Posts Tagged Herman Cain
Major Retailer Urges Workers To Take ‘Civics Course’ With Anti-Obama Content | Alternet
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Politics on October 31, 2012
Major Retailer Urges Workers To Take ‘Civics Course’ With Anti-Obama Content
AlterNet uncovers an anti-Obama program linked to the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, spoon-fed to employees of a major home-improvement chain.
October 31, 2012
If you live in the Midwest and you’re working on a home-improvement project, you’re as likely to do your shopping at a Menards store as at a Lowe’s or Home Depot. With 270 stores and 40,000 employees, Menards is the third-largest home-improvement chain in the U.S., and one of the largest privately held corporations in the country. But Menards stores sell more than just lumber and building supplies; their employees are sold a bill of goods in the form of right-wing ideology.
This January, as the Iowa Caucuses were underway, Menards began encouraging employees to take an at-home online “civics” course that characterizes the economic policies of President Barack Obama as a threat to the success of businesses such as Menards, and by extension, to the employees’ own well-being.
FBI Investigation
The course, titled “Civics 101: The National Self Governing Will In-Home Training,” incorporates much of the material comprising the Prosperity 101 program that AlterNet, working in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, exposed last year — a program concocted by Koch-linked political operatives Mark Block and Linda Hansen, late of the now-defunct Herman Cain presidential campaign. In March, Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the FBI is investigating possible financial improprieties involving two non-profit organizations founded by Block that are linked to Prosperity 101, which is a for-profit venture.
Menards employees who sign up for the course are graded on their knowledge via a multiple choice pass-fail test, and those who pass the test are acknowledged in company publications and bulletins. While workers are not required to take the course, those who hope for promotions may feel pressure to do so, since it is clear that management is paying attention to who is or isn’t taking the at-home classes, which are conducted on the employees’ own time. The civics course is offered as part of a battery of courses, most of which pertain to products sold by the company, or other aspects of working at Menards.
AlterNet has obtained the online textbook for the Menards civics course. The third part of the textbok, subtitled “American Job Security,” imparts a message similar to the letter sent by Koch Industries CEO Dave Robertson to retirees and employees of the company’s Georgia Pacific subsidiary, as well as the e-mail sent to employees of Rite-Hite, a Milwaukee equipment manufacturer, by company owner Mark White, urging them to vote for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. While the Menards course doesn’t offer an explicit candidate endorsement, it describes Obama policies in threatening terms, while policies that echo Romney’s proposals are portrayed in a positive and uplifting light.
Koch-Linked Program
In our June 2011 exposé, we reported that Herman Cain and Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore conducted more than a dozen Prosperity 101 seminars for the employees of companies in Wisconsin and other Midwestern states during the campaign season for the 2010 congressional midterm elections. Hansen, we reported, was looking to create an online Prosperity 101 program for the Wisconsin-based Menards, and it appears as if something like that happened just in time for the 2012 presidential campaign season. While it remains unclear whether the current Menards program was sold to the retailer by Prosperity 101, what is clear is that several sections of the program come directly — sometimes with minor edits — from the textbook, also called Prosperity 101, that was distributed during a breakout session that took place at an Americans for Prosperity Foundation conference in Las Vegas in July 2010. The conference, called RightOnline, took place at the opulent Venetian, owned by right-wing super-PAC funder Sheldon Adelson, and billed by AFPF president Tim Phillips as “the only non-union hotel on the [Las Vegas] Strip.”
The Americans for Prosperity Foundation is chaired by David Koch, the multibillionaire funder, with his brother, Charles, of numerous right-wing think tanks and interest groups, and co-owner of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in the U.S. Block is the former state director for the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the foundation’s sibling organization, and was deeply involved in effecting the sharp turn to the right that took place in Wisconsin politics in 2010 with the election of Governor Scott Walker, Sen. Ron Johnson, and Tea Party-allied members of Congress and the state legislature. (During the course of that campaign, Block was implicated in avote-caging scheme apparently designed to suppress turnout of young people and African Americans at Milwaukee polling places. He also enjoyed a brief moment of fame as the “smoking man” in a bizarre Herman Cain campaign ad.)
Menards, as we reported last year, is notorious not just as a polluter, but as a virulently anti-labor company. One former manager told Milwaukee magazinereporter Mary van de Kamp Nohl that he wasn’t allowed to hire two job candidates because, while in high school, they had worked as baggers in a union-organized grocery store. Menards threatened store managers with a 60 percent pay-cut, according to a 2003 Forbes article, if a union managed to get a foothold in a Menards store on that manager’s watch.
So it was not surprising to learn that Menards’ voluntary at-home civics course is part of a broader training program in which employees are encouraged to take part, unpaid, on their own time, often to simply learn about products sold in various store departments. After completing any of these courses with a passing grade, the employee is given a certificate, and sometimes a prize, such as an item of apparel bearing the Menards logo.
Attack on Obama
Among the materials the Prosperity 101 book and the Menards employee civics course both share is an article by Herman Cain, and another by Stephen Moore and Tyler Grimm (but in the Menards course, the article includes some Menards-specific references and a jokey graphic mock-up of an IRS tax-filing form that demands the filer pay his or her entire income to the government). More troubling, though, is an unsigned article not included in Prosperity 101 that is based on a study by the Heritage Foundation. The article, titled “A Path to Prosperity,” characterizes Obama’s 2012 budget as a “job destroying,” “reckless spending spree,” while laying out, in positive terms, an economic agenda almost identical to that of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (See graphic, below.)
