At a contentious town hall meeting last week, Rep. David Scott (D-GA) shot back at the protesters who were disrupting his event by accusing them of “hijack[ing]” the gathering. Now, Scott’s district office in Smyrna, GA, has been vandalized with a four-foot swastika painted onto his door. Fox News reported that Capitol Hill police will likely be launching an investigation immediately.
Senator Arlen Specter, (D-Penn.) faced an overwhelmingly hostile crowd on Tuesday, with attendees at a town hall forum challenging him with a host of deeply cynical and occasionally erroneous allegations about the president's health care agenda.
One man threatened the senator with God's wrath. "One day, God's gonna stand before you," he said. "And he's gonna judge you and the rest of your damn cronies up on the Hill, and then you can get your just deserts."
Man, I'm ticked and frustrated at Obama, I'm loading up on ammunition, I'm going to be practicing.
Don't be wasting it on targets. Save it for the administration.
"What if I actually had said that?" he asked. "So what? This is America!"
The Secret Service may investigate a fax sent to a Democratic lawmaker that depicts President Barack Obama as the Joker and warns of “death to all Marxists.”
The black-and-white fax portrays Obama in makeup similar to that worn by actor Heath Ledger in his portrayal of the Joker in last summer’s “The Dark Knight.”
On Obama’s forehead is a communist hammer-and-sickle insignia, and beneath the image is the text: “Death to All Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!”
Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) received the fax and passed it along to U.S. Capitol Police.
Following a tense town hall meeting by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) in Memphis over the weekend, local TV reported that one attendee was packing heat and had been escorted from the room -- which if true, would be a dramatic escalation in the increasingly confrontational health care debate. However, TPMDC has learned that there was not in fact any threat made, nor was it a cause for immediate alarm in its full context.
While one attendee did indeed possess a firearm, he did so in accordance with the state's conceal and carry laws, and was fully cooperative when asked to take it to his car due to a no-guns rule for the meeting.
"The gun issue was handled before the meeting," Shelby County Sheriff's Department spokesman Steve Shular told TPM. The audience was asked at the beginning whether anybody had a gun. One man replied that, yes, he was carrying a gun. He was told to leave it in his car for the meeting, and then did so. An officer followed him to his car, made sure that his permit was in order, and he was then allowed to re-enter the event.
Town hall disruptions around the country have led to some outbreaks of violence. Unions participating in town halls have received death threats. At an event held by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) last week, the threat of violence led her aides to call the police after one attendee dropped a gun.
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But there still is room for compromise there. They could design a new kind of co-op that could provide some real competition.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
ALTER: It could be essentially a public-private option that satisfies enough people to get something through.
So, I don't think liberals should go, you know, public option or bust. There are other alternatives and you have to remember that there are many, many important things in this bill that have become almost non-controversial that two years ago, if you'd been told they're going to-they're going to end discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, they're going to insure another 30 million Americans, we say, "Great, where do we sign up?"
And now, some progressives are-maybe a little bit too wed to the public option. Even though, my favorite, too, but we shouldn't go down with the ship, with the public option.
When I went to work in the Senate, I thought most lobbyists were criminals like the most infamous of them all, Jack Abramoff. But I was wrong.
In those pre-Abramoff days, none of them were that bad. Some of them surely were criminals at heart, but they feared the law too much to break it and there was way too much money to be made perfectly legally to ever risk jail time.I was chief of staff of two Senate committees back then, first Environment and Public Works, then the all-powerful Finance Committee.
Environment and Public Works is an odd mix of jurisdictions, basically protecting the environment and billing highways, courthouses, and order federal buildings. If you wanted to protect wetlands or an endangered species, of if your company poured concrete, your lobbyists desperately needed to see me.
Lobbyists for the biggest construction companies in the country tried to talk their way onto my schedule all the time. And when I moved to the Finance Committee in 1993, every lobbyist in town needed to see me because the committee's jurisdiction is so vast.
The corridor outside my office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building is actually known as "Gucci Gulch," because it's constantly patrolled by lobbyists.
