Fox News Teabagging Coverage Cited By Rachel Maddow

Fox News Teabagging Coverage Cited By Rachel Maddow
Teabagging is sweeping the nation. Rachel Maddow did a report on this new, conservative, right wing phenomenon on her show, last night, in a segment that began with the chyron “InsaniTea”. She summarized the high points of Fox News’s plethora of coverage including Neil Cavuto saying "we're all over it" (eww) and Griff Jenkins (sporting colonial hat) reading the movement's admonition to “teabag the White House.” (Lots of cajones needed for a building that size; but today's conservatives are muy macho!) Maddow’s coverage was quite informative. While she said that the movement’s organizers can’t be held responsible for who shows up, there is a great deal of interest in the white supremacist and militia community. (Fans of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, or leftist “plants?”) She said that Republican Senator David (diaper) Vitter wants a law honoring April 15th as a national tea party day. But I thought that Ana Marie Cox’s comment was just so right – “who wouldn’t want to teabag John McCain?”

Video at link

Dick Morris Lies About Barney Frank and Fannie Mae

Dick Morris Lies About Barney Frank and Fannie Mae
Dick Morris falsely claimed that "in the 2000s, when Bush proposed measures to rein in Fannie Mae, Barney Frank killed them." In fact, for much of the 2000s, Frank had no power to "kill[] ... measures" -- Republicans controlled the House, and Frank sponsored a bill to enhance oversight of Fannie and Freddie soon after Democrats took over the House in 2007.

Media falsely claim Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did not answer question asking if he bore any responsibility for financial crisis

Media falsely claim Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did not answer question asking if he bore any responsibility for financial crisis
Several media figures falsely claimed Barney Frank did not answer a student's question asking how much responsibility he bore for the financial crisis. In fact, Frank did provide a substantive response to the question.

During the April 8 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough falsely claimed, repeatedly, that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) would not give an answer to a student's question: "[H]ow much, if any, responsibility do you think you have" for the financial crisis? Similarly, on the April 8 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy falsely claimed Frank "never answered" the student's question, and on the April 7 edition of his Fox News television program, Sean Hannity asserted that Frank "had a little trouble answering a very simple question last night." Contrary to their claims, Frank did provide a substantive response, which none of them mentioned or aired.

Scarborough, Doocy, and Hannity all played clips of the exchange between Frank and a student at an event at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. But none of them noted that Frank said, "The answer is, yes, I do take responsibility for something," or that he later added that after filing "a bill in 2006 when I was still in the minority to say that hedge funds should be registered," in 2007, he "was approached by people who said, 'No. No. You can't do too much regulation,' and I backed off. I wish I hadn't." Frank also noted that he did, in fact, work on legislation to deal with mortgage lending, stating that in 2007 his committee passed restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and on subprime lending.

How Senator Chris Dodd Can Save Himself and Help America

Chris Dodd: Scourge or Casualty of Wall Street?
Democratic Senator Chris Dodd is in deep trouble. According to Stuart Rothenberg, Dodd is the most vulnerable Senator up for re-election in 2010 - despite the fact that he's coasted to election easily in this deep blue state since his first Senate run in 1980.

A March Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters showed only 33% of voters approve of the job Dodd is doing, while 58% disapprove. He trailed his likely Republican opponent, Rob Simmons by double digits.

Dodd's reputation has been sullied in the financial collapse. Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he received special treatment from lender Countrywide Financial (and was designated as a "friend of Angelo"). Countrywide, founded by Angelo Mozilo, was a leading peddler of the toxic loans that poisoned the financial system - particularly the subprime "Ninja loans" - mortgages to applicants with no income, no job and no hope.

As Chair, Dodd also was thrown under the bus by Treasury officials in the AIG bonus brouhaha, finally admitting that he had stripped the provision that would have limited the bonuses of AIG execs from the stimulus bill. Worse, Dodd's wife turned out to be on the board of directors of IPC Holdings, a Bermuda based insurance company controlled by AIG.

