“The Triumph of Big Buckus”

Sheldon Adelson, George W. Bush, and John Boehner at the alfresco opening dinner on the Adelson lawn, part of last week’s three-day leadership meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. The ritual anointing of Citizens United. Mega moola!!  (With apologies to Jimmy V.)

Evasive Action

I may be a day late and a dollar short, but neither matters. Hillary announced (April 20 in New Hampshire) that we are “into the political season.” Proof cannot be clearer than this: the announcement was a way to evade a question.

Asked about the claims in Peter Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Clinton Cash, that while secretary of state, she had helped “foreign entities” – surely someone can discover a less awkward term for guys, gals, and glomerations with money and interests from Oslo to Riadh – that donated to the Clinton Foundation, the candidate replied: “We’re back into the political season and, therefore we will be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks, and I’m ready for that.”

It reminds me of a childhood incident. I asked my older sister what I’d seen her doing with a certain boy. She looked right at me and running her hands from her shoulders to her hips said, “Did you know this blouse is cotton?”

Not exactly a retraction,

But:

In “The rising campaign issue for 2016? Big money in politics.” Matea Gold reports on just that (Washington Post online, April 19 at 6:18 PM. See here.)

What’s pertinent. First, no surprise:

Conservatives who favor less regulation of political money scoffed at the notion that distaste for the growing role of wealthy donors will galvanize voters.

But protests, particularly by New Hampshire Rebellion volunteers have caused candidates to weigh in, including Lindsey Graham,

. . . who called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

“It’s the wild, wild West,” Graham told voters in Barrington, N.H., this month, adding: “What I worry about is that we are turning campaigns over to about 100 people in this country, and they are going to be able to advocate their cause at the expense of your cause.”

Who’d a-thunk it? Not I, clearly. So, credit where credit’s due. Say more!

Here's what I've said, incidentally: “We don’t need campaign finance reform.  We need publicly financed campaigns.  Because this kind of shit happens all the time” - the rich buy sound trucks, and laryngectomies for the poor.

Buy a little tenderness

Please go see the original here.

Here is Tom Toles’ wonderful cartoon on mailman Doug Hughes’ attempt to deliver via gyrocopter to members of congress 535 letters of protest about the corrupting influence of big money on politics to members of congress. 

According to Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor (See here.), the main point of Hughes letter was this:

"I'm demanding reform and declaring a voter's rebellion in a manner consistent with Jefferson's description of rights in the Declaration of Independence . . . . As a member of Congress, you have three options. 1. You may pretend corruption does not exist. 2. You may pretend to oppose corruption while you sabotage reform. 3. You may actively participate in real reform."

Here is Lindsay Graham saying, They should have shot him down. “I don’t know why he wasn’t.”

It’s a matter of national security, which can never be threatened by powerful people that want what they want and damn-all what anyone else thinks about it – or how it looks. It’s threatened by a brave, little man in a gyrocopter.

Buy your free speech here: West Main Street Values PAC.

Look the other way and cough.

N

no conflict of interest • i-'ma-jə-ne-rē frend

     terminus politicus

     1. clear quid pro quo denied

D

deniability • dē-nī-ə-'bi-lədē 

     terminus politicus

     1. making sure the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing

We don’t need campaign finance reform. We need publicly financed campaigns. Because this kind of shit happens all the time.

Move along. Nothing to see here!
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)

An interesting essay by James Downie in yesterday’s Washington Post online about why conservatives and others – tax preparers and the makers of tax-preparation software, for example – don’t want to make filing your taxes easier, though there are viable alternatives, for example return-free filing. But read about that here. (It’s well worth it.)

At the end of the article we find this paragraph about who's in bed with whom.  Frankly, it's the same old shit:

[Grover] Norquist and company have powerful allies in the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, the makers of TurboTax. Manjoo writes that Intuit has spent $13 million on federal lobbying just in the past five years, the same amount as much larger companies such as Apple, almost entirely to preserve the current tax system. . . . And while Republicans have provided most of the resistance to return-free filing, some Democrats have been swayed. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who counts Intuit as one of her top contributors, has co-sponsored legislation limiting return-free filing.

Publicly financed campaigns violate no one’s right to free speech.  You can yell at a candidate as loud and long as you want; you just can’t interrupt someone else's yelling to wave a wad of cash in her face and say, “Am I right?”

As examples come along

The political-cultural lexicon will describe

     forms of political argument • ‘bā-bəl ‘ba-bəl

        1. non sequitur

Our example is from an op-ed from today’s Washington Post online, Kansas and Missouri are right. Welfare should cover only the basics. According to the Post, its author,

Chelsi Henry* is an attorney and environmental-policy advisor. She served for three years as an elected water conservation official in Jacksonville, Fla., and was named a Republican National Committee “Rising Star” in 2014.

