And So It Goes.

Kurt Vonnegut would not have been surprised but I am amazed. After the debacle of Joe Barton apologizing to BP for Obama's "shakedown" to create a $20 billion escrow account, the entire conservative blogosphere came to Barton's defense. Even after Tan Man Boehner threatened Barton with the loss of his committee seat, we see Newt Gingrich and other conservatives appear on Fox News and call Barton courageous. This is like the conservative support of the South Carolina congressmen who yelled "You Lie" at the State of the Union address. The Wall Street Journal warned that this fund set a precedent and wanted the government to pursue BP through legal means. And the capo di tutti, Rush Limbaugh called this "organized crime". Forget for a moment, that BP actually consulted the Republican leadership about this idea before they brought it up with Obama and the leadership approved. It's not like there is a wall between the corporate world and the Republican party.

The best defense of BP was Freedomworks' own Dick Armey, who said that the White House acted unconstitutionally in "forcing BP" to create the escrow account. This is rich coming from someone whose President enthusiasically embraced the doctrine of the unitary executive as the rationale for almost total power. Just days earlier Armey, head teabagger, told teabagger candidates to hide their affiliation because people think there are kooks. There is a rich irony here. Teabbaggers imitate American colonists who protested the East India Tea Company, while coming to the defense of British Petroleum. It's no mistake because Freedomworks enjoys the financial support of BP and Koch Industries, America's largest private oil company. Part of their work is to lobby for the lifting of all bans on offshore drilling.

(P.S. There were between 85-95 corporate agreements similar to the Escrow Fund during George W's administration. Remember Chevron agreeing to create a fund when they were caught violating the Iraq embargo? And the list goes on.)

The Baked Alaskan gave a full-throated defense of corporations claiming that support for corporations was the "American way". The absolute brazen support of corporations at this time is amazing. David Broder woke up from his coma long enough to suggest that while President Obama is mired in the Gulf crisis, he should look over his shoulder at the American corporations sitting on over $1 trillion that could be invested in the economy right now. What Broder didn't report is that Republican Senate leadership told the corporations to hold back until after the elections to move on this.

The Corporate Crime Reporter noted yesterday that EPA investigators have been trying to get BP prosecuted since 2005 because of safety violations, oil spills in Alaska and other problems but were stopped because BP provides 85% of the fuel for our military in Iraq.

So Washington pundits keep criticising Obama's Oval Office speech, saying the magic has worn off--probably for them. Darkness at Noonan called Obama a snake-bitten President.

I have to check myself with the flood of criticism from the right and the left and see whether any of this is really taking hold in the public. Remember the healthcare debate and all Americans opposed it except when the specific provisions of the bill were polled, which showed overwhelming support for them? The same is appearing now with Obama's proposals on the Gulf crisis.

Support for creating a fund of billions of dollars to compensate workers and businesses that have been affected. 82% Approve.
Support for increasing the amount of federal regulation of the oil industry. 68% approve
Support for changing the law so there is no limit to the amount of money BP can pay: 63% approve
Support for suspending all new drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and other offshore sites for six months. 58% approve
Support for filing criminal charges against BP. 53% approve

(CNN poll)
In addition over 70% support developing alternative sources of energy and nearly the same percent believe this will create more jobs.

If you notice,my posts this year have already surpassed the entire volume of last year. the reason is that I want to keep up the same rate as GOP Senate filibusters, which are now looking to top all of last year.

President Obama's Saturday morning address to the nation focused on Republican efforts--so far successful--in filibustering a new Jobs bill, that includes vital payments to state governments to save the jobs of teachers and law enforcement officers, extends unemployment benefits and also corrects the Medicare payments to doctors. Last year the Republican tactics were aimed at stalling the healthcare bill. This year it's flat out to kill aid to states and the unemployed. President Obama merely is asking for a vote on the bill. So far this has 57 votes. Nelson and Joe Lieberman (I-Knesset) are opposed.

I will return to the great deficit debate in a later post because this is where things will really get nasty. But for now I am absolutely astonished that Republicans can be so raw in acting against the public good. You really would have to look at the war against FDR in his first term to find such a precedent. I wish the opposition to Obama was all racially motivated. At least George Wallace was a populist racist. This is a total war by the wealthy and corporations to render us an undeveloped country. The final looting of the country.

I leave you with the true words that someone who voted four times for FDR and was "proud of it" said to me. President Ronald Reagan said to me," Remember large corporations are generally not very patriotic." You might recall this was when Pepsi and Archer-Midlands were actively trying to sabotage his policy toward the Soviet Union. The sentiment still stands.