My own sleaziest encounter with a lobbyist occurred in my Finance Committee office. One lobbyist who I didn't know somehow got 15 minutes on my schedule to describe the unbearable suffering AIG was being forced to endure because of some corporate tax provision or other that he wanted to get repealed or amended or something such. I feigned interest, I nodded a lot, maybe even led a hint of sympathy into my eyes and said nothing. If he told his masters that I was anything but noncommittal, he was lying.
The next day, one of our staff rushed into the office. She had just opened an envelope addressed to me and was shaking as she handed it to me.
It was from the AIG lobbyist, a letter thanking me for the meeting, and a check made out to my boss' reelection campaign. I would not even use a sheet of Senate stationery to reply.
Instead, I hand-wrote a very harshly-worded version of, "How dare you?"-and that's cleaning it up-on the lobbyist's letter and sent it back to him with that check. I didn't have to check with my boss, the late New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to know that is what he would want me to do. He was always impervious to the influence of campaign contributions and ran his campaigns on one-tenth the amounts that his successor, Hillary Clinton, raised to win his seat.
There are honorable lobbyists. I dealt with them every day. By "honorable lobbyists," I do not mean only those who do pro bono lobbying for charities or the underpaid lobbyists working for environmental groups. When a giant corporation, let's say Kodak, sends its very high-priced lobbyist to see you, to talk about how Fuji is subverting international trade agreements, you listen, because Kodak is the last manufacturer of film left in the United States, and the single biggest employer in Rochester, New York.
Yes, Kodak's lobbyists are trying to protect corporate profits, but they are also trying to protect American jobs and save Rochester from becoming a ghost town. Only the most zealous Marxist could fail to see the honor in that lobbying campaign.
Good lobbyists tell you something you don't know, like why teaching hospitals need more money for doctor training. They then tell you what they think you should do about it, how to pay for it, and most important, who opposes it and why. They know their opposition is going to be lobbying you too, so they don't say anything that can be proved wrong in your next meeting. And they don't promise their clients that they will always get what they want.
There are not enough Congressional staffers to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of complex issues under federal jurisdiction. Good government needs good lobbyists.
Our defense against the toxic mix of bad lobbyists and campaign cash, it always comes down to the people we vote for.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP. What follows is a clip of Laurence's former show, The West Wing, featuring Alan Alda playing Senator Arnold Vinick, and Patricia Richardson playing Shelia Brooks:)
SHELIA BROOKS: Now these energy guys that are going to be there tonight, obviously they're going to want to hear how you're voting on the energy deregulation bill.
SENATOR VINICK: Well, it depends on what is in it when it comes out of committee.
SHELIA BROOKS: Sends a very bad message to the big contributors if you vote against it.
SENATOR VINICK: Hey, if you can't drink their booze, take their money and then vote against them, you don't belong in this business.(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'DONNELL: Yes, "The West Wing" was a fictional universe, but I would not have written that scene if I never saw senators let lobbyists make their cases, contribute money to their campaigns, and then vote against them.
There is a massive amount of special-interest money from the health care industry sloshing around in the campaign coffer of our senators and Congressmen as they consider health care reform legislation. Let's just hope that enough of them still know how to take the lobbyists' money and vote against them.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) will not be hosting any town hall events this August -- instead, he's making himself available to constituents for one-on-one meetings about health care reform -- and at least part of the reason is this: His offices have received threatening phone calls, including at least one direct threat against his life.
"We had no town hall events scheduled for the August recess anyway, but in light of everything that's happened -- we have received a threatening phone call in the D.C. office, there have been calls to the Raleigh office," said Miller communications director LuAnn Canipe, in an interview with TPM.
"The call to the D.C. office was, 'Miller could lose his life over this,'" said Canipe. "Our staffer took it so seriously, he confirmed what the guy was saying. He said, 'Sir is that a threat?" and at that time our staffer was getting the phone number off caller ID and turning it over to the Capitol Police."
Canipe explained that Miller had no plans for a town hall before and won't be holding any now, due to this event and the examples he's already seem from the around the country: "Our point is, we're not gonna be bullied into having a town hall so it can then be interrupted by the fake grassroots folks."
