Needlenose

Forget privatizing Social Security with individual retirement accounts – that idea is so 2003.   John “Orange Man” Boehner rolls out the newest GOP plan to ‘fix’ Social Security – everybody will just have to work until they die.  What’s next, Orange Man – making up for lost tax revenues by bringing in ‘younger’ workers – like maybe child labor?  With loonies like “Ayn” Rand Paul waiting in the wings for the upcoming election I wouldn’t be too surprised to see that concept mooted.  And with the current reactionary makeup of the SCOTUS, it’s not inconceivable that they might take a strict ‘Originalist’ interpretation of the Federal Government’s ability to restrict labor practices (they’ve ruled in favor of child labor before).

To personalize this just a bit, my mom is still working in her late 70s, and my dad was working up until his first cancer treatments – I imagine a lot of people could say that Boehner’s fix is already the Status Quo.

Wurzelbacher and Borkin…kinda rolls off your tongue, huh?  And when they don’t win, they can parley their collective 30 minutes of fame into their own Faux News political talking heads show.

Good thing for Borky that he didn’t mouth off to “Dick” Cheney – he would have ended up with buckshot instead of sprinkles on the old snowcone.

Well it’s official now.  As predicted, the SCOTUS has thrown out all gun control legislation.  I wonder how many Columbines we need to go through before the pendulum begins to swing in the other direction?  On a more humorous note, this would be a great time to get arrested for possessing a hand-grenade  or an RPG, in order to take that case before the SCOTUS.  The Constitution just says ‘arms,’ and I’m sure they never envisioned the weapons of 2010.

*Update 6/29/10* And don’t expect the SCOTUS to reverse their decision anytime soon – Obama’s nominee is Gun-Nuttier than the man she is replacing.

This morning, Josh Marshall spent some time navel-gazing about the Supreme Court decision announced yesterday that questioned the conviction of Enron fraudster Jeffrey Skilling — and, more broadly, challenged the “intangible right to honest services” on which the Skilling verdict was partly based:

To put it very generally, the “honest services” theory allowed a much broader theory of criminal activity than those used in cases of bribery itself. Basically, if I’m working for the people of Kentucky and I’m in effect in the pay of a private interest, I’m depriving the people of the state of “honest services” even if the prosecutor cannot prove, narrowly speaking, that I took a bribe. In short, it makes it much easier for prosecutors to make their case.

The Court unanimously decided to scale back “honest services” and the conservative wing (Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy but not Alito) wanted to get rid of it altogether.

If you’ve followed TPMMuckraker over the last five years, I’d venture to say that the majority, probably the great majority of the public corruption cases we’ve covered relied in whole or in part on “honest services. So if it’s been dramatically curtailed that could undermine a lot of convictions.

I have to assume that those dissenting opinions, in particular, weren’t motivated by jurisprudence (Scalia? Thomas?! Obviously not…) or even ideology so much as an instinct for self-preservation. Strict constitutionalists or not, you gotta think that for the guys who overturned the popular vote in Bush v. Gore — and have since followed that up by determining that the 1st Amendment right to free speech should be weighted by how much money you have in Citizens United, among other atrocities — the last thing in the world they’d want would be an established legal right of the public to “honest services.”

A legal “right” like that could get certain Supreme Court justices in trouble if folks started taking it seriously.

They're coming to get you, Rand!

There he goes again, shooting his mouth off!  “Ayn” Rand Paul vows to stop illegal immigration by building a vast underground electric fence on our southern border.  Underground?  Who is he planning to stop, the Mole People?

Or as the Mole People themselves put in (courtesy of the Residents in Mark of the Mole):

“We have left our lives, we have left our land,
We have left behind all we understand,
Now we must cry out, yes we must demand –
Let my children live in a land that’s low,
Where the holes are deeper than light can go;
Let them have not pride but instead a soul
That can see the shame of the hands that glow.!”

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has a couple of posts today about the boost of rhetorical adrenaline Democrats have gotten from the reflexive apology Rep. Joe Barton (R – Big Oil’s Pocket) issued to BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday.  Saying that “Dems are determined not to let the Joe Barton story recede into the background, now that he’s retracted his apology,” Sargent notes:

The DNC has rapidly put together a new ad starring Barton that calls on Republicans to “stop apologizing to big oil” and says that if the GOP takes over the House, Barton will be in charge of the probe into the spill as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

In a follow-up post, Sargent quotes Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), promising this won’t be the end:

“Joe Barton said publicly where the majority of Republicans stand on energy — protecting the big oil companies,” Van Hollen argued, pointing to the fact that the Republican Study Committee, which has over 100 members, has called the BP escrow fund a “shakedown.” … ”This goes way beyond Joe Barton. It’s part of a larger pattern where Republicans in Congress are on the side of big corporate interests.”

…”We’re going to be making the point again and again that Joe Barton’s comments on big oil [show] Republicans in the House stand on the side of big corporate interests against consumers and taxpayers.“

In fact, Roll Call reports that the DNC has begun fundraising to support the new ad, and David Dayen notes in today’s Roundup that individual Democratic candidates are starting to blast their GOP opponents for remarks similar to Barton’s.