In an article titled “The Keys to Prosperity” that also appeared in a slightly different form in the Prosperity 101 textbook, Stephen Moore offers, as I reported in 2011:
…a series of charts, some of them indecipherable, including a pie chart called “Where Your Federal Tax Dollar Goes.” (Apparently derived from an earlier presentation Moore made at an AFP Foundation event, the same charts can be found here; scroll to slide no. 15/16 for this one.) Citing such official sources as the Internal Revenue Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it features eight slices labeled “Flushed Down a Toilet, “Pissed Away,” “Down a Rat Hole,” “Sleaze,” “Corruption,” “Given to ‘Supporters,’” “Tossed Down the Drain,” and “Postage Stamps.” (The latter, Moore baselessly contends, accounts for 6 percent of your tax dollars — which is, incidentally, six times the allotment for non-military foreign aid.)
Graphic from Steven Moore’s article, “The Keys to Prosperity,” as presented in Menards training program for employees, “Civics 101: The National Self Governing Will In-Home Training, Course 3: American Job Security.”
The article’s primary point is Moore’s claim that the rich are already paying more than their fair share of taxes, and that to ask them to pay more would have a detrimental effect on the economy.
Jacksonian Resentment
A second piece bearing Moore’s byline in the Menards course, “A Nation of Takers, Not Makers,” argues that the public sector is too large, and that government employees are draining the economy. The piece opens with this misleading statement:
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
If you’re a person stuck in a low-paying, non-union retail job, that sounds pretty awful. But Moore neglects to mention that the percentage of the workforce made up of government workers is almost exactly the same today as it was in 1960:15.2 percent in 1960, and 15.3 percent in 2010. What’s changed is the size of the manufacturing sector due to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs — something Moore and his paymasters at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (which owns the Wall Street Journal) and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (from which he’s collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees) are all in favor of.
The very title of the “Takers, Not Makers” piece invokes the old right-wing “producerist” trope, described this way by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons in their book, Right-Wing Populism in America:
Calls to rally the virtuous “producing classes” against evil “parasites” at both the top and bottom of society is a tendency called producerism. It is a conspiracist narrative used by repressive right-wing populism. Today we see examples of it in the Tea Party and Republican Party rhetoric, some sectors of the Christian Right, in the Patriot movements and armed militias, and in the White Supremacist Right.
Berlet and Lyons go on to explain producerism’s origins during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, during which a ”vision of the producing classes included white farmers, laborers, artisans, slave-owning planters, and ‘productive’ entrepreneurs…”
In the Menards civics course, which also addresses the nation’s early history, Andrew Jackson is given an outsized role — four pages unto himself, more word spillage than devoted to any one of the nation’s founders, for instance. What makes Jackson such a hero to Menards? He paid off the national debt in full before leaving office. (The method by which he did this had nothing to do, the reader is assured, with the ensuing Depression.)
Fear-Mongering on Regulation and Environmental Protection
Other articles in the Menards civics course focus on the evils of cap-and-trade pollution-curbing schemes which, the reader is told, “have resulted in the pilfering of nearly $1 trillion from the private sector.” The Waxman-Markey bill, supported by the Obama administration and which aimed to apply a cap-and-trade framework to reduce carbon emissions, is described as a threat to job security, and would, according to Menards, “destroy between 1.8 million and 2.4 million jobs.”
Cap-and-trade is also a favorite bugaboo of Americans for Prosperity, and coincidentally an idea fiercely opposed by Koch Industries, whose core business is in the gas, oil and coal sectors.
Also targeted for the ire of Menards management is the auto bailout, and the TARP measures that bailed out the big banks. Meanwhile, government programs aimed at helping smaller businesses are described as a government plan for making small businesses dependent on government.
Familiar Rhetoric
If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it’s because these are the same lines that have been advanced by Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity, and the Tea Party movement that AFP shaped and nurtured. In fact, the opening volume of the course is a rather benignly told history of the nation’s founding that is imbued with graphics recognizable to any Tea Party-leaning individual, thanks to the movement’s co-option of some of the American Revolution’s most iconic symbols, most notably the “Join or Die” cartoon published by Benjamin Franklin showing a snake cut into segments labeled for eight territories or colonies. The cartoon was appropriated by Glenn Beck for his 9/12 Project, which was a Tea Party organizing effort conducted over the cable spectrum occupied by Fox News Channel, which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
When the Prosperity 101 program from which the Menards civics course is derived first launched, Linda Hansen promoted it with an endorsement from Menards’ owner, J.R. Menard, who is quoted on her textbook’s back cover:
“It is the duty as a responsible employer to inform employees of the current and future business climate so they may make the best decisions for their career and their families. Public policy that is not business friendly will be detrimental to job quality and growth unless we voice our concerns and make a difference.”
On the inside cover, Hansen is described as the creator of Prosperity 101, and executive director of the Wisconsin Prosperity Network, one of the two non-profits founded by Mark Block that have earned the scrutiny of the feds. The other is a now-defunct entity called Prosperity USA, whose last profit-and-loss statement, as reported by Daniel Bice, revealed up to $42,000 in payments to Hansen’s for-profit Prosperity 101, for which she is named as the registered agent. Prosperity USA was also revealed to have improperly covered expenses for the Herman Cain campaign. including the chartering of a private jet to ferry the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO to campaign events.
When he shilled for the Prosperity 101 program at Sheldon Adelson’s hotel in Las Vegas in 2010, Cain called it the right’s “answer to ACORN” — referring to the now-defunct community organizing group that was famous for registering voters, especially among the poor and communities of color.
