Daily Kos

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Jeff Singer

Leading Off:

• NE-02: On Friday, the GOP unveiled two new negative ads in this fiercely contested Omaha-area race that instantly achieved serious levels of notoriety. First up is the NRCC's new throwback spot. A few candidates this year have revisited infamous hatchet-man Lee Atwater's playbook and run ads hitting their opponents for supporting policies that have supposedly allowed dangerous criminals to get released from prison early—a tried-and-true fear-mongering tactic.

Now national Republicans are now giving it a shot to bail out embattled GOP Rep. Lee Terry. The NRCC's spot features footage of news reports about Nikko Jenkins, who was convicted of multiple murders. The narrator describes how Jenkins was able to leave jail early because of something known as the "Good Time Law," which he goes on to accuse Democrat Brad Ashford of supporting.

This spot is drawing plenty of comparisons with George H.W. Bush's infamous Willie Horton ad and it's almost certainly going to get a lot of attention in Omaha. The Jenkins case was a high-profile story even before this ad came out and there has been a good deal of controversy over his release. However, it's always hard to say how voters will respond to ads like this. It worked for Papa Bush but backfired for Alaska Democratic Sen. Mark Begich when he tried a similar approach after the victims' family complained.

Terry himself is also going after Ashford with a similar line of attack. The ad begins with some very obvious fear-mongering, with the narrator talking about "Killings on our streets, and beheading abroad," complete with a gun pointed directly at the audience. The narrator then similarly accuses Ashford of fighting for the Good Time Law, arguing if he "won't protect us from the bad guys here, how can we ever expect him to protect us from the bad guys over there?" This ad is also drawing plenty of criticism from Democrats, but again, the jury is still out on whether it'll be effective.

It's hard to see Terry or the NRCC taking these kinds of risks if they felt good about their chances. Romney won the 2nd District 53-46 but Terry barely scraped by in 2012 against an underfunded opponent. Terry also complicated his chances with some deeply clueless remarks about keeping his paycheck during last year's government shutdown. Emily Cahn at Roll Call also reports that both parties have private polls showing Terry losing and quotes one Republican strategist arguing that the incumbent has a "path to victory." You normally don't argue that someone has a "path to victory" if they're expected to win.

Midterm turnout should help the GOP, but so far, early voting is actually looking great for Team Blue. Both parties are spending big here and it was clear even before these ads went out that Terry had a real race on his hands. The GOP can still win this contest and the new spots introduce an unpredictable element here, but there isn't much doubt that Terry is in trouble. As a result, Daily Kos Elections is changing our race rating from Lean Republican to Tossup.

Happy Monday, all!

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From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Ebola Hysteria: Maine Edition

Sorry, rest of the United states. This is going to be hard to top for sheer nuttery:

A teacher at Strong Elementary School was placed on a 21-day paid leave of absence after parents told the school board they were concerned that she might have been exposed to Ebola during a trip to Dallas.

She was there for a conference. An education conference. In a city of 1.25 million and ten miles away from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

“At this time, we have no information to suggest that this staff member has been in contact with anyone who has been exposed to Ebola,” the district wrote in a statement... “However, the district and the staff member understand the parents’ concerns. Therefore, after several discussions with the staff member, out of an abundance of caution, this staff member has been placed on a paid leave of absence for up to 21 days.”

An example of the parental concern:

“The bottom line is that there is risk.

Are we more capable of handling this than Africa? Sure, but why walk around blind and jam people into hot spots we can’t control? It all comes down to personal responsibility.”

Yes. The teacher was jammed into Dallas, that boiling cauldron of ebola. They literally had to use a toilet plunger to pack her into that writhing zombieland of infected humanity. And now she's free to spend three weeks of paid bonus vacation walking around anywhere she wants in Maine spreading her maybebola to everyone she meets. But at least she won't do it in that school.

But there is one plus to all this: it'll give Teapublican Governor Paul LePage a second chance to focus on "the bigger issue right now," which is of course "whether or not this individual had the proper papers.” Can't be too careful these days.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes that Both parties face a blue-collar imperative:

The elections in Georgia and Kentucky are different in important ways, but one lesson from both is that Democrats can’t win without a sufficient share of the white working-class vote. Nunn, on offense, and Grimes, on defense, are both trying to secure ballots from the sorts of voters who were once central to the Democratic coalition. [...]

