into office more business-minded Republicans, a potential foe to the Kochs’ top objective. The group spent most of its money on primary contests and notched a win rate of 14 out of 15 candidates, Reed said. The goal was to elect Republicans who are “committed to governing,” he said.
“What we did not want,” he said, “are the candidates who say, ‘Let’s get to D.C. so we can shut the damn place down.'”
The Chamber thinks Republicans should be prepared to fund infrastructure, even featuring that message in some of its candidate advertisements last year. “The key ingredients to thriving free enterprise are roads, bridges and tunnels,” Reed said.
Crossroads wants to avoid messy clashes that could ding the GOP image ahead of 2016
The Chamber can probably count on Karl Rove’s powerful Crossroads political groups as an ally. They’re driven far less by ideology than by party politics. That makes sense: Rove was former President George W. Bush’s top strategist, earning the nickname “Bush’s brain.” The Crossroads enterprise spent $100 million on the 2014 races, according to American Crossroads President Steven Law, and wants more than anything to put the party in a good position for the 2016 presidential election.
“Voters expect constructive action, not obstructionism. They want Washington to work and lawmakers to get things done,” Rove wrote in his post-election column in the Wall Street Journal. “Their expectations are low because their distrust of politicians is high. So surprise them. The rewards will be great if the GOP shows it has a governing agenda.”
Translation: Crossroads wants to keep senators from doing politically damaging things that might cost seats or, worse, the presidency in 2016. To that end, Crossroads will spend much of 2015 providing Republican leaders with research to advise them how to broaden the party’s appeal and what kinds of legislation voters would like to see. “There’s an appetite for constructive change, not reflexive opposition,” Law said.
As for any looming fiscal battles, “we strongly support spending restraint,” Law said. “But where we differ with some of the other groups is in tactics.” He said shutting down the government in protest of Obama’s health care law is a prime example of the kind of “colossal failure” he hopes Republican lawmakers will avoid. “You have to think through what you’re going to get for it. We’d be concerned about shutdown gambits that would tarnish the brand.”
Law, like many representatives of the political money groups, will make the rounds on Tuesday, congratulating the new members and attending various parties in their honor. “Everyone we were helpful to has been very kind about letting us know they appreciated our role,” he said.
Sheldon Adelson seeks the death of online gambling
A billionaire casino executive, Adelson wants to stop what he sees as the scourge of online gambling. He argues it’s not about the bottom line for his international gambling empire, but rather it’s an issue of morality because kids can get hooked on betting. Three states have already legalized online gambling, but Congress could step in with a federal ban. That’s what Adelson has pushed for through a Washington advocacy group he started in 2014.
Although some have argued that it’s too late for action, Adelson isn’t just anyone—he’s a megadonor. In addition to pumping more than $90 million into the 2012 presidential election, he spent $5 million last year to elect Republican House members. Politico reports he may have funneled tens of millions more through nonprofit groups that don’t disclose their donors.
Coal Country wants a return to power
The coal industry demonstrated last year that it can still fuel election turnout. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a pro-coal message to pad his win in Kentucky. More than one-third of McConnell’s TV ads in his race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes invoked his pro-coal stance, and voter turnout showed the message hit home: He improved his vote totals throughout the state’s coal counties.
The pro-coal theme also played well in West Virginia, where Republican Shelley Moore Capito defeated a Democratic opponent. The American Chemistry Council, American Energy Alliance and United Mine Workers of America Power PAC all weighed in with campaign money and election-time advertising. They’ll be after lawmakers to push back on President Barack Obama’s new regulations limiting smog, which were seen as a direct hit on the coal industry.
Black pastors bought themselves an unlikely friend
Weighing in at just $183,340 in contributions, All Citizens for Mississippi certainly wasn’t the election cycle’s biggest super-PAC. But it packed an important punch. The group worked to motivate African Americans to head to the polls in support of Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who was facing a surprisingly tough primary challenge from the right. The super-PAC, led by a black minister, put out radio ads warning that Cochran opponent Chris McDaniel would be bad for race relations.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup of the New Horizon Church International, who started the super-PAC, said its work on behalf of Cochran erased any doubt about the importance of Mississippi’s African American voters. Crudup said he’s had post-election conversations with Cochran. “The senator knows that African Americans stepped up for him, and I can’t put words in his mouth, but he has made good, affirmative statements that he appreciates the support.”
On Crudup’s wish list: better funding for historically black colleges and universities, policies that bring jobs to Mississippi and federal funding for workforce development. And there’s the issue of Obamacare. Crudup said he’d be very disappointed if Cochran tries to obliterate what he sees as a law that has been particularly helpful in getting African Americans health insurance coverage. “I think that our senator understands his constituents, black and white, depend on that service,” Crudup said.
By: Julie Bykowicz, Thank You Notes, Bloomberg Politics, January 5, 2015
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