In his article in the Menards course, Herman Cain reinforces the notion that workers’ jobs are threatened by those who seek to regulate business. He writes:
There are three things you can do to protect your personal prosperity. First, you can become informed about threats to your prosperity. Secondly, be involved. Register to vote and make sure you vote in elections. You can be involved by being connected to an organization that reflects your values and helps to express your view. Last but not least, be impactful. Voting makes an impact, but also be ready to protect your right to prosperity with your voice. Your voice and your votes are the two major weapons you can use to make sure we get this nation back on track.
At Menards, the boss may step just shy of telling you who to vote for, but there’s little doubt for whom he thinks you should cast your vote. Hoping for a promotion? You just may want to rethink that Obama/Biden bumper sticker.
Major Retailer Urges Workers To Take ‘Civics Course’ With Anti-Obama Content | Alternet.
Related articles
- Major Retailer Urges Workers To Take ‘Civics Course’ With Anti-Obama Content (alternet.org)
- Did Sandy Defeat Mitt? | Major Retailer Offering Employees Anti-Obama “Civics Course” | Are We Really Seeing the End of the Drug War? (womensphilanthropy.typepad.com)
- 5 Ways the Koch Brothers’ Money Has a Grip on Mitt Romney | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- The Romney Men: 6 Filthy Rich Moguls Who Will Do Anything to Elect Mitt | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- 8 Falsehoods, Lies and Misstatements From Romney Fundraising Video | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- Advertising on Television Rockets, as Super PACs Pour in the Dough: Total Spending $5 Billion | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- Obama to Congress in Weekly Address: Get Back in Town and Pass Some Bills | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- Ten Big Lies Paul Ryan Keeps Repeating That the Corporate Media Refuses to Push Back On | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
- Photos: Sandy’s Frightening Wrath | Experts Explain Which Prez Is Worse for the Economy | Does TV Make Us Passive? (womensphilanthropy.typepad.com)
- Beyond God and Guns: Why the GOP May Lose the White Working Class | Alternet (mbcalyn.com)
Newt Gingrich will remain out of this world – The Washington Post
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective, Politics on May 3, 2012
Opinion Writer
Newt Gingrich may have ended campaign, but he will remain out of this world
By Dana Milbank, Published: May 2
With “more discipline and more courage to be more outside the mainstream,” Newt Gingrich told USA Today on the eve of ending his presidential bid, “it might have worked better.”
Actually, Mr. Moon Colony was plenty outside the mainstream. But discipline? Yes, that might have helped.
Speaking Wednesday afternoon at an Arlington hotel, the former House speakerformally departed the GOP primary race in much the manner in which he ran his campaign: discursive, chaotic and utterly devoid of self-control.
For 23 desultory minutes in an overheating conference room, Gingrich took the 150 campaign workers and reporters present on a stream-of-consciousness tour of the Newtonian Mind. He spoke, in no particular order, of Capt. John Smith in 1607, mining asteroids, his novels about George Washington, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ellis the Elephant, the Strait of Hormuz, Alzheimer’s disease, Chinese bondholders, Todd Palin, electromagnetic pulses, radical Islamists, C-SPAN, his high school years, Nixon, Carter, Reagan (both Ronald and Michael), the civil service, the Civil War, autism, holograms, the Soviet Union, nanoscale science, the Federalist Papers and Herman Cain.
He had little to say about the one thing people in the room cared about most — whether he would endorse Mitt Romney, the man Gingrich had dubbed a liar and a fake. Gingrich was tepid. “You know, this is not a choice between Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “This is a choice between Mitt Romney and the most radical, leftist president in American history.”
Gingrich, who enjoys dinosaur fossils and zoos, chose instead to tell his captive audience about his pet projects. “I’m cheerfully going to take back up the issue of space,” he proclaimed. With his wife, Callista, in her usual place at his side, her mauve jacket perfectly matching her nail polish, he acknowledged that she was correct in telling him that his proposal for a moon colony “was probably not my most clever comment in this campaign. I thought, frankly, in my role of providingmaterial for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ it was helpful.”
About this aspect of the Gingrich campaign there can be no dispute. He gave us child janitors, the Tiffany charge account, algae, a Greek cruise, the mass defection of his campaign staff and the “food-stamp president.” He told us he worked as a “historian” for Fannie Mae, boasted about his speaking fees, and mercilessly condemned Romney as a man who “can’t be honest,” who “looted a company” and who “doesn’t seem capable of inspiring positive turnout.”
After his win in South Carolina, a Gingrich nomination briefly seemed plausible. But that possibility was quickly extinguished to everybody but Gingrich. As recently as two weeks ago, Gingrich was vowing to remain a candidate until the Republican National Convention. The New York Times’ Mark Leibovich caught up with him last week and discovered that he was the only reporter in Gingrich’s entourage. Soon after, even Gingrich’s Secret Service detail abandoned him.
Gingrich exited with typical disorder. First he was preempted by an aide, who announced last week that the candidate would quit. This week, Gingrich preempted himself, making a video on Tuesday to give supporters “insider advance notice.” That left little mystery on Wednesday afternoon, only the contradiction of having Gingrich, who campaigned against Washington and the national media, making his formal announcement inside the Beltway to the national media.
It was, he said, “a truly wild ride . . . all just sort of amazing and astonishing.” Gingrich had the good manners to thank Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire who kept his candidacy afloat. He regaled the cameras with a long recitation of his well-known biography and a detailed list of his future plans (“I will focus again on national security in three zones” and “modernize unemployment compensation to attach to it a training component”).
By the time he reached his defense of the moon-colony proposal, most of the reporters in the audience had stopped writing. A sound technician covered a yawn. One man had his chin on his chest, asleep. The former candidate’s granddaughter, standing onstage, exhaled deeply and put an arm around her mother.
