October 25, 2015

1997 Daschle's very bad abortion bill to stop another very bad abortion bill. Bad idea.

The war on women, the war on the reproductive choices of women, the abortion wars have gone on for years.

So often the Democrats have tried to compromise with the GOP's extremists on this and other issues.

I wonder if instead of trying to compromise with those who tolerate no compromise....that we stood our ground and made clear that some rights do not fall within the realm of government control in a democratic society. Take a firm stand instead of offering alternatives that were just a little less bad than those of the opponents.

From CNN 1997:

Clinton May Compromise On Abortion Bill. Daschle proposal is the key

WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, May 13) -- White House officials say President Bill Clinton could accept a Democratic compromise to limit late-term abortions. The proposal is an alternative to Republican legislation that the president has threatened to veto.

Last week Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) introduced an alternative to the contentious abortion bill banning any kind of abortion if the fetus is viable, unless the mother's life is at risk or if the procedure will protect her from "grievous injury."

Daschle's less restrictive bill could serve as a buffer to a bill sponsored by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), which is expected to come up for debate in the Senate later this week. Santorum's bill makes no exception for a woman's health, but would allow abortions if the mother's life is at risk. The legislation has already passed the House.

Here are a lot more details about this very bad bill of Tom Daschle.

Daschle Abortion Bill 1997

NOW denounced the bill.

NOW Executive Vice President Kim Gandy said today that abortion ban legislation prepared by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., is a politically expedient compromise that seriously imperils women's lives and health and expands government intrusion into private medical matters.

"We believe the Daschle approach is unconstitutional, as is the Republican ban that denies a woman the right to an abortion to preserve her health -- a right that Roe v. Wade and other cases have consistently protected," Gandy said.

"Daschle's so-called compromise bill, as quoted in the New York Times, permits an exception to the ban for `a severely debilitating disease or impairment specifically caused by the pregnancy (emphasis added),' but makes no provision for a pre-existing, life- and health-threatening `debilitating disease or impairment' that is being exacerbated by the pregnancy. This could include kidney disease, severe hypertension and some cancers. Nor does the Daschle bill allow for an abortion in cases of severe fetal abnormality where it is unlikely the fetus would live long outside the womb, even with technological support.

"The physician certification requirement and the potential loss of a medical license in the Daschle language invites government scrutiny of private medical matters and threatens doctor-patient confidentiality. The intent of this and other abortion ban bills is to control women and to limit their ability to make critical reproductive decisions that affect their families, their health and their lives. These bills represent the ultimate in Congressional arrogance," Gandy charged.

More from the link:

Daschle proudly pointed out in an NPR interview in 1997 that his bill was even more restrictive than that of the GOP. Yet it had started out as a defensive bill to stop a worse bill.

SENATOR SPENCER ABRAHAM, (R) Michigan: We should be able to end this process, and we should be able to end it in the context of this legislation, which provides, I think, protections for the life of the mother in sufficient fashion to meet whatever standards society might demand.

KWAME HOLMAN: A Democratic amendment was briefly considered and rejected, giving way to the major alternative of the abortion debate. The bill by Minority Leader Tom Daschle has attracted support of Republicans and yesterday the endorsement of President Clinton.

SENATOR TOM DASCHLE, Minority Leader: That is really the fundamental difference between the two pending bills. We ban abortion; they ban a procedure. They allow all the other abortive procedures available--dilation and evacuation, induction, hysterotomies, hysterectomies--those are still legally available. What we ban are all of those procedures--all of them.

That is a Democratic minority leader saying those words. He was proud of his bill banning more stuff than the Republican bill.

It would have caused physicians to lose their licenses if they did not follow the details of this invasive law.

We can not compromise with extremists. We do better when we take strong stands and speak out for what is right.

October 23, 2015

Let's talk Third Way. Some links about its founding and the founders.

One link I found at The Guardian in 2003 recounts the founding and purpose from the point of view of Tony Blair.

A brief history of the third way

What was the third way all about?
The so-called third way is New Labour's attempt to build itself an ideological foundation. In the face of accusations that the decision to re-christen the party and re-write clause IV was motivated purely by electoralism, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson sought to prove their ideological convictions.

.....Wasn't Bill Clinton involved?
Bill Clinton's electoral success after renaming his party the New Democrats was an inspiration to Mr Blair and his fellow Labour modernisers. Both shared the belief that a new ideological compass was needed.

