I think it is worth considering how differently repugs will view their teabagging day "triumph" in comparison to everyone else who saw something pretty silly and distinctly fringe. It is being, and will continue to be, pounded into their heads by the usual suspects that this was a great triumph. Since they only listen to and trust FauxCoulterHannLimRove Inc., that is what they will believe. Contrast that to the pre Iraq War protests. People at those protests knew the truth: there were huge numbers of people, they were attended by a broad cross section of often distinctly non-fringe Americans, and the media pretended - went out of their way to say- they were not those things. Weird. The media failed in both instances, but in opposite ways. For example, do you think Faux will show these two weekday pictures from BarbinMD Teabaggers v. Democracy
St. Louis teabaggers protesting against Barack Obama:
Barack Obama speaking in St. Louis:
You make the call ...
Let's do a little comparison of protests in Washington D.C.
First, Republican teabagging, courtesy of Aaron Wiener from The Washington Independent:
And from 2004, a women's rights march:
Update: From malibu1964:
The 2004 march was specifically pro-choice. Yes, a "women's" issue, but it was for a specific issue...it was called the "March for Women's Lives."
Josh Marshall: Hmmm ... Does the lack of any actual tax increases undercut this anti-tax rebellion?
- atrios Giant Puppets:
All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.
- a Repeat, A.L. gets it exactly right about the WATB party. - Anonymous Liberal: Adventures in Misdirected Anger
The fact that the ire of these protesters is so clearly directed at President Obama and the Democratic Party, after many, many years of Republican rule led us to this point, is strong evidence that what these protests are really about is losing. The Boston Tea Party was carried out by people who felt that they had no say in shaping the rules that governed their lives. In that sense, the current crop of teabaggers share something in common with them. The difference, of course, is that the original teabaggers had no say because a foreign government controlled them from afar. In this case, the teabaggers have no say because their chosen leaders ran this country into the ground and got voted out of office en masse. It sucks to feel powerless, but when the reason you feel powerless is because the majority of people in the country no longer share your views, that's just called democracy.
- Joe Sudbay (DC):
Well, now America knows what the Republican Party is all about. It was on full display yesterday. It's not just the "Party of NO." It's a party filled with people who just loathe the president -- and it has nothing to do with taxes. It's something more visceral and disturbing. Those teabagging events also proved, once and for all to anyone who doubted, that FOX is nothing but a GOP propaganda machine. Those aren't journalists on FOX. There isn't even a patina of objectivity.
The teabaggers are probably still excited about their big day. It looked like a lot of them don't get out much. But, they achieved more than we could have hoped. They showed America just how hateful and extreme the GOP has become. And, that wasn't the fringe of the GOP. That was the heart and soul of it.
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....
Honestly, though, I agree with Mike Tomasky that if Texas wants to leave the union we should probably just let them go and I’d say the same for other southern states that feel oppressed by our efforts to use federal tax money to help them take care of their unemployed citizens. Back during the Civil War, the cause of keeping the union together was intertwined with the cause of fighting the great evil of slavery. But assume we just welcome migrants from the Republic of Texas with open arms if they want to flee north, there’d be no comparable problem with letting Texas leave.
Obviously, one advantage of large-scale secession of the most conservative states is that it would be a lot easier to pass progressive legislation. An aspect of Civil War history that people don’t tend to appreciate is that the temporary departure of the Dixie bloc of Senators allowed a huge flowering of legislative activity that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. In addition to prosecuting the war, the Lincoln-era GOP took sweeping action on industrial policy, infrastructure, land reform, etc. much of which would have been extraordinarily difficult to accomplish had the southerners just stayed in their seats and used the considerable levers of obstruction that are available to legislative minorities.
Sully: And Then They Came For The Republicans ... Ctd.
Just One Minute explains why the right isn't being completely hypocritical for whining about that DHS study:
Andrew Sullivan chooses to miss the point and savor an "I told you so moment", exulting in his criticism of Bush's shredding of the Constitution and expansion of the "Surveillance State". Uh huh - the problem with this DHS study is not that they are threatening extra-Constitutional surveillance and interrogation of people; it is that they are coming very close to attempting to criminalize non-violent political dissent. That is deeply problematic even if they do it with all the proper warrants.
And when the Bushies cordoned off demonstrators and tapped phones without warrant, and tracked protesters at the GOP conventions in New York and St Paul, the right-wing blogosphere was complaining, right? Right. I remember now. Glenn Reynolds, another libertarian who suddenly re-discovered civil liberties and fiscal discipline on January 20, 2009, addresses the point by claiming he was complaining under Clinton! Doesn't that, er, somewhat prove the point: that Reynolds is a libertarian, as long as Democrats are in power? If a Republican is in office, the executive branch - even taken to the absurd extremes of Bush and Cheney - can do no wrong.