“This is not a trivial area,” Gingrich insisted. Perhaps not. But his rambling farewell was a reminder of why his candidacy, like his speakership, was destined to fail: Gingrich occasionally has brilliant ideas and strategies, but they are difficult to find amid the clutter of his mind and oratory, and that makes him seem unpredictable and unstable.
“I’m not totally certain I will get to the moon colony,” Gingrich acknowledged. But one thing is certain: He will always be way out there.
Newt Gingrich will remain out of this world – The Washington Post.
Related articles
- WATCH: Newt Gingrich Suspends His Presidential Campaign (foxnewsinsider.com)
- It’s Official: Newt Gingrich Bows Out (npr.org)
- Newt Gingrich Officials Drops Out Of GOP Primary, Doesn’t Immediately Endorse Mitt Romney (inquisitr.com)
- Newt Gingrich Ends Presidential Bid (theepochtimes.com)
- Newt Gingrich ends ‘truly wild ride’ of a presidential campaign (bangordailynews.com)
- Newt Gingrich Drops Out of Presidential Race (thehollywoodgossip.com)
- Newt Gingrich Ends Presidential Campaign (abcnews.go.com)
- We won’t have Newt Gingrich to kick around anymore (horsesass.org)
- Newt Gingrich officially exits presidential race (boston.com)
- Newt Gingrich pulls plug on ‘wild ride’ White House bid (independent.co.uk)
Borowitz Report – April Fools
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humor/Parody on April 1, 2012
Republicans Reveal that Entire Presidential Race was a Prank
April Fool’s Day Announcement Brings Practical Joke to an End
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In an April Fool’s Day announcement that took the political world by storm, the Republican Party revealed today that its entire presidential race had been an elaborate prank.
“April Fool!” exclaimed former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum at a press conference in Washington, where they were joined by fellow merrymakers Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.
Moments after revealing that the GOP primary had been one long practical joke, Mr. Santorum explained the rationale behind staging such a complicated and expensive prank.
“A lot of Americans are suffering right now and need a good laugh,” he said. “I think my colleagues and I can be justifiably proud of the entertainment we provided – even if it meant me wearing these ridiculous sweater vests.”
Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain agreed that the prank had gone well, but added, “I’m just amazed that the American people never figured out we were kidding.”
“I mean, I kept saying ‘9-9-9’ every four seconds, which was total and utter bullshit,” he said. “And everything out of Michele’s mouth made her sound like a mental patient.”
“True that,” Rep. Bachmann agreed.
Texas Governor Rick Perry said he worried that “every time I screwed up at a debate people would figure out I was pulling their legs,” but added, “The American people seemed to accept the idea that a Governor of Texas could be a blithering idiot.”
When one reporter mentioned that Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) was not at the press conference, a sudden silence fell over the gathering.
“Did anyone ever tell Ron this was supposed to be a prank?” Mr. Romney asked. “Holy cow, maybe he’s really serious.” Borowitz Report.
Related articles
- Borowitz Report – Bigot Report (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report – Romney Under Pressure to Prove He Was Manufactured in US (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report – In Confident Sign, Gingrich Changes Facebook Status to ‘In an Open Relationship’ (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report – Whitney Houston (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report – Fact That No One Likes Him May Be Hurting Romney (mbcalyn.com)
- Borowitz Report – To the People of Iowa (mbcalyn.com)
- Twitter’s unfunniest April Fools’ pranks (twitchy.com)
- Okay, if your geek April Fool prank doesn’t beat this, don’t try (RexBlog.com)
Borowitz Report – In Confident Sign, Gingrich Changes Facebook Status to ‘In an Open Relationship’
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humor/Parody on January 22, 2012
POSTED JANUARY 22, 2012
In Confident Sign, Gingrich Changes Facebook Status to ‘In an Open Relationship’
Newt to America: ‘Join Me. Join Me in My Marriage’
CHARLESTON, SC (The Borowitz Report) – In a sign of renewed confidence, just minutes after former House Speaker Newt Gingrich romped to victory in the South Carolina primary he changed his Facebook status to “In an Open Relationship.”
Mr. Gingrich made no reference to his new Facebook status during his victory speech, in which he made an emotional appeal to the American people: “I say to each and every one of you: Join me. Join me in my marriage.”
The former House Speaker used the speech to highlight the differences between himself and the current resident of the White House: “The American people have a choice: do they want a President who issues food stamps, or one who runs up a $500,000 tab at Tiffany?”
Mr. Gingrich drew cheers and a standing ovation as he concluded his remarks, saying, “In closing, I am staying at the Marriott, Rm. 205. Ladies?”
In yet another boost, Mr. Gingrich received this nod from former rival Herman Cain: “I am not endorsing Newt Gingrich, but I am endorsing Newt Gingrich’s lifestyle.”
At the White House, President Obama made only a glancing reference to the results in South Carolina, telling reporters, “I haven’t been this happy since we smoked bin Laden.”
For his part, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney minimized Mr. Gingrich’s 12% margin of victory: “That’s even less than I pay in taxes.”
Related articles
- Newt Gingrich Wins South Carolina Primary Beats Mitt Romney in Gop Race (binsidetv.net)
- Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney: Who Should it be America? (votingamerican.wordpress.com)
- Newt Gingrich’s Victory Speech – South Carolina Primary Win 1-21-12 (constitutionclub.org)
- South Carolina Vote Was “Primal Scream”, Newt Gingrich “Not Sustainable” (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
- The South Carolina primary: The slog begins | The Economist (policyabcs.wordpress.com)
- Political Reporter Jack Fink: Gingrich’s S.C. Win ‘Changes Everything’ (dfw.cbslocal.com)
- Newsy Video: Gingrich wins South Carolina (englishblog.com)
- Mittens And The Others Lose Lose To Newt In South Carolina (perezhilton.com)
- Chris Christie Introduces the Establishment’s Fear of Gingrich In To the Presidential Race (whitehouse12.com)
Where are the serious Republican candidates? – The Washington Post
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion, Perspective, Politics, Social, Society on January 16, 2012
Editorial Page Editor
Where are the serious Republican candidates?