In September 1998, Mr Clinton and Mr Blair held a conference in New York to officially launch their new ideology. Both said they rejected the neo-liberal belief that everything can be left to the market, but also saw the traditional left-of-centre faith in state intervention in the economy as outdated.

.....What's the state of play now?
Three years on, however, the outlook for the third way looks bleak. A Republican is in the White House and Mr Schröder has turned away from his earlier fascination with the Clinton-Blair outlook towards a more traditional leftwing stance.

TIME carried an article about this in 1998. They called it the Third Way Wonkfest. The link is still there, but it's behind a firewall. I saved a few paragraphs.

Tony Blair, the New Dems and the Third Way Wonkfest 1998.

After Bill Clinton and Tony Blair finish with the elegant dinners and toasts at the G-8 summit this week in England, the real fun begins: the two leaders will lock themselves in a room with a clutch of top officials to talk about government policy for four or five hours. The Sunday meeting at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country mansion north of London, will be the third such bilateral seminar, following one at the White House, when Blair visited in February, and the inaugural 12-hr. "wonkathon" at Chequers in November, when Hillary Clinton sat in for her husband.

The lofty chatfests symbolize the intimate political relationship between Clinton, a "new Democrat," and Blair, creator of new Labour. Each claims to embody a type of politics that is not just a poll-driven centrism but a "third way," a favorite Blair slogan and a phrase that Clinton highlighted in this year's State of the Union message. "Both governments have to react to challenges like globalization and better education for workers, and we have similar perspectives on what's needed," says White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, who organizes the meetings with his British counterpart, David Miliband, Blair's policy chief.

On the agenda for Chequers are social security, welfare, crime, health policy and education, with eight to 10 participants from each side.

The DLC, a very strong think tank at the time, were very pleased that Tony Blair was in support of the Iraq War. In fact they even named the Democrats who voted for the war the "Blair Democrats."

From the WP

The Blair Democrats: Ready for Battle

Will Marshall May 1, 2003

The U.S.-led coalition's stunning success in liberating Iraq is undoubtedly a triumph for President Bush. But Karl Rove shouldn't get too giddy, because it may be a boon for some Democrats, too.

After all, four of the leading Democratic presidential contenders -- Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sens. Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry and John Edwards -- not only voted to support the war but also joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair in demanding that Bush challenge the United Nations to live up to its responsibilities to disarm Iraq. This position put these "Blair Democrats" in sync with the vast majority of Americans who said they would much rather attack Saddam Hussein's regime with United Nations backing than without it. And it puts them at odds with what Kerry called the "blustery unilateralism" of the president, which combined with French obstructionism to rupture not only the United Nations but the Atlantic alliance as well.

Like Bush, these Democrats did not shrink from the use of force to end Hussein's reign of terror. Like Blair, they saw the Iraq crisis as a test of Western resolve and the United Nations' credibility as an effective instrument of collective security.

And from Lee Fang at The Nation in 2013:

GOP Donors and K Street Fuel Third Way’s Advice for the Democratic Party

Third Way, a centrist think tank that portrays itself as a Democratic group, has some advice for the party: avoid economic populism at all costs. In a column for The Wall Street Journal today, the group argues that the party should steer clear of creating a strong safety net, and criticizes Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s call for universal pre-K funded through an upper-income tax increase as a foolhardy idea for national Democrats.


......Buried inside the annual report for Third Way is a revelation that the group relies on a peculiar DC consulting firm to raise half a million a year: Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart. Peck Madigan is no ordinary nonprofit buckraiser. The group is, in fact, a corporate lobbying firm that represents Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, Amgen, AT&T, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, MasterCard, New York Life Insurance, PhRMA and the US Chamber of Commerce, among others.

The two organizations complement each other well. Peck Madigan signs as a lobbyist for the government of New Zealand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal; Third Way aggressively promotes the deal. Peck Madigan clients push for entitlement cuts, and so does Third Way.

Notice that Humana, a major health insurance company, lists its $50,000 donation to Third Way not as a donation to a think tank but as part of its yearly budget spent on lobbying activity, up there with the Florida Chamber and other trade associations. The company views financial gifts to Third Way as part of its strategy for increasing its profit-making political influence.