"We don't want to people to think we're shutting out our constituents," Canipe added.. "We're meeting with them one on one to discuss health care reform."
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"To be real honest with you, I don't know if he was just being aggressive or nervous but he just wanted to put out his position on the issue," Snider recalled in an interview with the Huffington Post. "He said he supported the public option but one that wouldn't affect the current plans of 200 million Americans."
"I told him I didn't understand. And he tried to explain it. He put his position out. He said if we went with a full public option -- which he called a government plan -- it would drive the price down and hurt private companies. I said, 'you mean competition.' And he replied that it would force people off the private plan and onto the government plan."
"That happened twice," Snider concluded. "He was telling me how bad a public option would be and when he was done I said, 'So you don't support a public option.' He would reply, 'That's not what I say.'"
The call lasted roughly ten minutes. In the end, Snider thanked Nelson but made no plans for future discussion.
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The bronze to Brian Stelter of the "New York Times." Front page story Saturday about a, quote, deal in which, as the headline read, voices from above silence a cable TV feud. Problem, Mr. Stelter asks me at least twice last week if there was such a deal, and I told him, on and off the record, there was not. And told I rather obviously would have to be a party to such a deal. And I told him that not only wasn't I, but I had not even been asked to be by my bosses.And he printed it anyway. And I had even written to him that this was merely a misinterpretation of an announcement I made here on June One, that because Bill Reilly at Fox News had abetted the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, he had become too serious to joke about, and I would thus stop doing so, an announcement that would obtain unless and until, of course, I felt like changing the rule again later since this is not the US Constitution here. It's a half baked television news cast and I make all the rules.
Primarily, there is no "deal" between MSNBC and Fox over what we can and cannot cover. This is part of a continuing strategy of blackmail by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, that reaches back to 2004, and has as its goal the cancellation of "Countdown." This stuff has ebbed and flowed for five years, it's part of my daily job to push it back with whichever strategy I think will best work at a given moment. For the last two months I've been employing "News Jujitsu." If you watch tonight and catch the references to Fox and its rogues gallery you will know that the most recent tack has worked, but the fight is endless and there will be reversals in the future, I'm sure.Okay, so let's be clear. Keith is on the record here...there is no truce. If he's lying, he's going to destroy his reputation and take his show down with it at this point.
Ailes himself is tonight quoted as saying he tried to 'broker peace' by restraining his hosts. This is the same Ailes who insisted he would never interfere with what Bill O'Reilly said on the air. Even naked hypocrisy is not too much if Fox can make itself seem victimized, or can muzzle dissent.
But there is no "deal." I would never consent, and, fortunately, MSNBC and NBC News would never ask me to.
Olbermann's Non-Denial and His Good Move.
On his show last night, Keith Olbermann essentially issued a non-denial denial about the GE-MSNBC-Fox story, saying that he himself was "party to no deal" - exactly what he said in the original New York Times article. There's no reason to doubt Olbermann - however, as journalism prof Dan Kennedy suggests (h/t Glenn Greenwald & Jay Rosen), Olbermann's own personal lack of involvement in a "deal" is far less important than the simple fact that GE started trying to give blatant news-content orders to MSNBC's newsroom - orders that may have been followed in places well beyond Olbermann's control.
As to Richard Wolffe I can offer far less insight. I honor Mr. Greenwald's insight into the coverage of GE/NewsCorp talks, and his reporting on Richard's other jobs. I must confess I was caught flat-footed. I do not know what the truth is; my executive producer and I have spent the last two months dealing with other things (see above) but what appears to be the truth here is certainly not what Richard told us about his non-news job.
I am confident his commentary to this point has not been compromised - he has been an insightful analyst and a great friend to this show - but until we can clarify what else he is doing, he will not be appearing with us. I apologize for not being able to prevent this unhappy set of circumstances from developing.
Obama has already provided a legal birth certificate demonstrating that he was born in Hawaii. No one has produced any serious evidence to the contrary. Absent such evidence, it is unreasonable to deny that Obama has met the burden of proof. We know that he was born in Honolulu as surely as we know that Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Ark., or George W. Bush in New Haven, Conn.