By Fred Hiatt, Published: January 15
Why is the Republican presidential field so weak?
Six months ago, that might have seemed an unfair question, or at least premature. The roster of candidates often starts out looking like the “seven dwarfs,” only to have some rise in stature while others fall away.1845
That hasn’t happened this time. Mitt Romney looks no less presidential today than he did at the start. But none of the others has come close to making himself plausible.
Ron Paul, second-place finisher in New Hampshire, remains what he always was: a movement leader, an advocate for both attractive and highly unattractive tenets of libertarianism — a fringe candidate.
Rick Santorum, launching from the unlikely platform of a losing Senate race, has come across as a sincere but sour, less inclusive, smaller-bore version of Mike Huckabee.Rick Perry, owner of the most promising resume, opened by calling the Federal Reserve chairman a traitor and went downhill from there. Newt Gingrich has demonstrated a disqualifying ego, which takes some doing in this business. Jon Huntsman has demonstrated that he can speak Chinese.
And already we are doubting our memories: Were Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann really serious candidates?
One of these people might have surprised in the Oval Office. Science has yet to discover how to predict which Kansas City haberdasher will exceed low expectations and which Georgia peanut farmer will fulfill them. It’s also true that the fantasy candidates who didn’t declare — Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, David Petraeus — would, under the scrutiny of press and rivals, have turned out to be human, too.
Still, on all available evidence it was and remains a weak field. So, again: Why?
It could be the luck of the draw. Every first-grade teacher will tell you that some years are better than others.
It could be that more serious presidential candidates, sizing up the incumbent in 2009, when serious campaigns had to begin, decided, not illogically, that President Obama was likely to win. Let someone else be the John Kerry of the Republican Party. Come back in 2016.
It could be that the process has devolved, for some, from daunting to repellent: the number of millionaires whose egos must be stroked on the way to raising $1 billion, the smears from unaccountable political action committees, the dwindling media interest in substance, the Twitter-paced cycle that makes the Clinton war room look like something from the vacuum-tube era — it may be a quadrennial bar to many people of quality.
It could be that serious people looked at the decisions that will have to be made in the next four years and concluded that the job would not be much fun. Taking charge in an era of rising health-care costs and an aging population doesn’t seem, at first blush, a road to popularity.
But in another year, that challenge might have motivated top-flight people. After all, the country’s travails offer an opportunity for fundamental reform that a true leader would jump at — to reshape the tax code, say, to encourage things we like (working and saving) and discourage things we don’t (burning oil, gas and coal). Such big things could be done, for political and substantive reasons, only in a bipartisan fashion.
For their own reasons, Obama and the Democrats haven’t seized that opportunity. But why have visionary Republicans shied away?
The nearly forgotten candidacy of Tim Pawlenty offers a clue. Once upon a time a conservative governor from a swing region with a record of working across the aisle might have gained traction.
But in a party that has come to loathe compromise, Pawlenty didn’t have the gumption to run on his record, and he couldn’t sell himself as less nice and more ideologically pure than he really was. When he couldn’t bring himself to be mean to Romney in an early New Hampshire debate, he was finished.
The Republican ideology of no new taxes, ever, is a straitjacket. But even more dispositive is the conviction that reaching across the aisle is weak and treasonous.
Until that conviction fades, politicians who want to get things done, and would know how to strike deals in the nation’s interest, may stay on the sidelines.
Where are the serious Republican candidates? – The Washington Post.
Related articles
- Huckabee’s Missed Moment (thedailybeast.com)
- ‘Anyone but Romney’ (macleans.ca)
- GOP Voters Demand Strict New Laws against Candidate Fraud (isoutrage.wordpress.com)
- Huntsman drops out of GOP race; Ron Paul surges in South Carolina (rt.com)
- Huckabee hosting a SC forum for GOP candidates (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Mike Huckabee Forum – ignore the media, this fight for the GOP nomination is far from over (worldviewtonight.wordpress.com)
- From the Archives: the Award for the Earliest W Nostalgia on the Left: (brothersjuddblog.com)
- Lone Candidate Who Believes in Global Warming Drops out of GOP Race [Politics] (jezebel.com)
- Huckabee hosting a SC forum for GOP candidates (sfgate.com)
- Huckabee Hosting GOP Event (huffingtonpost.com)
Cain accuser says candidate’s exit ‘bittersweet’ – CNN.com
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Editorial, Ethics, Opinion, Perspective, Politics, Privacy, Social, Society on December 7, 2011
(CNN) – The woman whose public accusation of sexual harassment helped push Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain out of the 2012 race called his decision to suspend the campaign “bittersweet” Monday.
Sharon Bialek told CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” that she was happy Cain decided to halt his presidential bid — “but it saddened me because even though he did so, he still has not spoken the truth.”
“He’s trying to blame everything that’s happened on everyone else except the one person that he should blame it on, and that’s himself,” she said.
Cain ended his run for the White House on Saturday, saying he would focus instead on his family and on promoting his economic proposals from outside Washington.
Cain?
He called the allegations against him “false and untrue,” but said he was bowing out after assessing the impact allegations by Bialek and others were having on his wife, his family and his supporters.