What’s more, Third Way’s leadership has tenuous connections to the Democratic Party it hopes to shape. Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager listed as a trustee on Third Way’s 2012 annual disclosure, bundled $556,031 for Mitt Romney last year. Third Way board member Derek Kaufman, another hedge fund executive, also gave to Romney.

They call themselves "progressives", but they are not at all.

They represent everything that Bernie Sanders is opposing right now.

Bill Clinton was there at the founding of the DLC as well. The founder, Al From, made it clear they wanted to have a "bloodless revolution" in our Democratic Party.

The DLC group is sometimes portrayed as a pro-Wall Street set of lobbyists. And From did recruit hedge fund legends like Michael Steinhardt to fund his movement. But to argue these people were corrupt or motivated by a pay to play form of politics is wrong. From is clearly a reformer and an ideologue, and his colleagues believed they were serving the public interest. “Make no mistake about it,” wrote From in a memo about his organization’s strategy, “what we hope to accomplish with the DLC is a bloodless revolution in our party." It is not unlike what the conservatives accomplished in the Republican Party during the 1960s and 1970s.

Al From's words to Bill Clinton about NAFTA show whose interests the DLC and its new form, the Third Way, had in mind.

'“Politically, a victory on NAFTA would assert your leadership over your own party by making it clear that you, not the Democratic leadership in Congress or the interest groups, set the Democratic Party’s agenda on matters of real national importance.”

They may claim to be "progressives", but in thought and deed the two groups are/were "conservative."

October 22, 2015

Neat picture. Back to the future backstage at Jimmy Kimmel.

October 22, 2015

Charles Pierce: Obama needs to cut ties with Kevin Johnson

I agree wholeheartedly. Kevin is married to Michelle Rhee, major education "reformer", and he shares her views. Also some unpleasant things are coming out about him again.

President Obama Needs to Cut Ties with This Alleged Grifter

Charles Pierce says it much more colorfully than I would.

Subtitle:

There is nothing redeeming about Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, and the president should cut him loose.

Getty Justin Sullivan

As I think we've mentioned several dozen times in this shebeen, the president's inexplicable sweet-tooth for the grifters, rounders, and mountebanks of the school "reform" movement is one of the most puzzling aspects of his years in office. One of the most egregious examples of this is the president's willingness to associate with Kevin Johnson, former NBA point guard, mayor of Sacramento, and husband of queen-bee grifter Michelle Rhee. On many levels, Johnson is a truly awful human being.

......Thanks to Deadspin's invaluable Dave McKenna, the onetime bane of evil-dwarf owner Dan Snyder in Washington, we are spelunking pretty regularly into the dark, dank depths of the muck that composes Kevin Johnson's political soul. What we find there is best left to the folks in the HazMat suits to handle. McKenna's most recent expedition has brought back the usual bagful of pure, foul awfulness.

Is there sexual misconduct? Judge for yourself.?

Kevin Johnson Wants Certain People To Not Talk About Kevin Johnson

It’s no secret that Kevin Johnson wants certain girls and women to keep what they have to say about him to themselves. Some of what the former NBA superstar and current scandal-magnet mayor of Sacramento, Calif. is willing to do to convince them is well-known; some less so. The more that comes to light, though, the more outrageous it seems.

Recently, one of Johnson’s attorneys tried to convince one of his many legal adversaries to stop talking to Deadspin—even going so far as to insert a “No Deadspin!” clause into a settlement offer.

This revelation comes as Johnson is in the worst spot of his three-decade run in the public eye. ESPN canceled the debut of Down in the Valley, a documentary that deified Johnson for having finagled $255 million in public money to keep the local NBA franchise in his hometown but totally ignored his well-documented dark side. The seamiest portions of Johnson’s back story involve the many allegations of sexual abuse and harassment that have come his way his way since the mid-1990s. Johnson has never been charged with a sex crime, but ESPN’s shelving the movie comes amid growing suspicions that a key reason none of the abuse claims made against him derailed his rise to power is that he made legal settlements that forced alleged victims to hush up.

....“People try to settle things because they don’t want things drawn out over long periods of time. They don’t want all this hashed out in public,” Maviglio told the Sacramento CBS affiliate last week, when asked why the mayor didn’t fight the allegations instead. “They want to settle things and move on with their lives.”