And Bill Clinton’s comments reflected what his party is up against: Republicans have been quite effective at turning the anger that working-class whites feel about being left behind in the new economy against liberals, Democrats and especially the president. The Democrats’ worries were nicely captured in a headline on Matthew Cooper’s recent Newsweek article: “Why Working-Class White Men Make Democrats Nervous.”

Harry Siegel at the New York Daily News writes The new protest paranoia:

Now, technology is upending what both the state and its dissidents can do, and everyone else’s viewing expectations for tuning in to those conflicts.

But the new cinéma vérité lacks context, and reporters frantically tweeting from the scene rarely add it. Yes, violence is violence, but the NYPD is not the Oakland Police Department is not the Egyptian military.

Every protest that grows involves three groups, with dedicated activists backed by moneyed interests trying to use ordinary citizens as their public faces, while hoping that they don’t have a tiger by the tail. Power always hedges its bets.

The New York Times Editorial Board praises Cuba’s Impressive Role on Ebola:

Cuba is an impoverished island that remains largely cut off from the world and lies about 4,500 miles from the West African nations where Ebola is spreading at an alarming rate. Yet, having pledged to deploy hundreds of medical professionals to the front lines of the pandemic, Cuba stands to play the most robust role among the nations seeking to contain the virus. [...]

With technical support from the World Health Organization, the Cuban government trained 460 doctors and nurses on the stringent precautions that must be taken to treat people with the highly contagious virus. The first group of 165 professionals arrived in Sierra Leone in recent days. José Luis Di Fabio, the World Health Organization’s representative in Havana, said Cuban medics were uniquely suited for the mission because many had already worked in Africa. “Cuba has very competent medical professionals,” said Mr. Di Fabio, who is Uruguayan. Mr. Di Fabio said Cuba’s efforts to aid in health emergencies abroad are stymied by the embargo the United States imposes on the island, which struggles to acquire modern equipment and keep medical shelves adequately stocked.

In a column published over the weekend in Cuba’s state-run newspaper, Granma, Fidel Castro argued that the United States and Cuba must put aside their differences, if only temporarily, to combat a deadly scourge. He’s absolutely right.

More pundit excerpts can be found below the orange cloud.

The guy on the left usually gets credit for saving places like the one where he is standing. And he deserves a lot of it. But the guy on the right of this knob of rock high above Yosemite Falls should get at least half the credit. That's John Muir. He had, since the 1880s, worked to preserve Yosemite. But he was not the first. Settler Galen Clark and others persuaded Congress to pass protective legislation—the Yosemite Grant—and Abraham Lincoln to sign it in 1864. But the land was ceded to California as a state park. That management was skewed toward practices, like intensive sheep-grazing, that destroyed rather than preserved. Muir's writings on Yosemite in Century magazine persuaded leaders in Congress to pass a bill in 1890 making it a national park. U.S. Army troops from the 1st, 4th and 9th Cavalry regiments were charged with its protection. The enabling legislation followed most of the recommendations in Muir's articles. But Congress frustrated him by leaving park management in the hands of the state. In May of 1903, during three days camping and talking late into the night with Theodore Roosevelt, he convinced the president to take Yosemite more deeply into federal control, not just the valley floor and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias, but also the surrounding mountains and forests for a unified national park. Congress passed and Roosevelt signed such a bill in 1906.

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John Cassidy at The New Yorker writes Rising Inequality: Janet Yellen Tells It Like It Is:

The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me. … It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority. I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.

No, that wasn’t Elizabeth Warren, or the editor of the Nation, or Paul Krugman (or even me) banging on about how the rich are getting richer and most everybody else is struggling to keep up. It was Janet Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, addressing a conference in Boston on Friday morning. It’s not unheard of for a Fed chief to discuss rising inequality: Ben Bernanke addressed it in a 2007 speech. But Yellen’s speech is surely the first time a Fed chief has pointed out that rising inequality threatens America’s sense of itself.

Yellen began by noting that inequality is still rising. During the Great Recession, income fell more steeply at the top, largely as a result of the decline in the stock market. That caused inequality to “narrow slightly,” she said, but it “resumed widening in the recovery, and by 2013 it had nearly returned to the pre-recession peak.” […]

Turning to wealth, which includes financial assets, real estate, and durable goods, such as cars, Yellen noted that the pattern was the same—except the increase in inequality had been even more stark. In 1989, the richest five per cent owned fifty-four per cent of over-all wealth. By 2010, that figure had risen to sixty-one per cent. And by 2013, it had reached sixty-three per cent.