The release of the obsolete birth certificate would not “resolve the issue” to those for whom it is not already resolved. They claim without basis that today’s birth certificate is a fake; there is nothing to stop them from claiming without basis that yesterday’s is as well.
The president would gain nothing politically for his trouble. By acknowledging the birthers’ demands, he would lend them a modicum of credibility. By ignoring them, he actually reaps political benefits from their efforts. His critics, even those who are not birthers, end up looking like cranks by association. His supporters use the birthers to paint Obama foes as racist--which is probably unfair even to the birthers, as we argued Tuesday, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective.
In a Commentary article last year, William F. Buckley recounted the way he, Sen. Barry Goldwater and a handful of other top conservatives worked to stigmatize the John Birch Society, whose founder, Robert Welch, maintained, among other things, that President Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist Party.” The Birchers, like the birthers, made respectable conservatives look like kooks, and in preparation for a prospective Goldwater presidential campaign, Buckley and his associates “thought it best to do a little conspiratorial organizing of their own against it.”
They succeeded in “excommunicating” the Birchers. It’s probably impossible to do the same to the birthers, because today the right wing is too vast to mount much of a conspiracy. The birthers are likely to be with us for as long as Obama is president--and because of them, it is more likely that this will be for the next 7½ rather than just 3½ years.
Poll: 28% Of Republican Base Are Birthers.But Huffington Post (which, when in doubt, will always spin things to the extreme) left it like this:
A new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll finds that 77% of Americans believe President Obama was Indeed Born in the United States, with only 11% saying he was not -- but there's no clear verdict among Republicans.
Among Republicans, it's a much weaker plurality of only 42% who say Obama was born in the U.S., with 28% saying he was not, with a very high undecided number of 30%. Among Democrats, the number is 93%-4%, and among independents it's 83%-8%.
New Poll: Less Than Half Of Republicans Believe Obama Was Born In U.S.
Less than half of Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America, a new public opinion poll finds.
Only 42 percent of Republican respondents in a Research 2000 survey, conducted for the liberal website Daily Kos, said they thought Obama was a natural born citizen; 28 percent said they did not believe Obama was born in the United States; 30 percent said they were not sure.
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In an interview with Greg Sargent this afternoon, Klein backtracked and brushed off the criticism. "Look, Lou's his own show, and CNN in general has repeatedly and thoroughly reported on the facts behind this situation."
CNN President Jon Klein wrote an email last night to "Lou Dobbs Tonight" staffers telling them the Obama birth certificate story is "dead," TVNewser reports.
"It seems this story is dead," Klein wrote, "because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef."
He sent the email just before Lou Dobbs went on the air. He included information CNN's political researchers had gotten from the Hawaii Health Department -- information which "seems to definitively answer the question."
I don't think the media has a liberal bias or a conservative bias so much as it has a bias toward overreacting to short-term trends and a tendency toward groupthink.
On Sunday night, Dr. David McKalip forwarded to fellow members of a Google listserv affiliated with the Tea Party movement the image below.
Above it, he wrote: "Funny stuff."
U.S. officials believe Saad bin Laden — a son of Osama bin Laden — has been killed by an American missile in Pakistan.
Saad bin Laden reportedly spent years under house arrest in Iran before traveling last year to Pakistan, according to former National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell.
It's believed he was killed by Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. Predator drone sometime this year.
A senior U.S. counterterrorism official tells NPR that without a body to conduct DNA tests on, it's hard to be completely sure. But he characterized U.S. spy agencies as being "80 to 85 percent" certain that Saad bin Laden is dead.
The U.S. counterterrorism official says Saad bin Laden wasn't important enough to target personally — that he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time."
He was active in al-Qaida, but was not a major player, the official said. He was believed to be in his late 20s.
"We make a big deal out of him because of his last name," the official added.
It's not known whether Saad bin Laden was anywhere near his father when he died.