Making deals with those complaining, deals in which they can not mention any thing about him again.

The tactic of convincing accusers to stay mum appears to have served Johnson well through the years. Deadspin recently reported on Mandi Koba’s allegations that Johnson sexually abused her when she was a teenager. Koba met Johnson in Phoenix in 1995, when he was a superstar with the Phoenix Suns and she was a 15-year-old high school kid. The details of what allegedly ensued over the next several months are contained in a police report and in a video recording of police interviewing Koba. Cops at the time referred to it as an investigation into “a celebrity involved in a reported child molestation.”

Johnson is suing his own city using the name of a group that wants nothing to do with him.

Kevin Johnson Sues Sacramento, Hides Behind Group That Hates Him

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson is suing his own city and a local reporter to prevent the release of his emails. But officials of a mayoral group that the former NBA star and controversy magnet claims to be representing in his lawsuit say they’re not on his side.

“We want nothing to do with Kevin Johnson,” says Vanessa Williams, executive director of the National Conference of Black Mayors, an Atlanta-based organization that Johnson listed as a co-plaintiff in his suit. “He’s not even a member. He tried to ruin this organization. I dare Kevin Johnson to find one person with this organization who supports him. Just one! Everybody with this organization hates Kevin Johnson. Nobody gave him permission to sue for us.”

Agree. President Obama doesn't to hang around with folks like that.

October 19, 2015

It smacks of Socialism.

Found on Twitter.

October 18, 2015

Ridicule of Bernie supporters growing after debate...The Atlantic this time. So childishly done.

A few paragraphs just do not do this snide piece justice. In fact I doubt any number of paragraphs could make this palatable or intelligent.

Here Comes the Berniebro

The Berniebro is very irate when CNN takes its online poll results down. The Berniebro posts about that, too.

The Berniebro, now that you think about it, seems to spend a lot of time on Facebook? You wonder how that graduate degree and/or startup is going.

......The Berniebro is not every Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders’s support skews young, but not particularly male. The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.

The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.

...The Berniebro is tired of reporters not letting this stupid email scandal go.

....The Berniebro, though steadfastly a Berniebro now, will not always be such. You can sense this. Soon, maybe already, the Berniebro will become a Schoolboardbro. Or a Municipalparkingbro. Or, heaven help us, a Localhistoricaldistrictzoningrestrictionsbro.

There is no purpose behind this piece apparently other than anger at us because it's hard to find ugly stuff about Bernie.

I especially like this paragraph from the comments section:

The media's problem here is that they can't do a character assassination on someone so principled, scandal-free, and consistent. So instead they have to take their pickaxe to Sanders's supporters to make people averse to wanting to be associated with these just absolutely contemptible human beings who dare to vote their conscience rather than as the media tells them to.

So it's just politics as usual: divide and conquer. The media is really sour that it doesn't hold the keys to the crown's case, and that we're not being obedient little worker ants like all the pre-internet generations had to be.

If I were the author of that article I would not take much pride in it.

It is helping to make the divisions in the primary worse for no reason at all.

Robinson Meyer is an associate editor at The Atlantic. I would expect more from someone in that position.

October 17, 2015

Bernie: "It is unacceptable that senior citizens and disabled veterans will get no COLA this year."

It is unacceptable that senior citizens and disabled veterans will not be receiving a cost-of-living adjustment.

Strengthen and Expand Social Security

Social Security has a $2.8 trillion surplus. It can pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 19 years (and more than three-quarters after that).

Social Security’s assets aren’t “just paper,” as conservatives sometimes put it. Social Security invests in U.S Treasury bonds, the safest interest-bearing securities in the world.

These are the same bonds wealthy investors have purchased, along with China and other foreign countries. These bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, which in our long history has never defaulted on its debt obligations.

Right now a billionaire pays the same amount of money into Social Security as someone who makes $118,500 a year. That’s because there is a cap on taxable income that goes into the Social Security system.

October 16, 2015

Substitute Sanders for Dean, 2015 for 2004...you see the same media battle all over again.

On edit to clarify: It's the "same battle", the candidates are different, much different. It's the battle that must be fought when the media starts coming out with talking points we know are not true.

Substitute BernieBots or Sandernistas for Deaniacs. We are once again considered the insurgents, sort of on the outside looking in. We are not really considered seriously at all. Yet.