Earlier, Bialek told reporters during an appearance with her attorney, Gloria Allred, that she didn’t feel sorry for Cain — “not any more.”
“I did initially,” she said. “But when he kept going on and on and lying and making me out to be some troubled woman, then I really stopped feeling sorry for that man.”
Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and a radio talk-show host, vaulted to the front ranks of GOP contenders in October. But his campaign began to stumble when news emerged that two women had accused him of sexual harassment in the 1990s, when he was president of the National Restaurant Association.
In November, Bialek told reporters that after a 1997 dinner in which she had sought Cain’s help finding a job, he unexpectedly put his hand on her leg beneath her skirt and pushed her head toward his crotch. She said Cain told her, “You want a job, right?” but stopped when she protested.
One of the women who filed complaints at the restaurant association, Karen Kraushaar, decided to come forward soon after Bialek went public. Then on November 28, an Atlanta businesswoman, Ginger White, said she had a 13-year affair with Cain that lasted until shortly before he launched his presidential bid.
Cain’s campaign accused supporters of one of his Republican rivals, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, of planting the initial story. The candidate called Bialek a “troubled” woman put up to hurting his campaign by Democratic activists and said he had never met her. And while he admitted knowing White and helping her out financially, he said they were just friends.
Bialek told CNN she would have regretted staying silent if Cain “had gone further in the race and perhaps been elected president.”
Cain accuser says candidate’s exit ‘bittersweet’ – CNN.com.
Related articles
- Bialek’s ex-boyfriend to speak about Cain allegations (thehill.com)
- Cain accuser says candidate’s exit ‘bittersweet’ (cnn.com)
- Sharon Bialek: Herman Cain Has No One to Blame But Himself (abcnews.go.com)
- Sharon Bialek Demands Apology From Herman Cain (ibtimes.com)
- Cain accuser Sharon Bialek served eviction papers (thegrio.com)
- Sharon Bialek on Herman Cain: “I respected him…it was just shocking to me” (piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com)
- Sharon Bialek Puts Conservative Face (And Dress) On Cain Scandal (styleite.com)
- Gloria Allred Defends Sharon Bialek’s Sexual Harassment Allegations Against Herman Cain (huffingtonpost.com)
- Cain’s accuser says candidate ‘still in denial’ (cnn.com)
- Cain accuser says candidate’s exit ‘bittersweet’ (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
- CNN Reports Cain “Reassesing” Run For President (themoderatevoice.com)
- Ken Blackwell: Cain must choose between family, campaign (thehill.com)
- Bachmann: Former Cain backers moving her way (sfgate.com)
- Cain says he expects fresh accusation (sfgate.com)
- CNN poll: Gingrich 24, Romney 20, Cain 17, Perry 11 (hotair.com)
- Herman Cain: Brokenhearted but unbroken (thegrio.com)
- Cain’s Accuser on His Exit (politicalwire.com)
- Cain: The Democrats might be trying to take me down because I’m their worst nightmare and they’d rather face Gingrich (hotair.com)
The GOP’s victim-blaming strategy – Republican Party – Salon.com
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Politics on November 15, 2011
TUESDAY, NOV 15, 2011
From Iraq to OWS, Republicans are going to increasingly absurd measures to protect the wealthy
Herman Cain, Sean Hannity and Rep. Michele Bachmann (Credit: AP)
According to the most reliable counts, the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians, 650,000 Iraqi civilians or more than 1 million Iraqi civilians. In other words, we’ve vaporized the equivalent of Billings, Mont. (pop. 104,170), Memphis, Tenn. (pop. 646,889) or San Jose, Calif. (pop. 945,942).
Horrifying as these statistics are, imagine how much more disgusted you would be if a foreign power actually did vaporize those cities, and then followed up that annihilation by having its leading politicians and pundits demand that Americans pay reparations for the privilege of experiencing such devastation.
If this seems difficult to fathom, that’s only because we live in a culture defined by a particularly American lack of empathy — the fist-thrusting, crotch-grabbing, middle-finger-extending “USA!”-chanting kind that prevents many of us from seeing the world through any other nation’s eyes. Indeed, if we didn’t suffer from this blinding endemic, it would undoubtedly be considered bigger news — and a bigger outrage — that one of our major political parties is now regularly demanding Iraqis pay us remunerations for the expenses we incurred by invading and occupying their nation and then killing large numbers of their countrymen.
Though sporadically aired over the years, this caustic demand has now gained serious velocity with the kickoff of the 2012 presidential race. In May, it was the GOP’s chief political televangelist, Sean Hannity, telling the Fox News mob that Iraqis “need to pay us back for their liberation.” A month later, it was Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., telling Iraqi leaders that he wants them “repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here.” A month after that, Republican presidential front-runner Herman Cain complained that Iraq is “having their political internal squabbles, when we should be getting paid back some of that money.” Now presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is making even bigger claims on Iraqi resources, telling “Meet the Press” this past Sunday that Iraqis must not only “pay us back for the money that we spent” but also “pay the families [of U.S. soldiers] that lost a loved one several million dollars per life.”
What can we make of the leaders of the world’s richest nation pressing our impoverished victims to pay even more than they already have? Can we conclude that this is all just the ugly 21st century manifestation of the old piratic mentality that says we have an inherent right to rape and pillage those we didn’t already kill during our imperial exercise?
Sure there’s some of that going on. In a nation that coined the phrase “to the victors belong the spoils,” Marshall-Plan benevolence and beneficence seems like the rare historical exception to the typical bravado and ball-spiking.