Very deep trouble.

So, why not turn the lemons into lemonade? As Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd could make himself into the source of the solution, not part of the problem. We need a Pecora Commission - a grand inquest into the roots of the financial crisis, modeled after the investigation led by Ferdinand Pecora in the 1930s. But the Pecora wasn't running an independent commission. He was Chief Counsel for the investigation of the Senate Banking Committee.

Dodd would render the country - and possibly his own political fortunes - remarkable service if he decided to lead a similar investigation into the current collapse. Subpoena the records of Countrywide and others and expose the systematic fraud and malpractice that went on. Call in the heads of Citibank and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and detail how they abandoned all prudence in pursuit of millions in private profits. Lay out for Americans the conflicts of interest that led the rating companies to go with the flow, the ideological blinders that allowed the regulators and Federal Reserve to overlook the gambling going on in the casino. Expose the banking lobbies and deregulation that spawned the shadow banking system.

Serious hearings on the roots of the collapse are essential if we are to achieve fundamental reform and restructuring of finance. Explosive hearings could warn the Obama administration off its unworkable plans to enlist hedge funds in the effort to prop up the zombie banks.

By making himself the scourge of Wall Street rather than its servitor, by championing reform in public rather than dealing in Senate cloakrooms, Senator Dodd would not only create a proud legacy, he might also be revive his own political fortunes. Chris Dodd, driving the change that we need. Sounds like a plan.

Will New Food Safety Bills Really Outlaw Backyard Gardening

Will New Food Safety Bills Really Outlaw Backyard Gardening By Ari LeVaux,
My inbox has been pummeled in recent weeks by a barrage of emails warning me of the evils of HR 875, a bill currently working its way through Congress. Sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 was one of several bills introduced in the wake of the peanut butter-borne salmonella outbreak. Each of these bills ostensibly seeks to improve food safety with increased regulation.

Critics, paranoid and level-headed alike, point to the disproportionate burden that increased regulation places on small farmers, and many wonder if the banner of food safety is being used as a Trojan horse to create a more favorable business climate for corporate agriculture.

"If [HR 875] passes, say goodbye to organic produce, your Local Farmer's market and very possibly, the GARDEN IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD!!!!!" announced one email."

Another warned that HR 875 would result in "...criminalization of seed banking, prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers."

And of course, no serious foodie conspiracy theory would be complete without Monsanto as the architect: "DeLauro's husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto!" claim nearly all of these emails.

Stanley Greenberg is indeed the CEO of a polling firm that did, indeed, contract with Monsanto. But it's no more true to say he works for Monsanto than it is to say he works for Nelson Mandela - who was also a former client of his firm, according to factcheck.org, which did a detailed dissection of one of the viral emails.

These emails seem to have been propagated largely by well-intentioned foodies, after having originated from a cadre of conspiracy theorists and Ron Paul supporters with too much time on their hands.

"There is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about how we can have food safety regulation without jeopardizing small farms and local food systems," says Patty Lovera, Assistant director of Food and Water Watch. "But it's hard to have a rational conversation via forwarded emails. It's not happening in a way that's going to change the policy."

Lovera says HR 875 won't regulate seed-saving, backyard gardens, or farmers markets. It would, however, split the Food and Drug Administration into separate bodies, one for food and one for drugs. This is a move that Food and Water Watch would support. But unfortunately, she says, it's likely to kill the bill, because splitting the FDA might be too daunting a task for lawmakers to take on right now.

Another bill that's more likely to make it to a vote, Lovera says, is HR 759. While this bill, "the Food And Drug Administration Globalization Act," has drawn relatively little attention, she thinks it would be more likely to cause big problems for small farmers.

HR 759 would extend traceability recordkeeping requirements that currently apply only to food processors to farms and restaurants - and require that recordkeeping be done electronically, placing a disproportionate burden, in terms of time and money, on small farmers. The bill would also establish production standards for fruits and vegetables, which are called "Good Agricultural Practices."