Chris in Paris: The Goldman Sachs profit that wasn't
The Washington Post better be careful or else Goldman might hire another swarm of attorneys to sue the newspaper for talking about the company. Yesterday Goldman reported a first quarter profit (forecast-busting, they say!) of $1.81 billion. Pretty impressive in this climate. Too bad Goldman somehow forgot about a few small losses in December that they skipped over. Because they shifted to being a bank, they changed their quarter and somehow - who knows how - overlooked almost $3 billion in commercial real estate losses. Yes, it's legal because of the change in quarterly reporting but it hardly signals a healthy Goldman Sachs. If anything it only highlights the high slime factor of this menace. Of course, they get away with whatever Washington allows them to get away with.The company included a page of charts in its Monday news release showing its December results, but it didn't include a narrative description of those results as it did for the January-through-March period. In a conference call with analysts yesterday, Chief Financial Officer David A. Viniar said the firm incurred $2.7 billion in "fair value losses" in December, meaning losses related to declines in the value of assets it holds. Among those write-downs were $1 billion for "non-investment grade loans," Viniar said, according to a transcript.Obviously too much discretion if they can choose to ignore $2.7 billion for now.
Viniar told analysts that the company faced "a difficult market environment" in December.
Michael Williams, director of research at Gradient Analytics, which specializes in examining corporate accounting, said companies have a lot of discretion in deciding when to recognize gains and losses.
Benen: SAY HELLO TO 'OVERCOLLECTION'....
Abuse of the already-weakened protections relating to the NSA's eavesdropping program? You don't say.From BarbinMD at Daily Kos:The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.
Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in "overcollection" of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.
The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.'s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.
For what it's worth, the Justice Department conceded that there may have been problems -- which is to say, the NSA apparently went too far in its surveillance -- and officials "detected issues that raised concerns." The Office of the Director of National Intelligence alluded to "inadvertent mistakes," and the NYT report said officials claim to have "resolved" the issues by changing the program.
Whether the apparent abuses were deliberate or unintentional is hard to say; the report, for understandable reasons, is a little vague. Whether the agency "actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them," is also unclear.
But the part of the piece that's bound to raise eyebrows on the Hill points to "earlier domestic-surveillance activities" that included an attempt to "wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip." The wiretap never actually happened, but the NSA apparently believed the unnamed congressman, as part of a congressional delegation in the Middle East, may have come into contact with someone with ties to terrorism.
Of course, the fact that the NSA even considered oversight-free surveillance of a member of Congress has caused something of a stir. As Kevin Drum noted, this might be a silver lining of the apparent abuse: "[M]aybe this will finally motivate Congress to take NSA surveillance more seriously. Having one of their own members come within a hair's breadth of being an NSA target ought to concentrate their minds wonderfully, if anything will."
- Kevin Drum also said: Jesus. If a member of Congress isn't a "United States person" protected from warrantless surveillance by every version of FISA that's ever been on the books, who is? Shouldn't this have set off alarm bells at every possible level at NSA, rather than merely being "ultimately blocked" because "some" officials had "concerns" about it?
Karl Rove thinks (ha!) that the hundred or so thousand people that gathered yesterday, out of the three-hundred or so million people in the country, is bad news for the Democrats.
Michelle Malkin spews idiotic paranoia about a Department of Homeland Security report, ignoring that it was ordered a year ago by the Bush administration.
Joe Klein takes on the "world's stupidest argument":
Bush flunkies trying to argue that Obama is more polarizing than Bush was. Given the fact that Obama had to take dramatic action, at home and abroad, to start lifting the country from the mess Bush made almost everywhere--and also begin to turn the country away from the myopia and greed of the Reagan era--it's amazing that he hasn't raised more dust or teabags. And, I should add the fact that the alleged polarization mostly results from the fact that Obama gets extremely low ratings from self-identified Republicans, who constitute an extremist shard of a party at this point, is a badge of honor. (Commenter sgwhiteinfla points out that the polarization is also the result of overwhelming--88%--support from Democrats.)
In the long run, it's a safe historical bet that Bush will prove more polarizing than Obama because he was such an abject failure in the job--I doubt we'll ever see Obama submerge to approval ratings in the mid-20s, or launch wars peremptorily without cause or purpose. The constant sniping from Rove, Wehner and the others during Obama's first 100 days is a deeply neurotic reaction to the enormity of their own cockups in office. It shows a profound lack of class or grace, but then, that's no surprise with these guys, is it? They ran the country like thugs, and thugs they remain.
Philandering Bishops and Pirates.
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