Since the top five per cent of households own almost two-thirds of the wealth, it stands to reason that most American households don’t own very much at all. But the figures that Yellen presented are still shocking. In 1989, the bottom half of the distribution owned just three per cent of all wealth. By 2013, that figure had fallen to one per cent. No, that’s not a typo: half the country owns one per cent of its wealth.

These numbers confirm an old but rarely stated truth. Many, if not most, individual American households possess next to nothing. […]

It was an important speech. One that reminded us why Yellen was the better choice for the Fed post than the fellow with the inside track. She included some words about long-term "opportunity." But none about how to make that opportunity a reality either immediately or down the road.

No suggestion or recommendation about how to get around or over or through the political juggernaut that this economic inequality has given to a self-selected few who make the nation's biggest decisions. It can be argued, of course, that such suggestions, much less recommendations, are not part of her job portfolio.

Trouble is, too many of our leaders don't think it's part of theirs either. Or they're on the payroll—in one fashion or another—of those who benefit most from inequality. Which means the solutions are up to us.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012— Festering economic boil Phil Gramm says Obama is winning because poor people have it too good:

See there? The reason so so many people are voting for Barack Obama in this election is that they're not hungry enough. In the wake of the Great Recession. When the first sub-eight-percent unemployment numbers have come in in for-freaking-ever, itself a dismally modest improvement that proved so shocking to conservatives that they have all but convinced themselves that it must be a government plot. Why, if we let those 18.5 million people starve, they'd be much more pissed off—and then they'd go out and vote for Mitt Romney!

This is, mind you, the exact philosophy behind Romney's infamous "47 percent" comments: those damn poor people all have it too good, what with social programs designed to allow them to not die in the streets, and of course people like that aren't going to vote for the good, responsible Republicans who want to bring back "dying on the streets" as this century's hot new thing. It does not dawn on Phil Gramm, who is a remarkable idiot by any standards, that the increases in food stamps and other government assistance are the obvious and expected results of a prolonged and utterly devastating economic downturn—no, it must be because we are just being too damn generous these days. This is the world according to Phil Gramm. He then goes on to complain that Obama hasn't fixed all the various things Phil Gramm and his fellow financial wizards have screwed up in the last decade, so clearly it's time to pass the reins to Mitt Romney so Phil Gramm and his fellow financial wizards can get back to screwing it up worse.

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Tweet of the Day

Bundy’s confidence has risen no doubt because there have been no consequences for his actions or for his followers  http://t.co/...
— @randyprine

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High Impact Posts. This Week in High Impact Posts.  Top Comments

It is distressing to be on the same side of an issue as Newt Gingrich—the man whose Contract with America, based on a Heritage Foundation wish list, started our government on the road to hyper-partisanship. The man who introduced us to the Taking Back Our Streets Act, which included funding for prison construction to accommodate the prisoners that it would have produced. The man who pushed for the impeachment of a president over a blow job while engaging in an extramarital affair with a House staffer.

On the same side of an issue with a man like that? I don't even want to be in the same universe. And when I read the Los Angeles Times editorial that he co-authored in support of California's Proposition 47, I rushed to re-read the ballot measure to find what I had missed that made it attractive to someone like him.

His co-author was B. Wayne Hughes Jr., a wealthy conservative and board member of the American Action Network (affiliated with Karl Rove's American Crossroads, which counted Hughes' father as its largest donor) and founder of the non-profit, Serving California. Hughes formed Serving California after meeting Chuck Colson, who recruited him into investing in Colson's Prison Fellowship, which is tied to The Family, a group from the religious right.

According to the Serving California website:

Serving California implemented a program in 19 state prisons involving to date over 1050 California inmates. The Urban Ministry Institute (TUMI) is a three and a half year Christian educational and personal character reformation program. Roughly the equivalent of a Master’s Degree in Theology, the TUMI curriculum consists of 16 different courses requiring the completion of 43 different books and other related materials. Each student engages in Biblical course studies designed to improve reading and writing techniques, critical thinking, ethics, leadership and character development.

