|
Murdoch Chides Romney As Soft on Obama |
 |
|
Friday, 06 July 2012 09:23 |
|
Intro: "To hear Rupert Murdoch tell it lately, Mitt Romney lacks stomach and heart. He 'seems to play everything safe.' And he is not nearly as tough as he needs to be on President Obama."
Rupert Murdoch, chief executive and chairman of News Corp, has critiqued Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. (photo: Keith Bedford/Reuters)
Murdoch Chides Romney As Soft on Obama
By Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times
06 July 12
 o hear Rupert Murdoch tell it lately, Mitt Romney lacks stomach and heart. He “seems to play everything safe.” And he is not nearly as tough as he needs to be on President Obama.
Mr. Murdoch’s thoughts on the Republican presidential candidate’s prospects? “Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from the team.” Chances of that? “Doubtful,” he tapped out in a Twitter message from his iPad last weekend.
Then, on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, published a blistering editorial criticizing Mr. Romney’s campaign, accusing it of being hapless and looking “confused in addition to being politically dumb.”
Mr. Murdoch has never been particularly impressed with Mr. Romney, friends and associates of both men say. The two times Mr. Romney visited the editorial board of The Journal, Mr. Murdoch did not work very hard to conceal his lack of excitement. “There was zero enthusiasm, no engagement,” said one Journal staff member who was at the most recent meeting in December.
The editorial was a stern reminder of Mr. Romney’s failure to win the trust of the Republican Party’s core conservatives, a group that pays close attention to Mr. Murdoch’s newspapers and cable news outlets. Though political strategists debate the ultimate impact of any single media outlet, what is written in the pages of The Journal and The New York Post and talked about on Fox News — all Murdoch properties — could have the collective power to shape the thinking of millions of voters.
Mr. Murdoch’s dim view of Mr. Romney points to a palpable disconnect between the two men, one that has existed since Mr. Romney’s first run for president four years ago, people who know them both said. More than a half-dozen friends and advisers to the two, speaking mostly anonymously to reveal private and frank conversations, said the Murdoch-Romney relationship could be summed up simply: They do not have much of one.
They have met only a handful of times. Their lukewarm feelings toward each other stem from their encounter at a meeting of The Journal editorial board in 2007, when Mr. Romney visited to pitch himself as the most capable conservative candidate about two months before the Iowa caucuses.
Romney and Journal staff members who attended said that despite being deeply prepared and animated — particularly on his love for data crunching — Mr. Romney failed to connect with either Mr. Murdoch or The Journal’s editorial page editor, Paul A. Gigot. Instead of articulating a clear and consistent conservative philosophy, he dwelled on organizational charts and executive management, areas of expertise that made him a multimillionaire as the head of his private equity firm, Bain Capital.
At one point, Mr. Romney declared that “I would probably bring in McKinsey,” the management consulting firm, to help him set up his presidential cabinet, a comment that seemed to startle the editors and left Mr. Murdoch visibly taken aback.
The Journal’s write-up of that meeting would later glibly refer to Mr. Romney as “Consultant in Chief.”
Mr. Romney followed up later in the campaign with a second meeting in Mr. Murdoch’s office, but that, too, failed to light a spark. “I don’t think he ever got excited about Romney,” said one associate of Mr. Murdoch’s.
By the time the first Republican primaries of 2012 were closing in, Mr. Romney met again with The Journal’s editorial board. Mr. Murdoch sat in. “America doesn’t need a manager. America needs a leader,” Mr. Romney told the board. He wore a suit, which he changed out of for a more casual appearance on David Letterman’s show that evening. And at one point, according to a Journal staff member, he said lightheartedly, “I hope I’m getting better at this.”
The Romney campaign felt the meeting went well — so well that it was surprised when The Journal kept hammering him, reprising its complaints about his “inability, or unwillingness, to defend conservative principles.”