I think I'll take the day off and read Michael Lux The Progressive Revolution: How The Best in America Came To Be (Wiley, 2009). Lux spends a great deal of his book on the progressive responses to corporate control of America.

The Lair of the White Worm*

*A Ken Russell movie you can miss.

Heard Howard Dean on the Young Turks. Howard Dean said that the Senate Health bill was basically written by two former employees of Wellpoint and United Health. He still is for it but suggests a Medicare buy-in for people 55 or older, since we are the high price people in health care. He believes the compromise with the Republicans could be to drop the mandates because that is the only part that is unpopular with the American people. On the other hand,that would not satisfy the insurance companies who desparately need these new customers. I think it might be clever if Obama dropped the mandates and forced the Republicans to put them back in the bill because they would have to answer to their insurance funders.

A spokeswoman for the Commonwealth Fund said the full implications of their report are not all the dire cost escalations which I quoted yesterday but rather that Americans, who still had health insurance, would see a rapid deterioration in the care they receive. She said doing nothing would not maintain the status quo as Republicans argue but start the steady decline in the American healthcare system.

Frank Luntz must feel the most important person in Washington today. How would you like to be a writer and everyone in town reads from your script. "Scrap the bill", "Start Over Again","take commonsense measures","the American people only support incremental change" were repeated over and over again from Republicans both in the Health Care Summit and on the television stations all weekend. All of these are verbatim quotes from his memo. I'm waiting for a Republican to suddenly talk for him or herself. Can you imagine being a Senator having to use talking points written by a consultant for everything?

A constituent of John McCain's wrote a letter to an Arizona newspaper questioning where the man's integrity went. The writer pointed to McCain's past support for sensible immigration reform, cap and trade legislation to combat global climate change,a debt commission and health care reform. And all these positions have been dramatically reversed because he faces a primary challenger who is bonkers. The writer asks why the 72-year old McCain doesn't stick to his principles and if he loses, do a Joe Lieberman and run as an independent. Good question because there are no strong Democratic candidates for the seat and John can't very well turn back again once he defeated his rightwing challenger and convince people he really doesn't believe what he says now.

I've noticed that since John McCain appears on the Sunday Talk Shows every week since he lost to President Obama that now no one reports anymore what he says. This is the Orrin Hatch syndrome. Hatch for years appeared on Meet the Press and was so convinced all American knew who he was that he ran for the Republican presidential nomination only to discover no one knew who he was or at least listened to anything he had to say.

Former Freedom House board member Dick Ravitch has assumed the position as the only mature adult in Albany with the David Patterson scandal forcing the Governor to announce he was not running again. Ross Douhot, the new ersatz conservative New York Times columnist, has embraced another former Freedom House board member Mitch Daniels as his candidate for President since Mitt Romney can't make anyone like him. Mitch, the former head of the OMB, has vowed that states must radically reduce spending in the next few years. His message is sour and his personality is perfect for Indiana but nowhere else. Maybe he can get another Freedom House trustee Peggy Noonan to write his speeches for him.

The unemployed are forming a union. One of their first acts is to call for Jim Bunning to be thrown out of the Baseball Hall of Fame for his one-man stunt to block the continuation of unemployment compensation. His stunt also means a layoff today of thousands of transit workers around the country and a cut in doctors' fees for Medicare by over 20%. Nice going Jim. By the way, Sandy Koufax has been acting as spring training pitching coach for the New York Mets.

Pat Robertson said God was even more upset with Chile than Haiti because of the prosecution of Augusto Pincohet. But commentators point out that Chile's good government has mitigated that country's disaster as contrasted with Haiti poor government performance. So good government may be the answer to counter God's wrath. Maybe the United States could learn that. I can see this becoming part of the Good Governance program for USAID. Who knows it may actually persuade some countries.

Republican talking heads say the healthcare bill is unpopular with the American people. Actually, every point on the Obama 11-page plan had a majority support except for mandates. If anything,if you bury deep into the polling data, it shows that the American people do not believe the health reform bills go far enough. The so-called "public option" has overwhelming support in both red and blue states and it's the only element left out of the Senate bill.

MENTAL TEST: Over the next few years, jot down names of Republican talking heads, commentators and op-ed writers for potential names of people who would serve in another Republican administration. As Ronald Reagan said, "Personnel is policy." Just do this and review the list and I am sure you will be horrified.

Whether you agree with Paul Krugman or not, it was embarassing to see him as a guest on one of the Sunday talk shows where all they talked about was the replacement of the White House social secretary. When he interrupted to talk about the growing number of unemployed, Sam Donaldson pipe up,"Welcome to Washington, Paul." This isn't Stoogeland for nothing.