Somehow, spreading the gospel according to the Family didn't make me any more comfortable with the alliance, but Hughes has been willing to sink $1.255 million of his own money into the campaign for Proposition 47, making him its largest financial supporter. Follow me below the fold to find out what it is that we agree on.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin was shot to death. His crime? He happened to be black, and a racist overzealous neighborhood vigilante named George Zimmerman decided to take matters into his own hands. He believed that "those assholes always get away" and he decided to make sure Trayvon didn't. So he ignored the advice of the dispatcher and left his home, armed, and had a confrontation. We don't know the exact details of how that confrontation played out. But what we do know is that Trayvon Martin ended up dead for the simple crime of walking down his own street.

Normally, one would think that if someone ignores police dispatch, goes out of the house armed, provokes a confrontation with an innocent teenager, and then kills him, that would result in some sort of murder conviction. Not so in the state of Florida, however. Florida is one of many states with so-called "Stand Your Ground" laws, which grant immunity from prosecution if a person has a reasonable belief that they are fearing for their own life in a confrontation.

Just to be clear, this law was not the direct reason that Zimmerman is not currently in jail. The law grants immunity from prosecution, and Zimmerman was prosecuted for the homicide he committed. But as Kevin Drum wrote shortly after Zimmerman's acquittal last year, the fact that the law was in the news had a definite effect on the jury's perceptions of Zimmerman's guilt:

And consider it they did. According to the most outspoken juror, known only as Juror B-37, Stand Your Ground was key to reaching their verdict. She told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview that neither second-degree murder nor manslaughter applied in Zimmerman's case "because of the heat of the moment and the 'stand your ground.' He had a right to defend himself. If he felt threatened that his life was going to be taken away from him or he was going to have bodily harm, he had a right."

So that's it then, right? Even if you're the one that provokes the confrontation, even if you're the only one with a gun, even if the person you kill is completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever—as long as you feared for your safety at some point during the confrontation, you have a right to kill.

As long as you're a man who isn't black. If you're a woman or if you're black, it's a different story. More below the fold.

Across the years in the United States, police officers have consistently been found not guilty in the shooting deaths of countless unarmed, non-violent citizens.

Kendrec McDade comes to mind.

So does Amadou Diallo.

Sean Bell is another.

Add Ramarley Graham to that list.

John Crawford also fits this bill.

In each of these horrific cases, the victims were unarmed and not committing a crime, but police, with stories, far-fetched or otherwise, were able to convince juries that they reasonably feared for their safety. At the root of widespread anger in African-American communities over these cases is the idea that if a white officer imagines a threat, he is basically allowed to act on it, no matter how fictitious the threat may truly be. In the shooting deaths of Amadou Diallo and Kendrec McDade, officers successfully argued that they believed they saw Diallo and McDade not only possess guns, but actually fire them—even though both men were completely unarmed.

Considering the facts of Mike Brown's shooting death at the hands of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, the question is, then, is it legal for a police officer who is reasonably aware that a citizen is unarmed, to shoot and kill that citizen if the citizen is incapacitated or has peaceably surrendered?

In the end, the shooting death of Brown and the case against Wilson may go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Follow below for more.

There is a confluence of events that currently have many Americans in a funk. A continuum has reflected an economy that simply is not working for the working middle class even though—as explained by President Obama and Paul Krugman—conditions have much improved. ISIS and Ebola have instilled an irrational fear in many.

Is the working poor and working middle class weak-minded, willfully ignorant, easily scared, or simply gullible? The politics of deception is not new. What is new is how easily the deception works.

How did we get here? How can the country that built the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, the Interstate Highway System, and voyaged to the moon and back degenerate into a dysfunctional semblance of a super power? How is it possible that Americans may potentially put those who will continue pilfering them in power after the 2014 election?

It is the systematic manipulation of the minds of enough Americans that is responsible. The well-established American plutocracy continues to fuel the machine of deception. What’s most amazing is how long-lived this manipulation has been.

Follow below the fold for more.

An honest question: Fox News, how are you okay with this? The rest of the punditry world: Is this the bounds of "professional" discourse now?

Fox News contributor Keith Ablow went on an unhinged racial rant against President Obama, accusing him of failing to protect the country against Ebola because his "affinities, his affiliations are with" Africa and "not us ... He's their leader."

