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December, 2009:

Phony Tea Baggers Take Over the Nut-Jobosphere

Dec 31st, 2009
by Tom.
3 comments

Re: Tempest in the Tea Party | Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer, Wed Dec. 30, 2009 8:47 AM PST 

TAXEVIL

What are taxes good for, anyway?

Would a true Tea Party patriot drop nearly $1,600 in donor money for a small meal at a fancy steakhouse? Robin Stublen says no, and he’s mad as hell about the profligate expenditures of a GOP political organization that has glommed on to his grassroots movement. Stublen is the organizer of the Punta Gorda, Florida, Tea Party and a member of Tea Party Patriots, a national grassroots organization that has no offices, no president, raises virtually no money, operates largely on volunteer efforts, and, most important, doesn’t endorse candidates. But unbeknownst to many, there’s another outfit claiming ownership of this conservative movement. It’s called the Tea Party Express, and it has dominated Fox News coverage over the past year with its multistate bus tours and political rallies.

Behind it is a well-established Republican political action committee that has raked in tons of money fundraising under the “Tea Party” banner—and it has also spent a lot of that money in a fashion unbecoming a supposedly grassroots insurrection. For instance, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the PAC that created Tea Party Express dropped $1,597.29 over the summer for a meal for six at a tony Sacramento Chops restaurant, an expenditure that has Stublen seeing red.

There’s a fight going on between the ordinary nut-jobs and the well organized and well funded nut-jobs. It seems that the real tea party faction, the Tea Party Patriots, have been out-maneuvered by the astroturf group, the Tea Party Express. And it looks like the Tea Party Express has emerged as the face of the tea bagger movement.

The Tea Party Express is funded by a GOP consulting firm, Russo Marsh & Rodgers which started the Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) PAC to propel false propaganda about Barack Obama during the 2008 election.

While Tea Party Express professes to be a driving force in the Tea Party movement, it was actually started by a California-based GOP political consulting firm, Russo Marsh & Rogers, which also set up OCDB.

FEC filings show that Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB), the PAC that set up the Tea Party Express, raised $1.9 million this year, $600,000 more than it took in during the heated 2008 presidential election.

According to TalkingPointsMemo in an article posted December 29th, 2009 the OCDB PAC funneled two-thirds of the money collected through donations from ordinary protesters back to the firm of Russo Marsh & Rodgers:

Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) spent around $1.33 million from July through November, according to FEC filings examined by TPMmuckraker. Of that sum, a total of $857,122 went to Sacramento-based GOP political consulting firm Russo, Marsh, and Associates, or people associated with it.

In the “adding insult to injury” category, not only have the Tea Party Express organizers sucked all the air from the Tea Party Patriots’ balloons, one of the leaders of the TPP who switched allegiance over to the Tea Party Express seems to have grabbed up TPPs precious email list on her way out. What did the Tea Party Patriots do about this theft? They did what any good liberal, ACLU member would do.

They filed a lawsuit.

According to Politico.com’s Ben Smith:

The lawsuit, which I mentioned earlier, against former National Coordinator Amy Kremer, who lives in Atlanta, is seeking to force her to stop using the group’s name and to turn over control and passwords to e-mail lists, websites and social networking sites.

Read Amy Kremer’s side of the story here.

It looks like that she absconded all their passwords, too. Pity. An honest, grass-roots organization like the Tea Party Patriots just can’t seem to get a foothold without right-wing money foiling their efforts. The Tea Party Patriots not only have Russo Marsh & Rodgers and their OCDB PAC to compete against, another PAC, FreedomWorks, is also out there organizing tea bag protests.

An article at Firedoglake states that, “FreedomWorks was launched a [sic] GOP version of MoveOn. ‘We believe that hard work beats daddy’s money,’ said Dick Armey at the time. Armey seems to be a bit irony challenged — Steve Forbes is on the FreedomWorks board. As Krugman notes, their money comes from the [sic] Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin and other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.”

Just a note here from AlterNet about the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles (who founded the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation), and their involvement with tea bag party protests:

As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first “tea party” protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing “tea party” opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

The big money heavyweights have jumped in and taken over what was to be an honest, albeit wrong-headed, grassroots movement.

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Going Off the Deep End Over Guantanamo

Dec 30th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

Re:  Likely casualty of air plot: Obama’s Guantanamo plans | McClatchy 

Maximum Security Prison at Thomson, Illinois

 

The foiled Christmas Day plot to blow up a jetliner over Detroit has thrown up a major roadblock to President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the prison camps at Guantanamo. 

The author speaks of a political roadblock, not a real, practical one. The right-wing nut jobs are stomping their feet again about how we cannot close the Guantanamo prison because some of the prisoners might reoffend. But the truth is that a great majority of the murderers and rapists and child molesters that serve their time and are set free reoffend again and again. The recidivism rate in the US is high and keeps getting higher. The following information is from the US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs: 

Recidivism is measured by criminal acts that resulted in the rearrest, reconviction, or return to prison with or without a new sentence during a three-year period following the prisoner’s release. 