You have two candidates who have taken chances by questioning party policy, irritating the party establishment....but most of all ticking off the media with justified criticism.

It's that ticking off the media that's going to be a deciding factor from now on.

Once again we have a campaign that is using the power of the internet and all the new resources it provides now that were not available in 2004.

Once again we have a candidate who is calling out the media. He's a stronger candidate, and the internet forces have grown. Will it be enough?

I found this article I remembered from 2004 on the media and Howard Dean's campaign. It reminds us that the power of that media can make a campaign and then suddenly destroy it.

When Old Media Confronted Howard Dean

Subtitle:

‘Dean scares the institutional media out of their wits … because of what he and Internet democracy say about them.’

The Howard Dean campaign (much more than Dean himself) has come to stand for the possibility of an Internet democracy. From the beginning there was no separating the “political” and “media” tracks of the Dean campaign’s offensive. Didn’t he say early on that he was running for President because the alternative was to spend the rest of his life yelling at the TV set? Dean began his campaign with a bold exercise in definition—a job of critical journalism that big news organizations don’t perform these days. His defining thrust was against the war in Iraq, in which even before it began the traditional media were embedded. He sounded an antiwar alarm that the institutional media had muffled. Millions of people knew intuitively that his warning was wise; millions more know it now. In large dimensions and small (like his chippy defiance of “Meet the Press” moderator, Tim Russert), Dean’s campaign was a critique of the somnolent self-satisfaction that runs through our housecat press. And lots of people loved him for it.

...What happened to Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire was not as much about politics as it was about an assault by commercial media on the very idea of a self-willed, self-defining citizenry. Dean scares the institutional media out of their wits—not because of who he is or what he might do as President, but because of what he and Internet democracy say about them. And because Dean is their worst nightmare, they tried to crush him like a bug.

Much was made then of the concept of blogging. There was no Twitter back then. Facebook had just been launched early in 2004. You Tube didn't launch until 2005.

Days before the New Hampshire primary, author and syndicated columnist Richard Reeves made the shrewd observation on our “The Blogging of the President: 2004” broadcast that something fundamental had changed since John F. Kennedy and television exalted each other in 1960. Since then TV networks have discovered that American audiences are more interested in football than in politics. Sure enough, as the Democratic candidates headed out of New Hampshire, the media were conditioning us to understand that everything that happens in the Super Bowl is more important than almost anything that is at stake in the presidential campaign.

It’s a dismal moment in American media—just the right time to be developing a real conversation on the Web. The revolution will not be televised, but maybe it will be blogged.

For Howard Dean it was death by media, as one South Florida paper called it.

So far Bernie Sanders' coverage has been relatively neutral, but at least twice during the debate he called out the corporate media.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

October 15, 2015

Utter chaos at Florida's Okaloosa County School Board meeting.

I could swear heard the 2nd speaker say "deliver us from pizza" and "thine is the kingdom of the pesto and alfredo". Found at a Daily Kos diary.

You might need to turn your speakers down when they really get going.

October 15, 2015

A U.S. trade director looking for professors to help sell still-secret TPP.

From Campaign for America's Future:

Ramping Up The Campaign To Sell The Secret TPP

The U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement is shopping around to professors, trying to get them to help “expand the conversation” around the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the public – even though TPP is still secret. In other words, “We can’t share what’s in TPP with you, but would like you to write about how great it is.”

Here is an example of a professor being solicited to write about how great TPP is, without knowing what is actually in it:

From: Gainer, Mitch <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:45 PM
Subject: USTR Trans-Pacific Partnership professor outreach
To: XXX

Dear Professor XXX,

The U.S Trade Representative is enthusiastic to inform you and your office that The Trans-Pacific Partnership has closed ministerial negotiations!

We believe that your expertise in labor standards in international trade would be significant in expanding the conversation about the benefits of this historic trade agreement to your larger community. I would be delighted to set up a call if you are interested in writing an op-ed, writing a blog post, doing research, or being on background for reporters – to highlight the benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We would love to provide you with as much information as we can and answer any questions....

"as much information as we can"....oh yeah. And we hope you don't ask too much about it cause we can't tell you until it is actually over and done.

More of the letter at the link.

It is signed;

Best,
Mitch

Mitch Gainer
Director of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
[email protected]