Fundamentally, Mr. Romney and Mr. Murdoch are very different. Mr. Romney is said to respect Mr. Murdoch as a visionary business mind and deeply admire how he built the company he inherited from his father into a $60 billion global media power. But a teetotaling Mormon from the Midwest and a thrice-married Australian who publishes photos of topless women in one of his British newspapers are bound to have very different world views.
Mr. Murdoch’s wariness about Mr. Romney is similar to the way many Republican primary voters initially felt about the candidate. Mr. Murdoch wanted anybody else, and could not resist getting swept up in the flavor-of-the-week fickleness that characterized this year’s Republican nominating process. He wrote glowing Twitter messages about Rick Santorum, calling him the only candidate with a “genuine big vision” for the country.
Along with Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, Mr. Murdoch urged Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to run. Both men admire Mr. Christie’s gusto and toughness — a sharp edge they have themselves. “He really wanted Christie,” said one of Mr. Murdoch’s friends. Mr. Ailes, a former campaign strategist for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, shares Mr. Murdoch’s disdain of how the Romney campaign is being run, telling people privately that it is too soft.
Although Fox News has been cast by liberal critics as an arm of the Romney campaign, its coverage of the presidential election has been far more aggressive toward Mr. Obama than it has been kind to Mr. Romney.
Mr. Murdoch does much of his sounding off on Twitter, as he did last weekend when he suggested Mr. Romney replace his staff. Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, politely brushed off Mr. Murdoch’s concerns about the staff’s competence. “Governor Romney respects Rupert Murdoch, and also respects his team and has confidence in them,” Ms. Saul said.
Those who know him say that his fondness for Twitter is classic Murdoch. A compulsive e-mailer and phone caller, he has always had a hyperactive mind. And the impetuous, unfiltered nature of Twitter suits his shoot-from-the hip style.
Mr. Murdoch’s political influence in the United States has never been anywhere near as potent as it was in Britain, where he once slipped into a private meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron through the back door of 10 Downing Street. But the phone hacking scandal has left him greatly diminished there and rendered him something more of a complicated figure in this country.
Mr. Romney’s advisers say privately that having Mr. Murdoch sniping at them is better than the alternative. To be praised by him would open the campaign up to criticisms that it is a tool of the conservative establishment.
“To his credit, the idea that Rupert Murdoch doesn’t think something could be better run is unimaginable,” said one Romney adviser, who requested anonymity to assess Mr. Murdoch’s well-known self-confidence. “That’s just how he is.”
Last week, when the campaign invited a few dozen leaders from Wall Street, the news media and Republican politics to an informal discussion with Mr. Romney at a private Manhattan social club, Mr. Murdoch was one of the first to offer a suggestion.
Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who was there, recalled that Mr. Murdoch spoke up after the chief executive of Univision, Randy Falco, told Mr. Romney that Mr. Obama had appeared on his network a dozen times and was building a considerable edge with Latino voters. (The meeting was first reported by Politico.)
“Every campaign attracts a fair number of critics,” Ms. Conway said. “But not every critic is created equal. Rupert Murdoch is a very important voice in the national conversation.”
When he spoke, Mr. Murdoch did not have much of a question — just more unsolicited advice, this time about the need to win over Latino voters.
“I hope that you’ll take the fight to President Obama,” he told Mr. Romney.
 |
|
FOCUS: Obama Deescalating the War on Drugs |
|
|
Thursday, 05 July 2012 11:31 |
|
Excerpt: "Never mind a second term, Barack Obama's pivot on the drug war has already begun."
President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa. (photo: AP)
Obama Deescalating the War on Drugs
By The Daily Beast
05 July 12
 hile Marc Ambinder’s much discussed, scantily-sourced GQ report of a second-term “pivot” runs through the murderers’ row of complaints against the Drug War—the cocaine/crack disparity; mandatory minimum sentencing; property-seizure laws and the fattening of the corrections industry—he doesn’t report that the president’s “aides and associates” have identified any of these as a starting point for Obama to “tackle” first.
“Don’t expect miracles,” Ambinder cautions, and that’s where he gets it wrong. The miracle has already happened. Here’s the answer that Ambinder’s anonymous sources failed to leak to him: the pivot point for Obama’s new direction is homegrown marijuana, and it’s already started.