She writes.

She [my mother] taught me that every penny counts and that paying my own way is the American way. Which is why states such as Kansas should go ahead with laws, like the one currently waiting for Gov. Sam Brownback’s signature, that restrict how recipients of government assistance spend it.

To see why this is babble,simply reverse the premise and the conclusion that is unrelated to it:

     States such as Kansas should go ahead with laws that restrict how 
     recipients of government assistance spend it, because my mother taught 
     me that every penny counts.

Or, feeling imaginative, you could construct a similar argument of your own:

     P. T. Barnum was almost certainly right when he said, “There's a sucker 
     born every minute.”** Which is why states such as Kansas should go 
     ahead with laws, like the one currently waiting for Gov. Sam Brownback’s 
     signature, that restrict how recipients of government assistance spend it.

Or,

     My cat is a picky eater. Which is why states such as Kansas should go 
     ahead with laws, etc.

_______________
      * No relation to Chelsea Handler.  
    ** Actually, Barnum did not say this, but never let facts get in the way of any political argument.

Who's on first? on top?

Des Bieler’s blog in today’s Washington Post online*

     tells of new football coach Jim Harbaugh’s intervention in University of Michigan campus politics, when in response to a student petition led the University to cancel a showing of the film “American Sniper.”

Tweet, tweedle-dee-deet:

The University reversed its decision.

“The petition to cancel the screening of ‘American Sniper’ was led by a Michigan student who had seen the film and told the Detroit Free Press that she ‘felt uncomfortable during it.’

“‘As a student who identifies as an Arab and Middle Eastern student, I feel that “American Sniper” condones a lot of anti-Middle Eastern and North African propaganda,’” Lamees Mekkaoui told the newspaper, also telling the Press that she liked the usual movie events, but Mekkaoui said. “‘I don’t think this film fits that event, which is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. I think it should be played, but not at this event.’”

Getting it back into the event may not have been all Coach Jim. After the movie was cancelled, another petition circulated. From the Free Press:

“The movie American Sniper is not about a racist mass murderer or a criminal,” that petition begins, though may Lamees Mekkaoui, or I, be pardoned if it occurs to us that a movie in praise of a man who gunned down one-by-one 160 Middle Easterners might be - on the face of it - about just that. No matter who hired him.**

Here I’m going to say something (else) bound to rankle many of you: First, I’m surprised the movie wasn’t titled American Hero, since we have taken that term we once would have used for Margery Kempe, Mohandas Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and reserved it for these to whom we also say, “Thank you for your service,” now defining that term [service] as going to war or, at least, supporting “the war effort.” In short, we have come to glorify the military – as we never have in my lifetime. They are our heroes. When we lift them up, glorify them, unaware, it seems to me, that by extension we also glorify those that go to war, and by extension we glorify the wars they go to, and by extension we glorify War.

        “Blessed are the peacemakers”? We spew those words out of our mouths faster than God did the Laodiceans.

_________________________

   * Thanks to Des also for leading me to the Free Press article on the subject.

   ** Of course, we did; and if Jim Harbaugh clearly cannot, I deeply, deeply regret my part in it.

F is for fuddish.

F

fuddish • ‘fəd diSH

     adjective

     1. highly competent in a totally incompetent way
     2. totally incompetent, but highly competent at it

As in,

    Like many a Spanish king, a fuddish congress went chasing down rabbit holes with a double-barreled shotgun in order to avoid the business of government.

S is for selling short.

P

prostitute • pr­ō

     noun

     1. saleswoman

     2. fundraiser

David Wihby, 62, has been arrested in Nashua, NH for solicitation of prostitution and has resigned his position as Senator Kelly Ayotte’s (R-NH) state director.

Ayotte declared herself “shocked and deeply saddened.”

   “David obviously cannot continue his duties, if he’s going to have anything to do with prostitution,” the Senator said, refusing to answer questions about her vote to fast track the Keystone Pipeline. "This is not about that," the Senator said.

Climate Stay-the-same

This week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told countries involved in negotiating a U.N.-brokered international climate change agreement that they should “proceed with caution” because of intransigent opposition to Obama’s efforts to significantly scale back U.S. carbon ­emissions.*

     “Whatever the president may say, whatever the rest of the world may negotiate, the people’s senate of the United States of Amer’ca will not give up our right to be the fart in the room,” McConnell rumbled. “I’m not shittin’ you.”**

_______________

     *The first paragraph is from Colbert King’s perceptive essay.  Read here!

   **I made up the second paragraph, but it comports with the facts.  I mean, 
       listen. You can’t hear McConnell thinking this?