Agriculture practices designed to improve food safety and address environmental, economic, and social sustainability, might sound like a good idea, Lovera says. But as written, the Good Agriculture Practices are mostly relevant to large, corporate farms - which are the source of most farm-related economic, social, environmental, and safety problems to begin with.

All of these bills, ostensibly, are efforts to make factory-farmed food safer so we can avoid E.coli in spinach, downer cattle in school lunches, feathers in chicken patties, and other food-borne horror stories we've grown all-too used to hearing about. But if these regulations are extended to the small, family farms where the problems aren't coming from, it's more than just a legislative overextension. It's a tilting of the playing field grossly in favor of corporate agriculture. And on this point, we all should be paranoid.

"What people don't realize is that if any of these bills pass, we lose. All we will have left is industrial food," says Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, which is dedicated to promoting and preserving unregulated direct farmer-to-consumer trade, and fostering the availability of locally grown or home-produced food products.

One of Stockton's top priorities is stopping the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Implemented by USDA in 2003 without congressional approval, NAIS is a federal registry program for livestock and for the premises where animals live or visit. The stated purpose of the system is to aid state and federal government response to outbreaks of animal disease.

"NAIS is a safety net for the corporate livestock industry," Stockton told me. "They're the ones with the practices that are creating problems for human and animal health, and they're the ones who need NAIS to cover their backs when something goes wrong. The main threats to food safety are centralized production, processing and long distance transportation."

Food and Water Watch shares Stockton's distaste for NAIS. According ot its web page: "The current plan to create a federal animal identification system ignores existing state animal health programs, puts too much emphasis on privatizing the data collection (forcing small farmers to submit data about their operations to trade associations they don't support), and essentially forces small farmers and ranchers to pay for a safety net for agribusiness."

But, says Lovera, the bills currently under consideration are aimed at the FDA, and NAIS is a USDA program. While she sees a lot of problems with many of the current bills, strengthening NAIS isn't one of them.

Stockton doesn't buy it. If any of them pass, she says, it would ratify NAIS, and strengthen USDA's ability to make it mandatory for all livestock, including your flock of backyard chickens.

So lawmakers, if you're listening, and you want these protestors, ballistic and level-headed alike, to chill out, here is how to get them off your backs: exempt local food systems from the current bills. Include specific language in the bills that will guarantee that small family farms, backyard gardens, personal livestock, farmers markets, and all forms of food self-sufficiency and farmer-direct purchasing are protected. Because the right to buy milk from your neighbor or grow your own food is as inalienable as the right to bear arms. And if you threaten to take away this right, you're going to face a backlash that will make the NRA seem like a bunch of flower-waving Hare Krishnas.

reprinted for educational purposes.

Witches, Condoms and the Pope

Witches, Condoms and the Pope by Christopher Brauchli
Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original. . . .
— Tom Lehrer, The Vatican Rag

He’s batting 50-50 which isn’t bad for most people. If you’re infallible, however, it’s not the sort of thing you’d brag about the next time you talk to your Father. The witches kept him from batting a zero.

While traveling through Africa recently Pope Benedict XVI came out firmly against witchcraft. Addressing the multitude of Catholics that were lining the Angolan streets on March 21, the Pope told his audience that if they had friends or neighbors who believed in witchcraft they should try to convert them. At a mass in Luanda at which two people who had already been saved were trampled to death in the mob’s eagerness to hear what the man from Rome had to say, the Pope said: “In today’s Angola Catholics should offer the message of Christ to the many who live in the fear of spirits, of evil powers by whom they feel threatened.” The Pope imparted the same message to a group of clergymen and nuns earlier in the day when he said they should be missionaries to the Angolans who live in fear “of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.” (It sounded remarkably like a description of the effects religion had on the early settlers in the United States.) It was not a particularly courageous stand for him to take since witchcraft has pretty much fallen out of favor in most parts of the world and a suggestion from him that it should be abandoned is not a suggestion that bespeaks great moral courage. Nonetheless, not everything that boosts your average is a great feat and so it was with the attack on witchcraft. It simply raised the Pope’s average to 50-50. It was his observations at the beginning of the trip that kept him from hitting 100% with his attack on witchcraft.