The presidential request for the FY13 budget deals a mortal blow to the helicopter-powered marijuana eradication umbrella. It does so by cutting in half the funding for the U.S. National Guard Counterdrug program, the Defense Department’s contribution to the marijuan-eradication effort that has, for the past 20 years, limited the size of domestic marijuana patches and increased the demand for “blood pot” imported by ultraviolent Mexican drug cartels—while doing nothing to stem the supply to anyone who wants to get high.
Until now, the DEA and state law enforcement could count on the National Guard to fly hundreds of helicopter hours over national forests and other public land, where growers became active following the passage of property-seizure laws in the Reagan years—but the FY13 budget changes that.
The 50-percent cut is not being apportioned evenly across the states—it’s a two-thirds cut in Oregon and a 70-percent cut in Kentucky, while the Southern border states are receiving less severe reductions in funding. It’s essentially a diversion of Defense Department assets away from the interior American marijuana fields to where the national-security risk is greatest: along our Southern border.
“We’re not going to have legalized weed anytime soon,” the president told late-night television host Jimmy Fallon in April. But there’s a lot a president can do to unwind the marijuana prohibition without going full-on Peter Tosh. After all, how effective is an umbrella with holes in it?
Without a fully functional eradication program, the feds cannot keep domestic pot production down. So even if it remains illegal, domestic production could boom during FY13, the first growing season of Obama’s potential second term.
The road map to pot decriminalization, an essential first step for any pivot on the drug war, can be found in the executive order President Obama issued on immigration to effectively implement components of the DREAM Act without the help of Congress by ordering his executive branch to de-prioritize enforcement of certain laws.
The simple fact that President Obama would even consider breaking the taboo of the marijuana prohibition is itself a miracle, given that our last president from the Democratic Party gave us the 1996 federal three-strikes law, which remains one of the most outrageous components of the pot prohibition, sending nonviolent marijuana growers to prison for life without parole for the offense of persistent criminal farming.
When Obama makes public his drug-war pivot, he will have 40 years of an abusive relationship between the Oval Office and marijuana to undo. When Ambinder says that drug laws in America “were created almost nakedly to marginalize disfavored groups,” what he’s talking about in part is how President Nixon doubled down on the already-in-place marijuana prohibition on the morning of May 26, 1971.
“I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana,” Nixon told his chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman. “I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them ... By God we are going to hit the marijuana thing, and I want to hit it right square in the puss ...”
President Reagan followed suit with a massive expansion of the federal government’s powers in matters of drug-related justice: eliminating federal parole; creating mandatory minimum sentences, and allowing federal agents to seize land and property from people merely suspected of being involved in “drugs,” whether those drugs were marijuana or heroin, in complete disregard of the suspect’s Fourth Amendment protections.
Any détente of the drug war that Obama might tackle in his theoretical second term must include, eventually, a massive legislative package that returns America to a pre-Nixon posture on pot; flattens the cocaine/crack disparity; eliminates mandatory minimum sentences; re-instates federal parole for nonviolent and victimless crimes; reins in property-seizure laws; grounds the fleet of pot-spotting helicopters; and grants blanket clemency for those currently serving federal prison time for trumped-up marijuana crimes.
In other words, in his second term, President Obama needs to kick Richard Nixon right square in the puss. In the meantime, by easing enforcement of domestic marijuana cultivation, thereby reducing demand for Mexican blood pot and freeing up Defense Department assets to send to the Southwest, the president can achieve another of his campaign promises: improving our border security.
|
|
|
Beast of Citizens United Slouches Forward |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 04 July 2012 15:47 |
|
Pierce writes: "The Supreme Court's decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has deformed our politics in a thousand different ways."
