Friday Reads

Posted: February 3, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, morning reads, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , | 70 Comments

Good Morning!

As you may know, one of my pet peeves is how right wing politicians distort historical figures and quotes to their advantage and very few journalists or people bother to spell check them.  Mitt Romney is going on using a George Patton quote and attributing it to one of my favorite founders, Thomas Paine.  Any one remotely familiar with the 18th century would know that “lead, follow, or get out of the way” couldn’t even be part of the lexicon.  But, never let a good opportunity to skew history the wrong direction get in the way of a pol in heat.

Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations published by Yale University Press, told BuzzFeed that “the notion that Thomas Paine said this is extremely ridiculous.”

“The diction and tone of ‘lead, follow, or get out of the way’ are, of course, far too modern to have been said by Thomas Paine,” Shapiro said.

A similar form of the quote — “push, pull, or get out of the way” — can be traced to a proverb dating back to 1909, according to Shapiro, who is the author of a forthcoming book on notable misquotes. And there is a newspaper mention of the quote from 1961, but it’s from the governor of Ohio. According to Paine biographer Craig Nelson, Paine “never said it. George Patton did.” (You can also find the quote attributed to Patton on the Internet).

In response to a request for comment on the Paine misquote, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul noted that the candidate had hedged a little bit: “In another era of American crisis, Thomas Paine is reported to have said, ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way.'”

University of Texas professor and Paine scholar William Scheick called Romney’s misquoting of Paine “another deplorable example of politicians distorting history to advance themselves and their shadowy supporters” and said that Paine “hardly is apt in Romney’s case.”

“For me, that’s the real story here — that Romney and his audience apparently have no clue to what a searing liberal freethinker Paine was,” said Scheick.

Don’t you just love the description “searing liberal freethinker”?  I might also add the man was a well-known critic of organized religion.  That’s hardly a combination of attributes for a leader that  you would think a Republican presidential wannabe would want thrown around these days.  I remember reading a biography of Thomas Paine in high school and thinking “wow”.  At the end of his days, Thomas Jefferson was one of the few folks that would even speak to him.  He was that scandalous. It is pretty well known that he moved from being a deist into the realm of atheism by his end days.  His most famous work is Age of Reason but he is also well known as a pamphleteer or the equivalent of a 18th century blogger.

What you may not know is that he was one of the most ardent and earliest supporters of emancipation for women.  One of his most famous works is called: An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex and includes many examples of how women have been subjugated to men.  Here, Paine channels his inner female to argue for emancipation.

If a woman were to defend the cause of her sex, she might address him in the following manner:

“How great is your injustice? If we have an equal right with you to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise? The public esteem ought to wait upon merit. Our duties are different from yours, but they are not therefore less difficult to fulfill, or of less consequence to society: They are the fountains of your felicity, and the sweetness of life. We are wives and mothers. ‘Tis we who form the union and the cordiality of families. ‘Tis we who soften that savage rudeness which considers everything as due to force, and which would involve man with man in eternal war. We cultivate in you that humanity which makes you feel for the misfortunes of others, and our tears forewarn you of your own danger. Nay, you cannot be ignorant that we have need of courage not less than you. More feeble in ourselves, we have perhaps more trials to encounter. Nature assails us with sorrow, law and custom press us with constraint, and sensibility and virtue alarm us with their continual conflict. Sometimes also the name of citizen demands from us the tribute of fortitude. When you offer your blood to the State think that it is ours. In giving it our sons and our husbands we give more than ourselves. You can only die on the field of battle, but we have the misfortune to survive those whom we love most. Alas! while your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and to die unknown? Would that the grave and eternal forgetfulness should be our lot. Be not our tyrants in all: Permit our names to be sometimes pronounced beyond the narrow circle in which we live. Permit friendship, or at least love, to inscribe its emblem on the tomb where our ashes repose; and deny us not that public esteem which, after the esteem of one’s self, is the sweetest reward of well doing.”

As I said, it’s really hard for me to imagine Willard thinking that he is quoting Paine.  He obviously knows not what of he speaks in many ways.

 Sabrina Rubin Erdely has written an incredible account of the “One Town’s War on Gay Teens” in this month’s Rolling Stone. The town is none other than Anoka, MN who is represented in congress by the dread Pirate Bachmann and her faux therapist, closeted husband Marcus. The personal stories of several teens is detailed and gut-wrenching. So much for Minnesota nice.

Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate. “LGBTQ students don’t feel safe at school,” says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. “They’re made to feel ashamed of who they are. They’re bullied. And there’s no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all I students.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder if any Republican presidential candidate has read that bible they keep thumping.  Here’s the latest example of  audacious  insensitivity from Rick Santorum.