Summary findings 

  • During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 persons on parole were at-risk of reincarceration.  This includes persons under parole supervision on January 1 or those entering parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007.
  • Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. A study of prisoners released in 1983 estimated 62.5%.
  • Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.
  • These offenders had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.
  • Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).
  • Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

Source: Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994 

We all know that some prisoners released will reoffend, no matter where they were incarcerated. Aside from psychological profiles that tell us who might reoffend, we have no way of telling who among them will actually do it. When there is no legal reasons to incarcerate a person, when there is no hard evidence that would warrant filling charges against that person, then they have to be released under US and Military law. 

The next obvious point here is the question, “Can’t our prisons hold Yemini prisoners as well as any other?” The new prison and the townsfolk in Thomson, Illinois seems to be perfectly capable of accepting the Yemini along with the others, so why should this lone,really ignorant, Yemini terrorist be a reason to halt plans to close Gitmo? 

Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) on FOX Entertainment this Sunday said, “But today it’s a first-class facility. It would be a mistake to send these 90 people back to Yemen, because based on the past of what’s happened when we’ve released people from Guantánamo, a certain number of them have gone back into the fight against us.” 

Politicians are good at misdirection, and Joe has tried it again here. There are no plans to send all 90 of the Yemini prisoners back to Yemen. There is, however, plans to send them to Illinois. Him and all the other Obama haters out there are jumping all over this as a reason to keep Guantanamo open. What does it matter if the prison there is closed? The right-wing whack-jobs think that by keeping the prison open that they will have defeated another of Obama’s plans never mind what’s good for America. Besides, Obama didn’t send the two men who planned the bombing back to Yemen, President Bush did. 

Officials say the White House is counting on congressional approval for its Illinois prison plan and that it has full confidence in Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, saying that the process is more thorough than the Bush administration’s, which released two detainees now linked to the Detroit airliner plot. 

ABC News identified the men as Mohamed al Harbi and Said al Shihri, both Saudi nationals who were repatriated to a rehabilitation program in the oil-rich kingdom in December 2007. They have reemerged as leaders of an al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen. 

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From the eMail Bag: Write a letter on health care?

Dec 29th, 2009
by Tom.
1 comment

I got this email today from MoveOn requesting that I write a letter to my local newspaper urging our congressional delegation to “fix” the bill and make it more progressive. I, instead, chose to urge my congress people to make the bill more passable with a common sense compromise. Please read on past the email to the letter I sent to the paper. You can follow the link and write your own if you want.

Kat Barr, MoveOn.org Political Action wrote:

Write a letter on health care?


From: Kat Barr, MoveOn.org Political Action [moveon-help@list.moveon.org]
Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 7:31 AM
To: Tom Chambless
Subject: Write a letter on health care?

Dear MoveOn member,

Now that the Senate has passed its health care bill, negotiations have begun over what will be in the final legislation.

So we’ve got an important opportunity this week, while members of Congress are home over the holiday break, to urge them to fix the bill and make it more progressive.

With conservatives continuing to push for watered-down reform, it’s imperative that Congress hears from those of us who want them to fight for the strongest bill possible.

Members of Congress will be reading the local papers while they’re home, taking the temperature of their constituents on health care before heading back to Washington. Can you write a letter to the editor about what needs to be in the final health care bill? There are some suggested points to make below, and you can click here to get started:

http://pol.moveon.org/lte?campaign_id=122&id=18436-7763971-4TSk1ux&t=3

Here’s the letter I sent to my small and quite conservative local paper:

The congressional conference committee will begin deliberations shortly on the two health care reform bills. They will focus on those parts of both bills that have been the most contentious.

Here’s the dilemma. Since this conference report is not budget resolution or budget reconciliation it may be filibustered in the Senate. Knowing this, it is generally acknowledged that the public option will not be in the final product because there are conservatives in the Senate Democratic caucus who would join the filibuster making the sixty vote threshold for cloture impossible to attain. Conversely, the House bill was passed with a strong public option. The sixty member progressive caucus has stated they would vote against a bill without the public option, dimming its chances in that chamber.

So what is a good compromise? There must be something new in the conference report that would create competition in the insurance industry to hold down costs – the main argument for the public option – and yet not be a “government takeover”, the debunked but emotional argument against the public option.

There is an answer in the Senate bill. It allows for private insurers to offer nonprofit coverage through insurance exchanges that would be overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, the same office that oversees the FEHB health care package that all federal employees are offered. At least one plan must be nonprofit and the plan would be available nationwide.

This is a viable solution to the public option dilemma. It allows for competition to control the runaway costs of insurance premiums yet is provided by private insurers, not the government.

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