Does American hate the middle class?

A push by Republican Senators, many from the South, killed a proposal to loan money to the three American automakers that had previously passed in the House. A Daily Kos front page diarist had harsh words for Tenn. Senator Corker:

Bob Corker just led the charge to kill the American auto industry, and with
it some 10% of the American economy, because he wasn't allowed to bust the UAW.
As such, Bob Corker is definitionally one of the most traitorous and
despicable human beings ever to track slime across the floors of the
Senate.

For some time, the left has been attempting to persuade the public, and itself that the country is progressive, but are either too dumb or guillible to realize it. The election of Barack Obama was used as further evidence of a shift to the center left. As indicated by the quote above about Corker, the left has set up the bailout as a battle of Left vs Right. The powerful against the working class. In their minds, opposition to this bill is a war on the middle class, is treason and is anti-American. (except for Sen. Tester D-Mont, he is a populist and all.)

This morning, the Washington Post released a poll, that the left must conclude says that a majority of Americans polled are traiters and union busters.

Overall, 55 percent of those polled oppose the latest plan that Chrysler, Ford and General Motors executives pitched to Congress last week, on par
with public opposition to earlier, pricier efforts. But with 42 percent support,
the new request for up to $14 billion in emergency loans has more backers than
previous proposals to secure up to $34 billion in loan guarantees.
But as
with the earlier bids, those who strongly oppose the measure greatly outnumber
those who are strongly supportive.

We have 55% of the country that wants the middle class to drop dead according the left. A majority of Americans are now union busters and all the other evil attributes heaped upon the right. So much for that center left country or that Daily Kos is part of the mainstream.

As a lifelong Michigan resident, I understand all too well about the importance of the domestic auto industry. I know about the mistakes, greed and incompetence on behalf of unions and management. However, these loans are a small price to pay to try to save a vital industry. The money we have wasted over the past decades on foreign policy is staggering. A few crumbs to Detroit is more than fair after what has been invested in Wall Street

Obama on regulation

He is on the Republican's side of this issue, according to his own words

WALLACE: And we are back now with Senator Barack Obama. Senator, one of the
central themes of your campaign is that you are a uniter, who will reach across
the aisle and create a new kind of politics. Some of your detractors say that
you are a paint by the numbers liberal and I'd like to explore this with
you.
Over the years, John McCain has broken with his party and risked his
career on a number of issues, campaign finance, immigration reform, banning
torture. As a president, can you name a hot button issue where you would be
willing to cross (ph) Democratic party line and say you know what, Republicans
have a better idea here.

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas
where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

WALLACE: Such
as.

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation, I think that back in the ‘60s and
‘70s, a lot of the way we regulated industry was top down command and control.
We're going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.
And I think that the
Republican party and people who thought about the margins (ph) came with the
notion that you know what, if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and
incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they're going to for example
reduce pollution. And a cap and trade system, for example, is a smarter way of
doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company
has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes
is less efficient.
I think that on issues of education, I have been very
clear about the fact, and sometimes I have gotten in trouble with the teachers
union on this, that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should
be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers. That
--
WALLACE: You mean merit pay?
OBAMA: Well, merit pay, the way it has
been designed I think that is based on just single standardized I think is a big
mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not
the kids are coming in the school already three years or four years
behind.
But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, you know
what, teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing
themselves professionally, that we should pay excellence more. I think that's a
good idea. So --
WALLACE: But, Senator, if I may, I think one of the concerns
that some people have is that you talk a good game about, let's be
post-partisan, let's all come together -- just a couple of quick things, and I
don't really want you to defend each one, I just want to speak to the larger
issue.
The gang of 14, which was a group -- a bipartisan coalition to try to
resolve the nomination -- the issue of judicial nominations. Fourteen senators
came together, you weren't part of it. On some issues where Democrats have moved
to the center, partial-birth abortion, Defense of Marriage Act, you stay on the
left and you are against both.
And so people say, do you really want a
partnership with Republicans or do you really want unconditional surrender from
them?
OBAMA: No, look, I think this is fair. I would point out, though, for
example, that when I voted for a tort reform measure that was fiercely opposed
by the trial lawyers, I got attacked pretty hard from the left.
During the
Roberts --
WALLACE: John Roberts, Supreme Court.
OBAMA: John Roberts
nomination, although I voted against him, I strongly defended some of my
colleagues who had voted for him on the Daily Kos, and was fiercely attacked as
somebody who is, you know, caving in to Republicans on these fights.
In fact,
there are a lot of liberal commentators who think I'm too accommodating. So here
is my philosophy. I want to do what works for the American people. And both at
the state legislative level and at the federal legislative level, I have always
been able to work together with Republicans to find compromise and to find
common ground.

