Clarence Thomas Thinks Rules Are For Other People. Supreme Court justices are appointed for life and are not subject to the whims of electoral politics. This is so they can make their decisions on the law and what is right, not on what would get them re-elected (as many politicians do). But that does not mean there are rules they must abide by just like all other public officials or government servants. One of those rules regards financial disclosure. This is so the public can be sure they are not being paid off to make certain decisions. And these disclosure rules extend to spouses of government officials. That prevents someone from funneling payoffs through the spouse to avoid financial disclosure. But it looks like Justice Clarence Thomas thinks that the financial disclosure rules are for other people, and he has decided that he'll only report what he wants to report. The government watchdog group Common Cause is reporting that Thomas' wife earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation between 2003 and 2007.
Link to original post. Going After Gore, by Evgenia Peretz: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com. Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, arrive in Nashville on June 15, 1999, the day before Gore announced his presidential candidacy. John Russell/AP Images. As he was running for president, Al Gore said he'd invented the Internet; announced that he had personally discovered Love Canal, the most infamous toxic-waste site in the country; and bragged that he and Tipper had been the sole inspiration for the golden couple in Erich Segal's best-selling novel Love Story (made into a hit movie with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal).
He also invented the dog, joked David Letterman, and gave mankind fire. Could such an obviously intelligent man have been so megalomaniacal and self-deluded to have actually said such things? Well, that's what the news media told us, anyway. And on top of his supposed pomposity and elitism, he was a calculating dork: unable to get dressed in the morning without the advice of a prominent feminist (Naomi Wolf). What happened to Gore? How did this happen? The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved With Euros. Gabrielle Giffords and the rightwing hate machine (on the bogus equivalence between right/left extremism) January 9, 2011 by Peter · Reaction to the horrific Arizona shootings, where six people were slaughtered including a 9-year-old girl, quickly congealed along clear-cut lines: a) The left blamed the right, pointing to violent imagery and language from Sarah Palin to the Tea Party. b) The right furiously denied blame, with some trying to pin the shooting on the left. c) Among public officials, pundits and press, the common impulse was to draw the typical false equivalence between rhetoric on the right and left.
At least one person was not buying it: “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. Dupnik added: We do not yet know whether the Arizona massacre was directly fueled by rightwing rhetoric. UPDATE: An essential post from Melissa McEwan:
Matt Taibbi: The Crying Shame of John Boehner | Rolling Stone Politics. Frum, Cocktail Parties, and the Threat of Doubt. Amid the buzz over David Frum’s recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute, some folks have linked back to this old post on the now-hoary trope that heterodox conservatives are simply angling for invitations to the fabled Georgetown Cocktail Parties. There’s a certain irony here in that Frum himself is no stranger to attacking the motives of deviationist conservatives.
Just a few years back he was suggesting that paleoconservative opponents of the war in Iraq had progressed from”hating their party and their president” to “hating their country.” And I’m not sure this quite counts as a pattern, but it’s interesting to me to note that Andrew Sullivan, similarly derided as an apostate for his increasingly harsh criticism of the current state of the conservative movement, was back then in very much the same business, denouncing those he regarded as insufficiently fervent about the war on terror as a “fifth column”. I doubt this is accidental.
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire by Tom Engelhardt and Alfred W. McCoy. By Tom Engelhardt and Alfred W. McCoy Recently by Tom Engelhardt: The United States of Fear Trying to play down the significance of an ongoing WikiLeaks dump of more than 250,000 State Department documents, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently offered the following bit of Washington wisdom: "The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it's in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets...
[S]ome governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. Now, wisdom like that certainly sounds sober; it’s definitely what passes for hardheaded geopolitical realism in our nation’s capital; and it's true, Gates is not the first top American official to call the U.S. The once shiny badge of the "global sheriff" has lost its gleam and, in Dodge City, ever fewer are paying the sort of attention that Washington believes is its due.
By Alfred W. The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama. On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green.
Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small. The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. Why Do Americans Keep Getting Suckered By Right-Wing Lies? November 21, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Ideas don’t happen on their own. Throughout history ideas need patrons.” —Matt Kibbe, president of Freedom-Works, a tea party advocacy group, quoted in Jane Mayer’s piece on the Koch brothers in The New Yorker.
Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. Unless and until progressives change the mind sets of the tens of millions of people who believe right-wing mythology, who never read the New York Times or listen to NPR, who never watch any TV news other than Fox, future elections will have disappointing results for progressives regardless of who is in the White House. Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have limits to their ability to de-program those who have been indoctrinated by conservative orthodoxy. Changing minds is more of an art than a science. Since Obama’s election, many pundits have quoted Franklin D. The Big Lie - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan. It seems to me that the last year or so in America's political culture has represented the triumph of untruth.
And the untruth was propagated by a deliberate, simple and systemic campaign to kill Obama's presidency in its crib. Emergency measures in a near-unprecedented economic collapse - the bank bailout, the auto-bailout, the stimulus - were described by the right as ideological moves of choice, when they were, in fact, pragmatic moves of necessity. The increasingly effective isolation of Iran's regime - and destruction of its legitimacy from within - was portrayed as a function of Obama's weakness, rather than his strength.
The health insurance reform - almost identical to Romney's, to the right of the Clintons in 1993, costed to reduce the deficit, without a public option, and with millions more customers for the insurance and drug companies - was turned into a socialist government take-over. Every one of these moves could be criticized in many ways. Where does one start? Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party | Rolling Stone Politics. Good TARP News Doesn't Fit; Media Are Flummoxed : It's All Politics. Hide captionA year ago, TARP was a clear villain — as when this protester appeared on Capitol Hill when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was preparing to testify. Many in the news media haven't caught up with the more recent better news about the program.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images What do we do with the end of TARP? And what do we do with the news that TARP will not have cost anything like the $700 billion we thought it would? What if, in the end, the Troubled Asset Relief Program so controversial at birth and vilified throughout its two years of life turns out to have turned a profit for the government and the taxpayer? We — most of the news media this is — simply don't know what to do with this news.
The suggestion that TARP did not blow a hole in the federal budget potentially blows a hole in some other presumptions as well. Still, the expiration of the program as Sunday turned to Monday passed largely unremarked. And narratives matter. There you have it.