This visceral, who’s-on-your-side framing should be familiar to anyone aware of populist Democratic messaging over the years, and it’s a far sight more potent than the emotionally-drained “party of results” versus “party of no” approach that DNC chairman Tim Kaine was threatening promising a couple of months ago.  (A hint, guys: If unemployment is still hovering between 9.5% and 10% come November, don’t expect that “party of results” stuff to have much resonance.)

But however refreshing it is to hear Democrats forthrightly characterizing Republicans as what they are, it’s equally sobering to think of what it took to reach this point — an epic ecological catastrophe, extended so long that the president’s poll numbers began to be dragged downward, pushing his party to find a potential angle of counterattack.  Before that, it was all about mealy-mouthed “bipartisanship,” pragmatism, and attempts at partnering with politicians and interest groups diametrically opposed to the needs and wants of ordinary Americans.

So, unless Democrats are willing to revisit a more effective economic stimulus program, a public option for health insurance, and a host of other issues, it’s hard to see this rhetorical shift as anything but a conversion of convenience, scheduled to expire just after this fall’s elections.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

(Note: I had this title last night, when I read the New York Times article discussed below and started to write a post… then procrastinated until everybody else in the world had posted about it waited to consider other viewpoints.  So even though Spencer Ackerman and probably others have riffed on the same obvious gag, I’m not changing it!)

In an apparent burst of nostalgia for the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney administration, when anonymous “senior administration officials” would bluff high-profile journalists for major newspapers into peddling dubious propaganda (somehow puffed up into sounding like a major scoop), the New York Times reported last night:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

Showing that a Democratic president is now in office it’s no longer the early 2000s, even mainstream journalists have reacted to the NYT “scoop” with skepticism bordering on outright scorn.  Meanwhile, among progressive bloggers, the reflexive hue-and-cry has predictably arisen: This is just a pretext to stay in Afghanistan forever to control its mineral wealth, just like we’re staying in Iraq forever to control its oil!

Which might be more persuasive were it not for the fact that we aren’t staying in Iraq forever (even as wrangling over forming a government continues, the withdrawal of U.S. troops is proceeding on schedule, with American influence fading concomitantly), and Iraqi politicians — who, unsurprisingly, covet the benefits of the country’s black gold for themselves — never have gotten around to signing over major oil fields wholesale to U.S. corporations.

Nor do I think Obama wants to stay in Afghanistan forever — certainly not long enough for him to reap the downsides of an endless, unsuccessful war while U.S. megacorporations in future decades garner the benefits.  To me, the president’s seemingly contradictory announcement last December of an immediate escalation combined with a hoped-for exit timetable was clearly designed to mimic Dubya’s 2007 “surge” in Iraq… that is, not so much a plan to win the war as an attempt to postpone the inevitable while being able to say we gave it our best shot (and, perhaps, take public-relations advantage of any unexpected lucky breaks, as occurred in Iraq).

In fact, although today’s NYT story is undoubtedly propaganda of some sort, its intent may be the opposite of what everyone is assuming.  Instead of providing an excuse for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, what if it inspires other forces in the region to hasten our exit? Karzai is known to be greedy and dishonest; why would reports of vast mineral wealth encourage him to be a loyal and scrupulous American puppet rather than tempting him further to ditch his former benefactors and cut a deal with the Taliban to split the booty?

Even more intriguing is the Chinese angle acknowledged by the Times:

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

Anyone else get a whiff of Br’er Rabbit from that passage?  “Oh, no, whatever you do, don’t push us out and entangle yourselves deeper in Afghanistan’s problems — please, anything but that, China!”

Hell, if we could get out of the business of providing armed security for Chinese-owned copper mines and lure the People’s Republic into taking our place, battling the Taliban and miscellaneous warlords for control of all those buried minerals, that would be nearly a best-case scenario at this point.  (It would be even more entertaining if the reported mother lodes turned out to be illusory… hasn’t someone written a science-fiction novel or something to that effect?)

That’s my conspiracy theory, and I intend to stick with it.

Louisiana Republican

The gushing goo destroying the livelihoods of the folks who live on Louisiana’s coast hasn’t damped the ardor of Louisiana Repug leaders to drill, baby drill.  You know, I feel bad for the poor Louisianans, but riddle me this – why do they continue to vote for abusive politicians?  Let Jindal go clean up the fucking mess his philosophy has created.

*Update 9:50P PT* Forrest Gump in 2010: bad news, BP oil spill destroyed his livelihood, his entire shrimping fleet had to be shut down.  Good news – he bought Apple stock, and held on to it!  Only question is, will he vote for David “double down on offshore drilling & liability cap” Vitter again this year, or will he realize that his shrimping business would be better off with a vote for Melancon?  Remember, stupid is as stupid does…

Finally!!  A US President calls for an end to the ludicrous tax breaks that keep fossil fuel prices artificially low!  But you have to really push this, Mr. President, you have a golden window of opportunity here.  If you wimp-out now, it will be years if not decades before another President can address this.