(image: fsfreestatenow)
Beast of Citizens United Slouches Forward
By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine
04 July 12
 orty years ago next March, Richard Nixon sat down in the Oval Office with his White House counsel, John Dean, to talk over a problem he was having with some former employees of his campaign. These employees had been caught the previous June breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee as part of an ongoing program of espionage and sabotage so extensive that Attorney General John Mitchell, not a field of buttercups on his best day, called it "the White House horrors." Now it was nearly a year later. As captured by the White House tapes, the exchange makes it clear that their silence was getting expensive:
PRESIDENT NIXON: How much money do you need?
DEAN: I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years. [Short pause.]
PRESIDENT NIXON: We could get that.
DEAN: Mm-hmm.
PRESIDENT NIXON: If you — on the money, if you need the money, I mean, you could get the money fairly easily.
A million dollars. For hush money. To cover up political sabotage.
At the time, the very idea of that conversation, and the amount of money mentioned, horrified the nation. The money itself, secret and laundered through Mexican banks, seemed to be as much an affront to American democracy as the activities that it financed. It sounds so quaint today.
The Supreme Court's decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has deformed our politics in a thousand different ways. Super PACs, entities made possible by the decision, had raised $220 million by the beginning of June, from sources as anonymous as were the ones who raised the money to pay off the burglars. One man, Joe Ricketts, threw $250,000 into a Senate primary in Nebraska at the last minute and bought the nomination for a woman named Deb Fischer. In 2010, when the House of Representatives changed hands, more than a billion dollars was spent on House campaigns, much of it anonymous. Millionaire cranks have been empowered; imagine what politics would have been like if, back in the 1950s, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society could have spent $100 million on campaign commercials instead of buying a few billboards. Earl Warren would have been back cooling his heels in California within a month.
But this is perhaps the most shameful thing of all. Citizens United has made all the crimes that we lumped together and called Watergate — the crimes that Dean and Nixon needed a measly $1 million of untraceable cash to cover up, thereby committing another crime in the process — utterly unnecessary. Why waste your time putting together a covert dirty-tricks operation when you can simply raise $50 million for attack ads that are just as truthless, and far more effective, than forging a letter that makes Ed Muskie lose it on TV? Why bother dreaming up ways to defraud your opponents and confuse their voters when you can lavish money on state legislatures in order to pass voter-identification laws that suppress turnout more effectively than any of Donald Segretti's penny-ante schemes ever did? Why plot in secret when you can bundle up your millions and invent a super PAC with a cool-sounding name to spread it far and wide? Anonymous corporate money is the coin of the realm now. It doesn't have to spend time in a Mexican bank to get itself clean. What Citizens United did was to privatize political corruption at a level so wide and so deep that the corruption is now the system itself. The only anomalous thing in our politics now is the truth.
Mitt Romney may be the perfect candidate for the new era — a person of great wealth himself who also is completely a creature of the world from which this great flood of anonymous money and unaccountable power has come roaring down on a fragile political system. He is in every way the rough beast that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens predicted in his formidable dissent inevitably would slouch toward Iowa to be born:
[The] conclusion that the societal interest in avoiding corruption and the appearance of corruption does not provide an adequate justification for regulating corporate expenditures on candidate elections relies on an incorrect description of that interest, along with a failure to acknowledge the relevance of established facts and the considered judgments of state and federal legislatures over many decades.... At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
He is in every way the living embodiment of what President Barack Obama said in his first State of the Union Address when, in what may go down as the finest moment of his presidency, he looked straight into the eyes of the justices who had broken a century's worth of settled law into splinters and thereby had fastened in place everything a rising plutocracy needed to attach itself to the government of the country, and told them, "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems."
Obama's overmatched now. His super PAC, Priorities USA Action, managed by former Obama aide Bill Burton and old Clinton hand Paul Begala, is struggling to get by, in part because even his tepid attempts to reform the criminality on Wall Street were enough to outrage the gentle souls in our financial-services industries, and he hasn't been able to put the touch on the same people who helped him rather lavishly last time. By May 1, it had raised a little more than $10.5 million, a quarter of the sum raised by Romney's Restore Our Future.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the sheer level of monetized rage being directed at him is positively staggering. The Koch brothers alone have said they are willing to spend $400 million to ensure the president's defeat. A casino mogul named Sheldon Adelson has said he's in for $100 million.