GOP contender Rick Santorum had a heated exchange with a mother and her sick young son Wednesday, arguing that drug companies were entitled to charge whatever the market demanded for life-saving therapies.Santorum, himself the father of a child with a rare genetic disorder, compared buying drugs to buying an iPad, and said demand would determine the cost of medical therapies.

“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” Santorum said, “but paying $900 for a  drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”

The mother said the boy was on the drug Abilify, used to treat schizophrenia, and that, on paper, its costs would exceed $1 million each year.

Santorum said drugs take years to develop and cost millions of dollars to produce, and manufacturers need to turn a profit or they would stop developing new drugs.

“You have that drug, and maybe you’re alive today because people have a profit motive to make that drug,” Santorum said. “There are many people sick today who, 10 years from now, are going to be alive because of some drug invented in the next 10 years. If we say: ‘You drug companies are greedy and bad, you can’t make a return on your money,’ then we will freeze innovation.”

Santorum told a large Tea Party crowd here that he sympathized with the boy’s case, but he also believed in the marketplace.

Then there’s “I don’t care about poor people Willard”.  Do these guys even think before they speak?  I really like this Pierce description in an article where he rips austerity a new one.  We have to be punished for suffering, for not surviving their financial abuses, and for not being patient enough.  Hallelujah  and trickle it down Big Brother!

The idea of poverty’s being a sin that requires ritual purification before redemption runs pretty deeply in this country. When Jonathan Edwards delivered his great sermon, Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, I doubt whether even that unbending piece of Puritan iron realized how many of his fellow citizens would be so willing to be the servants of that god, seeking to punish their fallen brethren. There has always been a strong view in our politics that pain can purify the nation. Especially the pain of other people, less-worthy-people. Sinners.

We are falling like dim children, like the suckers we always are, to the notion of the deserving and undeserving poor, the have-less-and-lesses are being pitted against the have-littles, and the have-nots. That’s what Willard Romney’s been about the last couple of days. He wants to find a way to harness the fear people have of becoming poor to his advantage at the expense of the people who actually are. That is the basis of the entire public career of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, and the whole party has signed the guestbook into his little S&M parlor of a budget.

Speaking of Big Brother References, I just finished an interesting novel about religious cults, domestic violence and alternative realities called 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.  I’m checking the sky for two moons these days.  I totally recommend it.  It’s literary.  It’s unusual.  It’s got marvelous character development and descriptions and a plot that is amazing.  Here’s the NYT review from October. Aomame makes the girl with the dragon tatoo look like a conformist and weakling.  It was a very long read and didn’t always capture me, but it is still worth the time. It starts out with what seems like two completely unconnected characters and events and then weaves all the connections from there on out.

One of the many longueurs in Haruki Murakami’s stupefying new novel, “1Q84,” sends the book’s heroine, a slender assassin named Aomame, into hiding. To sustain her through this period of isolation she is given an apartment, groceries and the entirety of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.”

For pity’s sake, if you have that kind of spare time, follow her lead. Aomame has the chance to read a book that is long and demanding but well worth the effort. The very thought of Aomame’s situation will pain anyone stuck in the quicksand of “1Q84.” You, sucker, will wade through nearly 1,000 uneventful pages while discovering a Tokyo that has two moons and is controlled by creatures that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. These creatures are called Little People. They are supposed to be very wise, even though the smartest thing they ever say is “Ho ho.”

You can see the Times reviewer was not enthralled.  I was frankly happy to read something not so cookie cutter for a change. So, I guess that’s what’s on my mind these days since I’ve had plenty of bedrest and time on my hands. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Forget “frothy”, Slimy is a better adjective

Posted: January 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, 2012 presidential campaign, lobbyists, Republican politics | Tags: , , , , | 31 Comments

I really never thought we’d have to front page Rick Santorum.  He’s a two term senator from Pennsylvania with more corruption and crazy problems than Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann combined.  Yesterday, TV news was full of reporters following the man around New Hampshire.  I spent a bit of time on twitter trying to get them to ask relevant questions like “Do you regret your association with Jack Abramhoff?”  It took a group of college students to get “man on dog”, sex-obsessed Santorum to get his freak on.  He was heartily booed for suggesting gay marriage would lead to polygamy.  Yes, Santorum’s culture war is probably his hallmark.  That and his battle with Google and the man on dog sex attribution.  Cannonfire has a piece up today on Santorum’s really weird brand of Catholicism.  (Think Mel Gibson.) However, what really has me jumping up and down is the level of corruption that characterized Santorum’s years in the senate.

Santorum’s tenure includes a fake charity, a fake leadership PAC and a level of man on lobbyist coziness that would make Tom Delay blush.  It actually makes me wonder why Santorum isn’t sharing a jail cell with Delay or wasn’t taken down during the Abramhoff scandal. When you Google Santorum, the results should read a slimy mixture of corruption and sanctimonious blather.  Philly News Writer Will Bunch has a laundry list of Santorum’s shocking abuse of public office. It’s enough to make me mourn for the loss of Michelle Bachmann.  She was just plain crazy.  Santorum takes corruption to a whole ‘nother level.  These are only Bunch’s top 5.