That said, the kick-’em-while-they’re-down attitude embodied in this GOP rhetoric isn’t just run-of-the-mill jingoism and it’s not just limited to discussions of foreign policy. It’s part of a new and larger blame-the-victim project by Republicans — one designed to resurrect notions of American exceptionalism while simultaneously defending the wealthy, the powerful and the status quo.
The Iraq rhetoric is illustrative. Rather than permit America to consider any responsibility for the gross immoralities of our foreign aggression, the GOP’s demand for reparations plays to our exceptionalist conceit by implicitly suggesting that — facts be damned! — the war was Good and Just. And not just moderately good and just, but so Good and Just that we deserve to be paid for our trouble. Along the way, this self-righteous posture implies that we shouldn’t change anything about the (highly profitable) Military-Industrial Complex that led us into the war in the first place.
While the Iraq discourse is probably the most pronounced, there are many other examples where the blame-the-victim’s twin dynamic operates in similar fashion — just as Republican tacticians hope.
For instance, despite a tax code that lets Warren Buffet pay a lower effective rate than his secretary and lets a quarter of all millionaires pay lower rates than the middle class, the GOP has organized itself around demonizing the hardest-hit victims of the recession — those so crushingly destitute that they don’t make enough to pay federal income levies.
Ignoring the indisputable fact that the overall tax code (i.e., federal income, federal payroll, state and local tax systems combined) is so flat that Americans pay almost exactly the same share of taxes as their share of national income, the GOP’s nonsensical blame-the-victim posture posits that the American economy would still be exceptionally terrific, if only those lazy leeches at the bottom started paying their “fair share.” In the process, the narrative works to undermine any initiatives that might return tax rates to the higher levels (when the economy was better, FYI) that forced the ultra-rich and big corporations to pay just a bit more.
Along these same economic lines, Republicans (in tandem with the financial industry and its media apologists) have been working hard to blame victims of the housing market collapse for the recession. In this fantastical version of the disaster, irresponsible low-income homebuyers — with the help of liberals in Congress, of course — somehow forced the most powerful multinational banks on the planet to give them loans they knew they couldn’t pay back and when they defaulted, the whole economy collapsed.
As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi expertly details, “just the opposite was true” — the banks led “an orgiastic stampede of lending … Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs.” The result: Banks made billions while using foreclosure proceedings to throw millions of Americans out on the street — all while ending up with a special taxpayer bailout to cover any losses along the way. Yet, the Republican narrative gains traction nonetheless because it A) reassures us that America’s current financial regulatory architecture remains exceptionally Good, and B) defends the GOP’s banking-industry benefactors from prosecutions and policy proposals that might change their ways.
Even on a seemingly unrelated issue like immigration, the GOP’s blame-the-victim mentality rules the debate.
Using epithets like “illegal immigrants” and “aliens,” Republicans tell us that destitute Mexicans risking their lives to flee across desert borders in search of low-wage jobs are the real malefactors in our economy. Left out of this tall tale is any reference to what these undocumented immigrants most often are: brutalized victims of a corporate-written U.S. government trade policy that deliberately decimated Mexican wages and displaced Mexican farmers unable to compete with U.S. taxpayer-subsidized agribusiness. But the GOP suppresses those simple truths, because they would destroy the unquestioned portrayal of “free” trade policies as American benevolence, thus threatening the key argument that corporate advocates use to keep these increasingly unpopular trade policies in place.
The list seems endless. From demonizing Occupy Wall Street protesters to bashing unions already under pulverizing corporate assault, the Republican Party is today organized around the politics of scapegoating the least powerful among us — and that’s a problem for the GOP’s opponents, because history shows that kind of politics works.
Yes, as crass tactics go, victim blaming has, unfortunately, been a reliable bet. From the mid-1960s to the beginning of the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s (as I demonstrate in my recent book), blaming the victim became the backbone of the ugly but electorally powerful backlash to the civil rights movement — a backlash that sociologist William Ryan famously identified as ”justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality.”
Back then, the “Silent Majority”-branded campaign demonized the real victims of racism (aka black people) as either promoting a malevolent “pathology” or as overly privileged recipients of affirmative action. That successfully mobilized white voters by helping them re-envision themselves as the aggrieved and oppressed righteously fighting for equality.
No doubt, we see the same patterns — and potential for election success — in today’s Tea Party as it bullies American politics down the well-trodden footpath of aristocratic grievance. That’s not altogether surprising. This is a populist moment, after all, and blaming the victim is a bizarro kind of populism. It appropriates the us-versus-them zeitgeist, but deviously redefines the “them” as the war-ravaged, the poor, the foreclosed on, the foreign or any other disempowered demographic unable to respond or fight back. If such majoritarian mob sentiment catches on (as it so often does in our country), it inevitably establishes an unfair fight. That typically means a big victory for Republicans and their special interests. Trouble is, society’s real victims once again lose out in the transaction.
The GOP’s victim-blaming strategy – Republican Party – Salon.com.
Related articles
- The insanity of running as a sane GOP candidate – 2012 Elections – Salon.com (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- The one way Michele Bachmann could actually help the GOP – War Room – Salon.com (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- GOP: No tax hikes – except for the poor – Taxes – Salon.com (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- The moment Rick Perry’s candidacy collapsed – War Room – Salon.com (mbcalyn.com)
- Obama and the art of picking a fight – Barack Obama News – Salon.com (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- Cynicism, the GOP’s most destructive weapon – Republican Party – Salon.com (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- How they get away with obstruction – Opening Shot – Salon.com (mbcalyn.com)
Borowitz Report – Startled Deer Becomes New Republican Frontrunner
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Humor/Parody on November 15, 2011
POSTED NOVEMBER 15, 2011
Startled Deer Becomes New Republican Frontrunner
Inability to Speak Considered a Plus
CONCORD, NH (The Borowitz Report) – The race for the Republican presidential nomination took an unexpected turn today as a new poll showed that a startled deer was the new GOP frontrunner.