Keith Ablow is the Fox News resident "psychiatrist," and his long-held schtick is to come on Fox News, usually in the already dismal caverns of Fox & Friends, to explain why the current president of the United States is not a true American in spirit. Period. It is presented as a medical opinion and given the accompanying jargon: The opposition president (opposition to Fox News, that is) has any number of psychological conditions that cause him to hate America, and to want to destroy America, and to be glad when something bad happens to America, and all of this is conducted via "Dr." Keith Ablow's patented method of psychological seance.

It nearly all revolves around the central observation that the first non-white president of the United States had a black father, a black foreign father, and that the president's own inherited genes and skin tone and the presumed heritage that goes with those things make him therefore mentally unqualified to lead true America. Sometimes it is presented as dog whistle. Just as often it is stated outright, as you can see below the fold:

There are lies, damned lies, and right-wing zombie lies. What's a right-wing zombie lie? It's an untruth that—no matter how many times it is debunked, no matter how many times it is killed—keeps coming out of the mouths of right-wingers. Most of the rank-and-file conservatives with whom we might interact get their information from conservative media sources. They live inside a right-wing information bubble. Republican politicians are ensconced within it as well. Inside the walls of that closed environment, facts that do not jibe with conservative ideology or the conservative interpretation of events are twisted, turned on their head, or simply ignored. The lies live on.

Remember David Horowitz? He's a notorious race-baiter who recently published Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream. The cover, of course, depicts President Obama as the personification of black privilege, which the book's description characterizes as "the most insidious bias in our culture today." A real lover of the truth, that one. In 2006, Horowitz was forced to retract two very specific claims he had made about supposed liberal bias in university classrooms. In an interview conducted after the retractions, he actually said that "everybody who is familiar with university classrooms knows" that what he said is true, and who cares if he doesn't have, I don't know, evidence. But back to his recent lies about race-baiting.

Last week Horowitz was a guest on the "Eagle Forum Live" radio program, hosted by another infamous right-winger, Phyllis Schafly (herself caught in a lie about Barack Obama earlier this year). The two were talking about Michael Brown and the ongoing protests that followed his shooting death at the hands of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson this past summer. Horowitz characterized Brown as "just a thug" and condemned the protesters as people "who destroyed a city to get a cop who was defending himself. Look at the picture of him in the hospital with his eye socket practically blown out." Also, let's not forget Horowitz's final point, another "truth" only he's brave enough to speak: "There’s no community that’s more racist in America than the black community. And everybody knows it, but nobody will say it."

Right. Black skin privilege and all. So we have Horowitz's big lie, buttressed by a smaller lie, but a very important one that helps convince right-wing listeners about the truth of the big one. That's the lie about Darren Wilson's eye socket. Of course, if Michael Brown had blown out the eye socket of the cop who shot him, that would be a pretty strong point against the protesters and in favor of Horowitz's broader points about race in America. One small problem: It didn't happen.

Want to fight the lies of the right? Beat them at the ballot box. Remember that if we turn out, we win. Chip in $3 to help GOTV for Daily Kos-endorsed candidates.

Voting by mail is convenient, easy, and defeats the best of the GOP's voter suppression efforts. Sign up here to check eligibility and vote by mail, then get your friends, family, and coworkers to sign up as well.

For more about this and about the broader issue of right-wing zombie lies, please follow me beyond the fold.

The question was posed by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "What is your position on the minimum wage? Should we have it?

Scott Walker's response: "Well, I am not going to repeal it, but I don't think it serves a purpose."

Watch the video, look at his facial expression at around 35-36 seconds when he says, "I don't think it serves a purpose." That statement, that facial expression, tells you all you need to know about Walker and his contempt for the working poor of Wisconsin. Later in the video, at about 2:19, he goes on about flipping burgers at McDonald's and how he did not expect to make $15 an hour doing it. I am Scott Walker's age, and I worked at McDonald's when I was in high school flippin' burgers. I made $3.35 an hour. After a month on the job, I got a raise to $3.45 an hour. I would have gotten another 20 cents an hour, but I was told I did not smile enough to warrant it (you try to smile while wearing brown polyester and are covered in french fry grease).

Walker obviously does not care about the working poor, or the middle-class. It is time to show him the door and elect Mary Burke. Please give $3 to help Wisconsin become Scott-free.

Jump below the fold for more.