Banking Problems

John McCain has been trying to pull off a move to the right in the past year, including boasts of being against regulation. His detractors have tried using his words against him to tie him to deregulation in the banking industry and therefore to the current credit crisis. The facts don't really back either side.

In Bush's first term, his administration attempted to enact more supervision on Fannie Mae. From the New York Times:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory
overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a
decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a
new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision
of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the
two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

Opposition to this plan was voiced by Democratic Congressman Barney Frank

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a
bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National
Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter
regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing
low-income and affordable housing.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said
Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the
Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the
more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of
affordable housing.''

The proposal was never enacted. Republicans, including John McCain tried again three years ago to impose some control on Fannie Mae in a Senate bill. McCain stated the following:

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform
Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE
regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will
continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose
to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a
whole.

Once again, the bill was never enacted. Of course it is impossible to say whether this regulation would have prevented was has since happened, but it does prove that McCain was no asleep on the regulation front. He was co-sponsoring a bill to bring about more regulation.

In the Spring of 2007, Austan Goolsbee, who is now a high ranking economic advisor to Barack Obama, praised deregulation of the financial sector as good for the people.

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages
may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing
that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to
let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a
lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” It has allowed them access
to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

So a Republican was pushing regulation while the Democrat was fighting it. Even Bill Clinton remarked on the trouble he had getting Democrats to help, and tied himself to Republicans.

Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC's Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years
have been "resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I
was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac" (video
available here, relevant section at 2:45).

VP for McCain

The pick of Gov. Palin is one that surprised me. His campaign is not currently facing the huge disadvantages faced by Mondale when he made a similar pick of an obscure female politician in 1984. I mentioned to a friend that perhaps McCain is picking her because she successfully ran her campaign railing against corruption. He pointed out her current nepotism scandal, however I assumed the campaign vetted her in connection to this and other issues. Apparently, that wasn't the case, which makes this even riskier.

Imagine her image as a reformer being dismantled weeks before the election. Instead of looking like a maverick Republican, she may look like a corrupt, big city mayor. Perhaps this pick portrays a bit of arrogance on behalf of McCain since it is a pick that is meant to throw a bone to the base rather than independents. The arrogance is in McCain thinking that he has the right stuff to sway the independents in spite of this VP pick.

UPDATE:

Her daughter is knocked up, which may provide a temporary sympathy swing, especially given that some on the left have been behaving in a sleazy manner with all the rumors. However, it is just another episode of the constant cuts that have inflicted her since the announcement. After a while, the cuts add up.

Progressive street cred

Among some on the left, Sen. Obama has been seen as a bit too centrist at times, best exemplified by his decision to vote for Pres. Bush's FISA bill after stating he was very against telecom immunity. Liberal voices are now about two months away from the election, so they have decided that now is not the time to turn wobbly. The more progressive voices are now starting to say, "He is one of us". Kos described it as "a full-throated defense of progressive principles". He went further to say

"To be honest, this is the speech -- aggressive and unabashedly populist --
I expected Biden to give. I couldn't be more pleased to have gotten it instead
from the standard bearer himself."

Biden the populist? The senator who the Netroots refer to as the Senator representing MBNA and championed the Patriot Act? So much for reality having a liberal bias. Another blogger, who is far more populist, David Sirota seems to be in general election mode as well, proclaiming that Obama is now following the Sirota script.