Bucky, the red deer who is the first choice of likely Republican voters is believed to be the first woodland creature ever to lead a major party’s presidential field.
“Voters like what they see in Bucky,” said veteran political strategist Ed Rollins, who has signed on to helm the red deer’s primary campaign. “The fact that he is unable to speak is a major asset.”
In his first appearance in Concord, New Hampshire, however, the antlered candidate garnered mixed reviews for what some observers said was an unsteady performance.
Appearing frightened by the TV lights, Bucky kicked over the podium and then pranced down the hall before being subdued by a tranquilizer dart.
“Clearly he’s a little rough around the edges,” said Mr. Rollins. “But he still did better than Herman Cain.”
It was another rough day for Mr. Cain, who offered this response to a reporter’s question: “For the last time, I did not touch her down there. Oh wait, did you say ‘Libya?’”
Gov. Rick Perry also stumbled badly in a campaign appearance in Iowa, telling supporters, “If I am elected, I will find out where Iran’s nuclear weapons are. Also, where Iran is.”
Meanwhile, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted that his recent rise in the polls is not a fluke: “The American people want an adult, and no one has a stronger record of adultery than I do.”
Related articles
- Late Night Comedians Love Herman Cain (themoderatevoice.com)
Conservatives’ mindless opposition – The Washington Post
Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Opinion on November 15, 2011
Opinion Writer
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: November 13
Conservatives need to contemplate what the Rick Perry and Herman Cain stories say about the state of their movement and the health of their creed.
Perry’s debate gaffe last week was about something more important than “brain freeze.” Memory lapses can strike anyone, and Perry probably helped his cause a bit by poking fun at himself at Saturday’s CBS News/National Journal debate and on the David Letterman show.
What really matters is the subject that sent Perry’s brain into lockdown. He was in the middle of describing sweeping changes in the federal bureaucracy closely connected to his spare vision of American government. One presumes a candidate for president ponders such proposals carefully, discusses them with advisers and understands their implications.
Forgetting an idea at the heart of your program, in other words, is not the same as forgetting a phone number, a friend’s name, a football score or the title of a recently read book.
Perry’s memory lapse showed that he wasn’t asserting anything that he is truly serious about because he is not serious about what government does, or ought not to do. For him, governing seems a casual undertaking.
“And I will tell you,” he declared, “it’s three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the — what’s the third one there? Let’s see.”
Yes, let’s see what “gone” might imply. Would Perry end all federal aid to education? Would he do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that, among other things, tracks hurricanes? Energy was the department he forgot. Would he scrap the department’s 17 national labs, including such world-class facilities as Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or — there’s that primary coming up — Aiken, S.C.?
I’m not accusing Perry of wanting to do any of these things because I don’t believe he has given them a moment of thought. And that’s the problem for conservatives. Their movement has been overtaken by a quite literally mindless opposition to government. Perry, correctly, thought he had a winning sound bite, had he managed to blurt it out, because if you just say you want to scrap government departments (and three is a nice, round number), many conservatives will cheer without asking questions.
This is a long way from the conservatism I used to respect. Although I often disagreed with conservatives, I admired their prudence, their affection for tradition and their understanding that the intricate bonds of community are established with great difficulty over time and not easy to reweave once they are torn asunder. At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism.
That brings us to Herman Cain, who is trying to get out from under charges of sexual harassment. His approach is to have his campaign attack the individuals who leveled them, and, even more, to go after those who made these charges public.
True, he’s been inconsistent about laying blame. Off and on, he pointed to his Republican opponents. But Cain and his defenders have settled on a strategy to rally conservatives by assailing the “liberal media” and “the Democrat machine.”
Politico ran the first stories about the allegations, and to argue that Politico is “liberal” requires an extraordinary leap of the imagination. Most liberals see Politico as leaning over backward to give conservatives more than their share of journalistic spin.
In any event, while women of a variety of political stripes have been in the forefront in demanding accountability from Cain, plenty of liberals have been happy to look on and let the GOP settle this one. And most members of “the Democrat machine” defended Bill Clinton against impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky matter. They, too, have largely stayed away from the Cain controversy, aware as they are of the meaning of the word “hypocrisy.”
Not so with the many conservatives who donned full feminist armor during the Clinton scandal and now defend Cain reflexively, not even asking that he come clean about the facts.
There are honorable exceptions: Bill Bennett, for one, and to some degree — hard to admit, I know — Karl Rove. But that so many other members of a movement theoretically devoted to traditional values on sexual matters would eagerly jump into this mess on Cain’s side speaks volumes about its condition. To paraphrase Bennett from another context, where’s the outrage about a conservatism that is losing both its intellectual moorings and its moral compass?
Conservatives’ mindless opposition – The Washington Post.
Related articles
- You: The real conservative scandal (washingtonpost.com)
- The True Conservative Scandal (themoderatevoice.com)
- Only family economics, Rick Santorum gets it only partially right – The Washington Post (wpvins.wordpress.com)
- Economy can’t afford Obama’s austerity (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- 2012 GOP race: Has the Tea Party already lost? – The Week (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
- Perry’s gaffe: mindless opposition to government (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Rick Perry’s “Niggerhead” Problem Is A Sign Of Moral Failing ” CAFFEINATED POLITICS (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
Recent Comments