Joining the enlightened crowd that sits on the Texas Board of Education and would like to include in the Texas curriculum the fact (as they see it) that evolution is nothing more than a theory and there are other theories to be explored to explain the world) the Pope’s first pronouncements on his trip to Africa was that the use of condoms worsens the HIV problem. The Papal pronouncement came on the first day of his visit. Believing that the power of the word is more effective than the power of the prophylactic, he said that the proven most effective way to prevent the spread of AIDS is to just say no. He said to reporters on his plane that: “You can’t resolve it [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary” said he “it increases the problem.”

Long before AIDS had become a prominent member of society, the Pope and his predecessors opposed any means of artificial contraception. Once AIDS made its appearance, the Senior Vatican officials adopted the position that the most effective way of preventing the spread of AIDS, aside from remaining faithful to one’s partner, was avoiding sex. Although the thousands of sexual abuse suits that have been brought against the Church and settled, conclusively prove that avoiding sex is easier said than done, the Vatican Officials are undeterred. The Church remains firmly opposed to condoms while nonetheless proclaiming itself a leader in the fight against AIDS.

Twenty-two million people are infected with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa according to UNAIDS. Two-thirds of all the deaths in the world from AIDS took place in that part of the world. The Church’s position distresses those who instead of contemplating the disease from the bubble of the Popemobile must work with its victims on a daily basis. Speaking to a reporter from the Washington Post, a teacher in Yaounde said: “Talking about the non-use of condoms is out of place. We need condoms to protect ourselves against diseases and AIDS.” Echoing those sentiments Rebecca Hodes with the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said: “[H]is opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans.” She’s got that right. Even some of the Pope colleagues, if not equals, differ with the Pope. Monsignor Illidio Leandro, a Portuguese bishop has said that people with AIDS are “morally obliged to use them.” Acknowledging the fact that some folks can’t avoid sex he said such people are “morally obliged to avoid passing on the disease by using a condom.” The Bishop is a realist.

The Church and witchcraft have one thing in common. Neither believes condoms will prevent the spread of AIDS, the Pope because he doesn’t believe they work and followers of witchcraft because they know witches give AIDS to those they dislike. It will be hard to reduce the AIDS epidemic in Africa. That’s because it’s hard to teach those whose creed is ignorance.

How Obama proved his mettle at the G20 summit

How Obama proved his mettle at the G20 summit
Vast multinational conferences, like the G20 summit in London, are useful mainly for the "bilaterals"—the one-on-one side-room conversations—and, in these forums, President Barack Obama is living up to high expectations.

Which is to say, the United States seems to be returning to diplomatic basics—a development that in the wake of the last eight years is practically revolutionary.

Take Obama's meeting on April 1 with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which produced an unusually substantive 19-paragraph joint statement laying out a broad but specific agenda—all stemming from a cleareyed, even somewhat steely grasp of what international relations are all about.

"What I believe we began today," Obama said at a joint press conference afterward, "is a very constructive dialogue that will allow us to work on issues of mutual interest."

The italics are mine, but a "senior administration official" also drew attention to the phrase in a background press briefing and contrasted the approach with George W. Bush's first meeting with a Russian president, after which he proclaimed that he'd looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seen his soul.

The Medvedev meeting, then, marked the occasion when Obama officially pushed that "reset button." The move was recognized as such by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who noted a "new atmosphere of trust," stemming not just from personal camaraderie—which, he said, creates only "the illusion of good relations"—but from recognition of "mutual interests" and a "readiness to listen to each other." Lavrov added, "We missed this much in the past years."

