Category: Politics As Usual

Virtually Speaking Sunday

~ susie

Sunday, Jan 29 | 9 pm eastern | 6 pm pacific | digby and Stuart Zechman discuss developments of the week, highlighting what’s been neglected or misrepresented on the Sunday morning broadcasts, drawing from their work of the prior week and the wickedly funny Bobblespeak Translations. Featuring CoT’s the ‘Most Ridiculous Moment’ from the Sunday morning talk shows. Follow @digby56 @bobblespeak @Stuart_Zechman. Listen live and later on BTR

Darcy Burner

~ susie

You could donate to Darcy’s congressional campaign and not hate yourself a year from now:

Why do lobbyists have so much influence? Lots of people give campaign contributions; what is it that lobbyists are doing differently? Right now, most of the policy work in Congress is done by staff whose average age is 26, and who are typically covering 4-6 major policy areas each. If they’re lucky, they might really understand one of those policy areas. So when a lobbyist walks in and says, “Ok, here’s what you need to know about this bill your boss has to vote on tomorrow, here’s how your boss should vote, and here are your talking points,” and that’s the only information they’re given, of course the lobbyist will usually succeed.

It wasn’t always this way: there used to be internal think tanks in the House where members would pool their resources to hire deep experts in some topic area. There were, for example, experts on nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. So if a member of Congress wanted to know how big a threat Iran’s nuclear program is, or the impact of some piece of legislation with sanctions, there were deep experts they could consult who were part of their team. Gingrich banned shared funding of staff and canned those expert staffers in order to consolidate power, and as a consequence members have to rely on lobbyists, leadership, or outside organizations like the Heritage Foundation for the information they need. That’s totally fixable – and it could conceivably be fixed in the first week of a new Congress.

Obama’s new populism

~ susie

Taibbi wonders if it’s real. Well, of course it’s not “real” – it’s a campaign strategy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make him to follow through on it:

If as SEC enforcement chief Bob Khuzami has not investigated the vast corruption involved with the creation of mortgage backed securities (it’s called “securitization” – it should be policed by the SECURITIES and exchange commission), then why would he start now? Even leaving out his potential culpability from his Deutsche days, Khuzami has been part of the problem, if anything.

I would feel better about a committee that not only didn’t have a White House flack and a failed/compromised SEC enforcement chief sitting on it, but had nobody with any ties to Wall Street at all. The argument for them would be that we need someone with expertise on the committee, but I’m not buying it. I’d rather see Schneiderman hole up in an abandoned warehouse with ten vice detectives from someplace like Detroit or Miami. And Charles Martin Smith, if they can get him.

Seriously: despite what people think, the crimes we’re dealing with are not terribly complicated, and any veteran investigator would grasp the basic concept – taking worthless crap and selling it as high-end merchandise – within ten minutes. The most important element contributing to the success of a committee like this is a locked room full of clean hands. And Breuer and Khuzami are not a good start.

But it’s too early to say what is going on. Everything that I’ve heard about Schneiderman in the last year leads me to believe that he’s the genuine article. I haven’t heard a single thing suggesting otherwise. But there are certainly a lot of curious elements here. For one thing, as Yves Smith points out, Schneiderman really isn’t getting much extra authority by taking this post. As New York AG he could already have taken this investigation anywhere he wanted:

It’s clear what the Administration is getting from getting Schneiderman aligned with them. It is much less clear why Schneiderman is signing up. He can investigate and prosecute NOW. He has subpoena powers, staff, and the Martin Act. He doesn’t need to join a Federal committee to get permission to do his job. And this is true for ALL the others agencies represented on this committee. They have investigative and enforcement powers they have chosen not to use. So we are supposed to believe that a group, ex Schneiderman, that has been remarkably complacent, will suddenly get religion on the mortgage front because they are all in a room and Schneiderman is a co-chair?

One thing we do know: Obama’s decision to tap Schneiderman publicly, and dump Geithner, and whisper about a millionaire’s tax, signals a shift in its public attitude toward the Wall Street corruption issue. The administration is clearly listening to the Occupy movement. Whether it’s now acting on their complaints, or just trying to look like it’s doing something, is another question. It’s way too early to tell. But it’s certainly very interesting.

Protest

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

There’s no room for humor in the authoritarian mind:

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”

Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote.

Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard.

Yep

~ susie

What Avedon said:

Jay Ackroyd and McJoan mostly talked about Republicans on Virtually Speaking Sundays, and Digby did the same on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. It was entertaining, but I think people spend too much time talking about the Republicans, and I’m a bit annoyed by the effort involved in, say, unpacking Ron Paul, worthy effort though it may be, when there is the much larger issue of restoring liberalism at stake. Talking about Ron Paul’s connections to the Koch brothers is all very well, but if you’re ignoring the Democratic Party’s own ties to some of the most right-wing funders in America, you are missing the larger point, which is that our entire political apparatus has been hijacked by these people.

Electing Democrats no longer means building and promoting liberal policies, it just means we don’t fight as hard to do it because we’re supposed to be protecting and defending Democrats – even Democrats whose “strategy”, apparently, is to sabotage their own party. But if the Democratic leadership is manifestly unliberal, as it certainly is, why would we want to defend them? What is the point of electing Democrats whose sole purpose is to help the Republicans slip their own hideously right-wing policies by us without our fighting back?

Remember, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security, but he failed, and he failed because people – with liberals leading the charge – fought back, to the point where even registered Republicans realized what was going on and called their GOP Congresscreeps and let them know they’d never get another vote from them if they signed on to this outrage. Now Obama is trying to wreck Social Security, and where are those people? Well, they’re not telling people to call their Congressmen, because they are still too busy telling us how awful the Republicans are, as if only the Republicans were doing anything outrageous.