If his convention speech tonight is any indication, Barack Obama has (finally) signaled that progressive economic populism is going to be the central thrust of Democrats campaign in the stretch run of the 2008 election.

This is not the first incarnation of Obama as the populist though. He spent some time in the primaries bashing NAFTA, only to be undercut by an aide who told the Canadians that it was just talk. After the primaries, Obama even admitted the free trade rhetoric got overheated.

So now the Dem blogs are in full general election mode, this is summed up in an interview with Naomi Klein. She goes after liberal institutions

But a huge amount of the progressive infrastructure, in terms of policy institutes, think tanks, magazines, blogs, is pretty much part of the Obama machine and is sort of suspending a fair bit of their critical thinking. They're kind of in war mode, they're in crisis mode, and it's "We have to keep McCain out, and if we have to sacrifice some of our honesty and integrity to do that, then so be it. We'll deal with it after the vote."

She details that Obama is not anti-war and that Moveon.org is failing its members by not pointing this out to them, and are reduced to the role of "cheerleader". Klein points to democrats on Wall Street who want Obama to soften his tax plan and describes one Obama advisor as:

Jason Furman is a young economist. I think he's 37 years old. And he's actually best known for his defenses of Wal-Mart. He's written papers, taken on people like Barbara Ehrenreich, saying that Wal-Mart is actually a force of progressive good because of its low prices

Klein has had some problems in the past with the truth, she severely misrepresented Milton Friedman as a neo-con, but I think she has a better grasp of who is with her and who is against her on her own side of the political spectrum. Klein clearly points out how vastly different she is from Obama, yet many of the same websites that heap praise on Naomi Klein, do the same to Sen. Obama. A chart from Politcal Compass Test shows how relatively close Obama and McCain are to each other, when compared to many of the scores Daily Kos posters include in their signature lines. I have no great liking for Naomi Klein, but at least she will state what Obama is and isn't.

Bush, the Taliban and the leftwing blogosphere

When is it ok to let people starve to death? If you are a left wing nutcase, the answer is if President. Bush is the one offering the food. Recent related posts on Daily Kos and Democratic Underground undercut the claims that the left is a force of truth and is a force of compassion. The recommended diary appeared on Daily Kos, trying to slam Bush for providing food assistance to the starving Afghans who suffered from drought and the neglect of the Taliban. Many sources on the left, and even some on the right, stated that the aid was a gift to the Taliban, or was given in cash directly to them. The diarist quoted the Nation magazine spouting a huge untruth:

That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State
Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban

George Orwell once stated that "political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters." A liberal media blog shot down these mistatements years ago. Spinsanity published rebuttals to these falsehoods from assorted hacks such as Robert Scheer and Michael Moore. Spinsanity pointed out the inconvenient truth that the aid was in the form of food and bypassed the Taliban.

Drawing on work by Bryan Carnell of Leftwatch, Brendan pointed out that the $43 million was not aid to the Taliban government. Instead, the money was a gift of wheat, food commodities, and food security programs distributed to the Afghan people by agencies of the United Nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Secretary of State Colin Powell specifically stated, in fact, that the aid "bypasses the Taliban, who have done little to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people, and indeed have done much to exacerbate
it."

The left mocks the right for being uneducated, easily led, and willing to suspend reality for the sake of its ideology. Yet many kossites believed this as can be seen in the comments. The comments expressed outrage, the cliched critiques of the media falling down on the job, too many conspiracy theories to list(including funding 9/11), and even the old one that the US was the main supplier to Iraq in the 1980's (the USSR and the French provided the vast majority of Saddam's military). Another poster, in a complaint about the mainstream media, indicts the lefty press in spreading this falsehood:

Unfortunately,this was written and known for year and no one wanted to listen, when it was brought up (the media or the gov't). But this was definitely on progressive, public and black radio back in 2001+. Especially WBAI, 99.5 FM in NYC. Anytime there's a war, or a
violent act, they get all the experts and info. Air America, was forced to have
many of Pacifica's (their natinal affiliation of public radio) guest, to spread
this unbelievable type news.

