Month: October 2009

Right Germany

Rick provides nice followup to this bit of Lemkin wisdom in a New Yorker piece:

…it’s not as if German conservatives are a bunch of crazy far-right nihilists. This is not the Republicans we’re talking about. Both the CDU and the FDP recognize the urgency of global warming. Neither of them has a problem with gays. (The FDP’s leader, soon to be foreign minister, is the country’s other openly gay political bigwig.) Nor do they have a problem with allowing a woman to end a pregnancy if she feels she must, or with telling kids to use condoms if they can’t resist having sex, or with the theory of evolution, or with gun control—or, for that matter, with “socialism.” The vast majority of Germans, including most CDU voters and probably even most FDP voters, have no desire to junk the basic architecture of German social welfare, which, of course, is mainly the creation of the SPD. That’s another reason the SPD found it so difficult to get fired up and ready to go.

Thanks, Rick!

Get Your Ass to Mars

Chris Matthews, apparently a longtime resident of Olympus Mons, talks to Clinton biographer Taylor Branch about the Fools for Scandal that are the Villagers:

Branch: Well, first of all, [Bill Clinton] was frustrated that his presidency was off course and besieged by tabloid scandals for six years of which the Lewinsky one was the only one that proved any substance. He forfeited the attempt to rise above the cynicism of the tabloid era by validating that cynicism with Monica Lewinsky. And his only explanation was that he felt sorry for himself, yet he was trying so hard to to be a good president and all anybody wanted to talk about was filegate, travelgate and whether or not he had killed Vince Foster.

Matthews: Did he think that people … well let’s get to some of the more extreme charges against him. Did he think that anybody thought that, anybody real, I mean we talk about the nut jobs all the time. But does anybody really think that Bill Clinton put a hit on his friend Vince Foster?

Branch: No, but it stayed in the news for six years.

Matthews: What news?

Branch: …. that’s astonishing. It was all over the place.

Matthews: What newspapers carried that?

Branch: Well first of all..

Matthews: The Clinton Chronicles, you know and Fox

Branch: Ken Starr could make stories about it all the time. It was an official investigation of the Whitewater special counsel.

This has been something of a recurrent theme with the establishment press in DC. They created Whitewater. They hounded Clinton for years. They invented stories about Gore out of whole cloth (these tales remarkably always managing to buttress preferred GOP talking points), and continue to repeat them to this day as though they are fact. But, when confronted directly about their complicity…they go into Sergeant Schultz mode: “I know nothing! I see nothing!” and act like it’s a brand new fucking discovery that the MSM was directly responsible for the lead-up to the Clinton impeachment, just like they were directly responsible for the run-up to the Iraq war. But they are fundamentally incapable of admitting or even perceiving this. Again with the Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Which, perhaps should be moderately revised to:

It is difficult to get a complicit media agent to understand something when they became millionaires by not understanding it.

You’d think there wouldn’t be anything more remarkable in the Branch interview than the Vince Foster stuff excerpted above. But there is:

Matthews: Why would he think that the liberal establishment, reflected in newspeople’s opinions were anti-Clinton?

Branch: That’s what drove him nuts. But more specifically, the New York Times and the Washington Post drove the Whitewater scandals and he always looked up to them and he though they were sucked into some tabloid netherworld that was detracting from his agenda for the country.

And continues to detract from any substantive agenda to this day. But, setting that aside for the moment, it’s utterly breathtaking to see Matthews here, pretending as though the six year war on Clinton, the subsequent war on Gore, the role the MSM played in the “election” of George W. Bush over Gore, the parroting of Bush lies as truth, and the bitter, still-unwinding outcome of those lies and all the rest: just never happened. Well, maybe, but only on FoxNEWS or something. This man was himself complicit in these events. Here’s Matthews on W. Bush:

MATTHEWS: What’s the importance of the president’s amazing display of leadership tonight?

[…]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically […], the president deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That […] if you’re going to run against him, you’d better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[…]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

And on and on and on.

Here’s Matthews on the “Clinton ordered Vince Foster’s murder” theories, chatting with Gennifer Flowers, no less, having a conversation he now denies ever happened in the MSM:

Ms. FLOWERS: I don’t know for–I didn’t hear Bill get on the phone and call and place the order to have this man killed, no.

MATTHEWS: Well, that’s not–you sort of need evidence like that to accuse even this guy, your–a guy you don’t like, perhaps, of murder, don’t you?

Ms. FLOWERS: Well, I–well, I think if it looks like a chicken and walks like a chicken, perhaps it’s a chicken. I mean, come on.

MATTHEWS: Well, perhaps, perhaps.