Former Bush aides have told me that their boss got a bad rap for his remark about Putin's eyes and soul. When he made the comment on his first trip to Europe in June 2001, he had decided to scrap the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty so that he could build a missile-defense system. He felt he had to assure Putin that the decision was not aimed at Russia, which at the time was extraordinarily weak; he also wanted to cultivate Russia as a counterweight to China. In short, Bush's remark was driven, these officials said, by motives of grand strategy.

Maybe so, but that only makes his statement seem daffier. Did Bush believe that chumming up to Putin, treating him like a "good man," would melt his resistance and lure him to our side? The only question is whether, deep inside, the ex-KGB spy gaped at Bush's naiveté or bristled at his condescension.

What Putin would have been keener to hear at that moment—what all leaders with an understanding of history and the requirements of their office want to know in diplomatic dealings generally—is what was on the table that could serve his nation's interests.

At his press conference on Wednesday, Obama emphasized that the United States and Russia have serious differences and that he wouldn't paper over them; from the start, he told Medvedev to forget about recognition of Abkhazia or South Ossetia as independent states, and he protested the beating of prominent human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov. But Obama also said he wouldn't let those differences get in the way of vital matters—such as nuclear proliferation, counterterrorism, regional conflicts, and international trade—where cooperation could promote (again) the interests of both countries.

The only thing remarkable about this sentiment is that compared with policy statements of just a few months ago, it's so remarkable.

Bush's diplomacy tended to the black and white: I get along with you, or I don't; you're with us, or you're against us; you're a terrorist, or you're opposed to terrorists. This approach led—and, in general, leads—to disaster not because it's moralistic, but because it so egregiously misapprehends the world and leaves us with so little leverage to affect it.

For instance, Obama will almost certainly open up talks with Syria as a means of isolating Iran and cutting off both countries' links with Hezbollah. Bush always opposed any contact—and vetoed efforts by some of his top officials to go that route—because Syria supported terrorists. By this argument, had someone with this view been president during World War II, the United States wouldn't have struck up an alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany on the grounds that Stalin wasn't much less evil than Hitler—and we would have faced catastrophic defeat in our high moral dudgeon.

This is, in part, why Obama has abandoned the phrase "global war on terror." It implies that all terrorist movements form a single bloc of equal weight and danger; and it therefore prevents us from even contemplating the notion of splitting the movements apart or playing off one against the others. One definition of skillful diplomacy is to unite allies and divide enemies; Bush's pronouncements tended to do the precise opposite.

To the extent that Bush racked up some successes in his last two years, it was because he abandoned his precepts. The "surge" in Iraq achieved as much as it did (in tactical military terms, anyway) because it coincided with a new strategy that forged alliances with Sunni insurgents—former enemies—in the interest of defeating a larger common enemy. (Too bad the war's first four years killed so many people and tore up so much of the country.) The North Koreans agreed to halt their plutonium reprocessing because Bush finally agreed to hold serious negotiations. (Too bad they built and tested a nuclear weapon in the time that he refused to negotiate as a matter of misplaced principle.)

American leaders and diplomats have long struggled with the tension between their interests and ideals. Bush finessed the issue by pretending that the tension didn't exist. In his second inaugural address, he declared that our interests and ideals coincided, invoking an appealing but empty syllogism: Tyranny sires terrorism; terrorism threatens our security; therefore, promoting democracy enhances our security; hence, our interests and our ideals are one. The problem was that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and democracy is not necessarily a cure for it in any case. (Hamas won fair and free elections in the Palestinian territories—elections that Bush insisted on, over the advice of many, on the premise that Hamas couldn't win the election because terrorism and democracy were incompatible.)

Obama seems to be aware of the tension between interests and ideals without letting it paralyze policymaking. In this sense, he is like most presidents in American history—and his foreign policy, or for the moment his approach to foreign policy, signals a restoration of what was once called statecraft: literally, the art of conducting the affairs of state. The term has always implied a meshing of interests and ideals with reality while navigating the shoals of a dangerous world. Leaders can try to reshape an agenda, but they can't toss away maps or ignore laws of physics to get there. They have to deal with the world as it is, and that's what Obama seems to be doing.