The liberal blogs hold themselves out as the last bastion of the truth and they can't get away with spreading lies because their people are too sophisticated, educated and righteous to let falsehoods stand. Yet this bit of arrogance has even begun to be challenged by the leftist bloggers themselves:

I used to think that the Left blogs (and it is something I try to be)were
dedicated to one thing though - accuracy. Maybe we did not report all the facts,
or all the polls or all of the story, but we tried to make sure we were accurate
about the statements, as opposed to opinions, we did make. Especially when writing about Democrats. After the most recent Democratic Primary, no one can claim that that is true anymore.

A few comments in the diary point out the facts about the aid, but they are widely ignored, or have responses that are even more disturbing than the original lies. One poster , as well as the original diarist, was upset that we fed starving people and that it might have freed up money for the Taliban to buy weapons.

Do you not see that when the U.S. and U.N. provided food for Afghanistan, the Taliban didn't have to spend their own $43 million? They
saved their own money and spent it on. . .not food.

If the world community decided to withhold aid to starving people in totalitarian regimes, as these compassionate liberals suggest, then it should be the policy of all right thinking people to let Zimbabweans starve to death because feeding them frees up money for Mugabe to be a thug. But as a couple other posters brought up, the Taliban wasn't bothering to feed their people in the first place.

A thread on Democratic Underground was started based upon this diary. Commentors here also took aim at the media with one poster saying he send this information along to MSNBC's Countdown. Others used this a proof of a right wing media machine suppressing the misdeeds of the Rethugs . So unless the media spreads false, left wing propaganda, it is considered right wing by the nutroots community.

In their quest to be outraged by the deeds of the Bush administration, the clowns should have considered this from the State Department:

Even before this latest commitment, the United States was by far the
largest provider of humanitarian assistance for Afghans. Last year, we provided
about $114 million in aid. With this new package, our humanitarian assistance to date this year will reach $124 million. This includes over 200,000 tons of wheat.

The previous year mentioned in the briefing was when President Clinton was in office. This makes the faux outrage of the left even more foolish.

Tale of Two Press Secretaries

Bush's press secretary, Tony Snow, passed away over the weekend from cancer. One blogger at Daily Kos left a nice diary explaining how Snow was a friend of his liberal preacher's. For the party that claims to hold a monopoly on compassion, kind words for the dead were too much for some of its members. The diary has a slew of comments that blamed Snow for all sorts of sins.

Similar items appeared at other blogs, including Democratic Underground. The original threads dealing with his death led to the moderators warning their members to behave. One topic was a kind tribute from someone I am not overly fond of, Keith Olbermann, but he did a great job of expressing his sorrow at Snow's passing. Other posters were not so kind, blaming Snow for the deaths of US soldiers and Iraqis. One asked the following:

I grieve for 4118 soldiers and a million Iraqis. Without Snow's lies, how
many of them might still be alive?

Kind of an interesting question, how responsibly are the mouthpieces for administrations for their actions. According to many at liberal sites, the spokesperson is quite responsible. Among the more vile statements I have read, more than one condemned Tony Snow to an eternity of hell. Since the left values equal justice, I wonder if we can expect widespread condemnation of the Press Secretary under LBJ during Vietnam. A war that was started based upon a non-existent attack in the Gulf of Tonkin. A war that caused the deaths of nearly 60,000 US soldiers. On the day of Snow's death, another diary was recommended which discussed that Press Secretary, Bill Moyers. Since these are politically sophisticated people, and they claim to value honesty over everything else, I expected the diary to bring up the parallels between Snow and Moyers, Bush and LBJ, and Vietnam and Iraq.

No such luck, the piece was to praise Moyers and those who commented upon the diary heaped all kinds of praise on him, calling him a "national treasure" and "a gem". The press secretary during the most disastrous American war was being praised by the same people who condemned Tony Snow on the day of his passing.