Now, of course, none of this ever happened. Not in the mainstream media, of course. Only those fringe lunatics ever talked about this stuff. Un-fucking-believable.

Family Values in Action

Witness the holiest of holier-than-thous, C street, in action:

That month, Mr. Hampton [whose wife was carrying on an affair with John Ensign] decided to take stronger steps to end the affair. He and Mr. Ensign shared a strong Christian faith, and often attended prayer meetings at a Capitol Hill house where Mr. Ensign, Mr. Coburn and other lawmakers lived. The house, on C Street, is affiliated with the Fellowship Foundation, a Christian outreach group influential with conservatives in Congress.

Mr. Hampton went to several group leaders. On Valentine’s Day, they confronted Mr. Ensign during lunch at the house. Mr. Hampton, yelling at times, was there, too. Mr. Coburn, an ordained deacon, took the lead in questioning Mr. Ensign, who acknowledged that Mr. Hampton’s accusation was true.

“I said, ‘No. 1, you’re having an affair, and you need to stop,’ ” Mr. Coburn recounted. The senator said he also advised Mr. Ensign to make the affair public and to work to reconcile the two families.

Mr. Coburn warned Mr. Ensign that if the affair did not end, he would “go to Mitch” — referring to Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, Mr. Hampton said.

At the urging of foundation leaders, Mr. Ensign agreed to write a goodbye letter to Cynthia Hampton and send it by overnight mail. “What I did with you was a mistake,” he wrote in longhand. “I was completely self-centered and only thinking of myself. I used you for my own pleasure.”

There you have it, Jesus at work. Why, they wrapped this thing up in record time. Oh, wait:

But immediately after the confrontation, the senator called Ms. Hampton and told her to disregard the letter, Ms. Hampton said. The relationship would continue for six more months.

[-and-]

The senator soon began developing an exit strategy to quietly move Doug Hampton out of his life.

Truly a model for all of us to follow and emulate. God love the GOP and their family-oriented politics and politicians.

Read the whole, sordid tale.

Go Die in the Streets is catching on, though under the Die Quickly! rubric. I still take, nay DEMAND credit, though.

When pressed by the GOP for an apology, Grayson gave them one:

“I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

More like this, please.

New slogan ideas

marco:

The Democratic Party: Depressingly Ineffective.™

The Democratic Party: We Won’t Put Up Much Of A Fight.™

The Democratic Party: Wait, We Won?™

The Democratic Party: We’ll Forgive Our Opponents Repeatedly So You Don’t Have To.™

The Democratic Party: Defeat You Can Believe In.™

The Democratic Party: How Much More Of A Majority And Public Support Do We Need To Get Anything Done?™

All About the Benefits

TNR reports on the firing of Hyatt’s Boston-area housekeepers, noting:

The housekeepers, some of whom had worked for Hyatt for over twenty years, were making between $14 and $16 an hour plus health, dental, and 401(k) benefits. Their replacements were to make $8 an hour with no health benefits.

It’s unclear to me why, within the context of the current debate about healthcare, the benefits angle to this story has received zero attention. Instead, everyone rushes to the $16/hr to $8/hr change in gross-pay. Sure, Hyatt is now paying half as much and these replacements are, apparently, pretty much all there on guest-worker visas (and so are, by definition, short-term, damned near cash basis day workers).

The key fact, though, is all that stuff that comes after the mention of base pay. These folks that have been fired were getting health, dental, and 401k benefits. That’s a vaguely astounding contract they had; seemingly unprecedented, actually. I’d wager Hyatt cut their expenses on employing these workers by four to five fold just by dropping benefits. Tacking on the pay cut was just gravy; something they did because they could. Based on some back-of-envelope calculations using these figures to get ballpark estimates for provisioning the insurance coverage, to provide the health benefits (forgetting dental and 401k for now) Hyatt was paying these workers the equivalent of $23/hr. Add in the rest and you’re up to $30/hr easily. Probably well beyond it.

So, we have workers’ jobs cut specifically to save on the (presumably) outrageous expense of providing them with healthcare; these firings have subsequently gone national for a variety of completely unrelated reasons. During the biggest healthcare debate of my lifetime. What does the media focus on with absolute uniformity? An $8/hr pay differential. As if nothing else is going on here. Do we mention that these uninsured guest workers still create a cost on healthcare in this country? Do we mention that Hyatt has effectively shifted some of its healthcare expenses from Hyatt to you, the US Taxpayer? Do we mention that this is yet another clear-cut case of spiraling health coverage costs measurably and indisputably claiming jobs, all the while adding to the rolls of the unemployed (and uncovered) in this country? Of course not. Keep walking. That sort of thing just isn’t said.