I'm getting a little fed up with the conservatives alleged reverence for Ronald Reagan. Almost every conservative that has been quoted by the press as wanting to go back to the days of the Big Ron were part of the gang of conservatives who turned against him during his second term. Later these same characters turned against George H.W. Bush and went over to Ross Perot. This stuff also applies to conservative attacks on Ron Reagan, Jr. Big Ron's problem with Little Ron was around the issue of ballet. However, the adopted son Michael now dons his father's political mantle and attacks young Ron when Michael only reconciled with his father when he was stricken with Alzheimer. What a bunch of opportunists.

In Your Guts, You Know They're Nuts

The CPAC frolics which will culminate in Rush Limbaugh receiving an award for preserving the Constitution gave me flashbacks to the last real conservative crack-up I first remember. William F. Buckley,Jr. gentrified conservatism by courageously at that time exiling the John Birch Society, the KKK and the isolationism of the American First Movement. It's hard to believe that the man who was to put us under United Nations rule at that time and was an appeaser was none other than Dwight David Eisenhower. Perhaps, it's no mistake that the whole Eisenhower family backed Barack Obama--they have long memories.

Barry Goldwater won the hearts and minds of conservatives with his orneriness and blunt speaking. But, dear Barry was also a founding member of the NAACP in Arizona and was more a libertarian than the social conservatives of today. Yet the monumental landslide loss in 1964 should have indicated the limits of the appeal of unvarnished conservatism to the public.

Today, Ronald Reagan would be hard-pressed to win the leadership of the GOP because as Governor of California he did raise taxes and vote for abortion rights, something conveniently forgotten in the hagiography of his Presidency.

Conservatives and the party they finally seized are faced with the same swill of neo-confederates, white supremacists and separatists that plagued them in the 1950s. It's hard to imagine today's situation where the "birthers" actually seek out approval of Pravda as they do.
The Senator from the state with the most secessionist groups and a high level of white supremacist organizations--DeMint from South Carolina--claims the enemy is the Left--presumably the 68.5 million voters for Barack Obama.

Since the election, almost all the conservative and Republican pundits have been chanting the litany that America is a center-right country. This was echoed again yesterday at CPAC when speakers claimed the majority backed their views. This assumes that ideology will always trump competence, which the last Administration sadly lacked. And curiously, these same people studiously ignore the American people's support of the president's economic programs and his huge popularity as opposed to the conservative Republican leadership in Congress. The politically astute would normally pause and try to analyze this discrepancy.

The blatant appeals to racism and nationalism by the McCain campaign thankfully failed but they have continued through the first weeks of the Obama Administration. We should recall that for the first time in my life a presidential candidate campaigned against the "socialism" of his rival, something the average voter didn't quite perceive. One would have to assume by the results of the last election that "socialism" won, since it was put up to a popular vote.

If you want to drill down and find out where the most noxious rumors about Obama come from, you should examine the hate websites. Last week the Southern Poverty Law Center posted an interactive map of hate groups in the United States. Now there are some 926 such groups ranging from the Nazis to the Nation of Islam, almost a 50% increase since 2000. They usually generate some of the Obama rumors that then get filtered into more conservative websites like the Free Republic and become somewhat accepted within that political culture.

If some adult figures don't step in and call a halt to this courting of the most noxious types in our society,so-called conservatism will become a seditious affair. So far, no respectable leader has called these groups out on their nonsense and tried to steer the debate back to Planet Earth. And, frankly, I believe it is because the Republican leaders now want to see the political possibilities in this route. The same crowd that generated the whole Clinton scandals believe this type of behavior will pay off dividends in the future. In fact, those who believe the "birthers" are stark raving bonkers believe " we should create innuendo after innuendo so that Obama's credibility is damaged." And, yes, it is as cynical as that.

The most curious new addition to the conservative enemy list is FDR. This would be understandable to the geriatric set but makes no sense to Generation X'ers. The embrace of attacks on FDR--which I find disconcerting and irrevelant--are aimed at preserving the Bush entitlements to the rich and corporations. Grass-roots conservatives are not invoking the demons from the FDR period but more the fiscal conservatives linked to Wall Street and the corporate media. Since both New Gingrich and Ronald Reagan once embraced FDR, it's hard to find where the traction is among younger types. For the rich Republicans the anti-FDR scree is a call to dismantle social security and Medicaid--a position not held by the majority or even a significant minority of Americans.

As Glenn Beck lamented, "America is addicted to Government." or as Michelle Bachman said, "What would our founders think of taxation with representation"--you can't make that up. Where is the next William F.Buckley, Jr. when the conservatives need him?