1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law — was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called “leadership PAC” created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America’s Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less — and typically far less — than any other “leadership PACs.” What America’s Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum’s then hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Wal-Mart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC’s expenses – paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists – were “unconventional,” at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg “McMansion” with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.

3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines – not all positive – for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy.What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum’s passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum’s efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart’s corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform “out of respect for the Schiavo family”  even as the closed fundraisers went on.

4. Santorum didn’t seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum’s kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash=strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.

5. Washington’s lobbyist culture — Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called “K Street Project,” an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate’s “point man” on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist — at least occasionally and perhaps frequently — to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.

Marcus Stern and Kristina Cooke at Reuters remind us that Santorum was knee deep in the excesses of the K Street Project.  What I wonder is if this information will come out soon enough to stop Santorum’s momentum? Santorum has so many questionable ties to lobbyists that it’s hard to come away from any reading of articles about him not feeling the need for a shower.  It’s not just his senatorial past that is in question, however.  This particular item is from his current antics as a lobbyist.  Santorum has made his millions in the last few years on deals like this.

For example, his million-dollar-plus 2010 income included payments from a lobbying firm, an energy company engaged in controversial “hydrofracking” and a hospital conglomerate that was sued for allegedly defrauding the federal government.

Again, his past is even more fraught with behavior that looks a lot like being a senator for hire. So much for hyper-morality.

But the rubric “K Street Project” came to encompass the entire climate of cozy cooperation between Republicans and lobbyists.

When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, House Majority Leader Tom Delay and others organized regular meetings with lobbyists that reviewed K Street job openings with an eye toward filling them with party loyalists, who would in turn steer support and donations to the members.

By 2001, Sen. Santorum was also holding one-hour breakfast meetings with lobbyists on alternating Tuesday mornings at 8:30 a.m.

In 2004 he denied being involved with Norquist’s effort to staff K Street. But Santorum convened Senate Republicans to discuss the appointment of Democrat Dan Glickman as head the Motion Picture Association, according to Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill.

“Yeah, we had a meeting, and yeah, we talked about making sure that we have fair representation on K Street. I admit that I pay attention to who is hiring, and I think it’s important for leadership to pay attention,” he told the paper at the time.

In 2006, as the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to jail unfolded, Santorum said he was ending the breakfasts in his conference room. However, his staff confirmed to Washington newspapers that they resumed almost immediately, on the same day and at the same time, at a location off the Capitol grounds.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington  named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006.  The 2006 report accuses Santorum of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.” 

Despite a number of denials, there is evidence that Santorum and Abramhoff had met on the infamous Marianas Islands scam.  I wrote about this last March.  It is a horrifying example of modern slavery.  The story includes all kinds of immoralities like forced prostitution and abortions of young girls that were supposedly hired to work in garment factories in this US commonwealth territory  that is not covered by US labor laws.  The Delay Republicans held the associate companies up as beacons of capitalism.  Abramhoff says that he didn’t have any associations with Santorum but Roll Call and other sources show quite the opposite story.

Santorum definitely left the Senate through the revolving door.

Within months of leaving the Senate, Mr. Santorum joined the board of Universal Health Services, where he collected $395,000 in director’s fees and stock options before resigning last year. He also became a consultant to Consol Energy, after years of advocating drilling and extraction policies helpful to the company, a Pennsylvania gas and coal producer. And he consulted for the American Continental Group, a lobbying firm whose clients won earmarks he sponsored.

Its hard to reconcile this level of prostitution with a morality crusader, isn’t it?  But, there it is and if you goggle Santorum’s name and add lobbyist, corruption, K Street or any other number of combinations that go beyond the frothy mix definition, you’ll see the vast documentation.  It’s hard to imagine the tea party diehards getting behind a man with this kind of background.  Even Bill O’Reilly took issue with Santorum’s views on the rights of states to outlaw contraception with Santorum’s odd explanation that contraception put things out of the proper ‘order’.  Every thing about Santorum screams odd and narcissistic.

There’s been a reason that this man has been scraping along the bottom of the Republican presidential wannabe heap for some time.  My only hope is that when he is sent packing, that nearly every politician will want to avoid the stench and that will put an end to Santorum’s lucrative lobbying career as well.  In the mean time,  get ready for a few weeks of  the puppy dog press following Santorum around New Hampshire and South Carolina asking banal questions when they should be shouting  “show us your ill-got money”.  This guy may have had a coal miner grandfather, but he’s a total gold digger now.  What’s worse?  One man and one dog or one Senator and an army of lobbyists?  Evangelical Republicans, you’ve been Rick-Rolled!

I apologize to any earth worms I may have unintentionally insulted by the title of this thread.