Saad was believed to have been heavily responsible for the bombing of a Tunisian synagogue on April 11, 2002, which killed 19.[1]
The following year, there were disputed claims of his capture by Pakistan in March,[2] though these proved false, and he was implicated in the May 12th suicide bombing in Riyadh, and the Morocco bombing four days later.
Saad accompanied his father on his exile to Sudan from 1991-96, and followed him to Afghanistan after that. He is believed to be married to a woman from Yemen. Iran has stated that a number of al-Qaeda leaders and members are in their custody, possibly including the son of Osama bin Laden, Saad bin Laden.[3][4]
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Now that bailed-out banks are reporting record-breaking profits, the U.S. taxpayer, who bought into these institutions at bottom-barrel prices, could wind up on the winning end of a nice profit. That's what happens, after all, when you buy low and sell high.
When Congress bailed out Wall Street, it required banks to give warrants to the treasury. That way, if the market turned around and a bank's stock rose, the taxpayer could profit. Indeed, the notion that the taxpayer might profit from the bailout was floated by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
The Congressional Oversight Panel, however, looked into the early sales of warrants and found earlier this month that Treasury would only get about 66 percent of the market value for the warrants. And it was doing so in private negotiations with the banks.
A group of Democrats in Congress want to end that practice. A bill introduced by Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio) would require the Treasury to sell warrants in a public auction and do so in a transparent way. On Wednesday, the Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations holds a hearing on the sale of warrants, focusing on protecting profits for the taxpayer.
Heading into a critical period in the debate over health-care reform, public approval of President Obama's stewardship on the issue has dropped below the 50 percent threshold for the first time, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Obama's approval ratings on other front-burner issues, such as the economy and the federal budget deficit, have also slipped over the summer, as rising concern about spending and continuing worries about the economy combine to challenge his administration. Barely more than half approve of the way he is handling unemployment, which now tops 10 percent in 15 states and the District.
On health care, the poll, conducted by telephone Wednesday through Saturday, found that a majority of Americans (54 percent) approve of the outlines of the legislation now heading toward floor action. The measure would institute new individual and employer insurance mandates and create a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. Its costs would be paid in part through new taxes on high-income earners.
The president's overall approval rating remains higher than his marks on particular domestic issues, with 59 percent giving him positive reviews and 37 percent disapproving. But this is the first time in his presidency that Obama has fallen under 60 percent in Post-ABC polling, and the rating is six percentage points lower than it was a month ago.
Since April, approval of Obama's handling of health care has dropped from 57 percent to 49 percent, with disapproval rising from 29 percent to 44 percent. Obama still maintains a large advantage over congressional Republicans in terms of public trust on the issue, even as the GOP has closed the gap.
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This could have been different, I kept thinking all day. These hearings didn't have to go this way. The instant Sen. Jeff Sessions used his second round of questioning to go back to the well of the "Wise Latina" issue, probing yet again at Sonia Sotomayor's alleged bias and wise Latina prejudice, it was perfectly clear that Senate Republicans wanted this hearing to be all about race and that her single, mangled half-sentence was the linchpin of their strategy. There were lines of people waiting patiently to get into these hearings, even if just for a few moments, and what was striking about it is that so many of them were very young, so many were women, and so many were of different races and colors. America's future was waiting in line to get a glimpse of a hearing at which the woman who will become this country's first Hispanic justice was repeatedly called out as someone with a race problem.
I don't think this is all posturing. Listening to Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn speak, it's clear that their anxieties about a changing America are real. Still, by making the whole case against her with a long, loopy line between her "wise Latina" speech and her panel decision in the Ricci case, they chose to turn this historic hearing into a crabbed and bitter conversation about the impact of race on America.
Remember that scene in Annie Hall where the Alvy and Annie are waiting in line at the movie and Alvy is going nuts listening to the pontificating blowhard going on about Marshall McLuhan and then Alvy pulls McLuhan himself out from behind the movie poster to tell the guy he's an idiot. Not quite identical and Sotomayor could have driven the point a bit harder but Judge Sotomayor managed to pull off something like that.
I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no effect on her approach to judging. We’d both like to see more women on the courts.