The money renders analysis useless. At the end of May, Romney spent a day hanging around with Donald Trump in Las Vegas. Commentators were baffled. What could Romney possibly gain from his proximity to a sideshow freak like Trump? The point, however, was that it didn't matter. Romney can do anything and he can say anything because there is nothing he can do or say, no mistake he can make, that the money now available to him in politics can't buy him out of. There was a strange, stilted quality to the Republican primary process this year, in no small part because everybody pretended there actually was a process, and not a simple transaction. People pretended that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — and even, God help us, Herman Cain — had a chance when everybody knew that, sooner or later, Mitt Romney's money would get around to burying them all in turn. It was like watching the eye of Sauron descend upon the landscape. It's hard to see how that dynamic doesn't repeat itself this fall. Public corruption has a new name. It is now called "elections."
Right about the same time that Romney was cruising the Strip with the Donald, the long and complicated trial of former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards came to an inconclusive verdict down in North Carolina. Edwards was charged with violating some arcane provisions of the very campaign-finance laws that the Supreme Court had ruled violated the free-speech rights of, say, Exxon-Mobil. Thus had the whole trial been rendered a sad farce. In the context of a Supreme Court — granted political system of anonymous cash and ritualized bribery that would have embarrassed the Borgias, jurors were being asked to determine whether poor old Bunny Mellon had given Edwards $725,000 to help stash away his pregnant mistress as a campaign donation, or simply to help out a friend. Were I on the jury, I'd have voted to acquit, and I'd have mailed the slip of paper on which I'd written my verdict to John Roberts. COD.
|
|
FOCUS | What Hath Roberts Wrought? |
|
|
Tuesday, 03 July 2012 13:30 |
|
Lakoff and Wehling write: "What Roberts accomplished on one issue was to enshrine two conservative ideologies - without the Democrats even noticing while they were cheering."
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts greets President Barack Obama on Capitol Hill. (photo: AP)
What Hath Roberts Wrought?
By George Lakoff, Elisabeth Wehling, Common Dreams
03 July 12
 emocrats all over America are claiming victory in the Chief Justice Roberts' vote to uphold the constitutionality of the President's Health Care Law. Conservatives all over America are campaigning all the harder for a president and a congress that will overthrow the law in the future. Chief Justice John Roberts is a conservative, and a very smart, forward-looking one at that. (Photo: Chuck Kennedy/KRT)
Thomas Friedman in his New York Times column praises Roberts to skies for putting the country ahead of ideology. Others have seen Roberts as saving “his court” from the appearance of ideological control.
But Roberts is a conservative, and a very smart, forward-looking one at that. What Roberts accomplished on one issue was to enshrine two conservative ideologies - without the Democrats even noticing while they were cheering. He did this by using the Court's ability to turn metaphors into law. He accomplished this with two votes.
First he was the swing vote that imposed the idea that Health Care Is A Product and set the stage for a possible general principle: The Interstate Commerce Clause governs the buying and selling of products and the government cannot force anyone to people to buy a product (real or metaphorical).
Second, Roberts was the swing vote on the ruling that saved the Affordable Health Care Act by creating a precedent for another metaphorical legal principle: A fee or payment imposed by the government is a tax.
In short, in his votes on one single issue, Roberts single-handedly extended the power of the Court to turn metaphor into law in two conservative directions.
Many important laws, especially in the area of environmental protection, use the interstate commerce clause. The Court in this session held that the EPA cannot keep a property owner from developing, and hence destroying, a wetland on their property. Will the general principle that comes out of the latest Supreme Court decisions be seen to be that the Commerce Clause cannot be used to preserve the environment but only to govern commercial transactions? The Endangered Species Act is based on the Commerce Clause. Will the above principle be used to kill the Endangered Species Act?
Given the conservatives' success in rousing public ire against taxes, will all fees and other government payments be argued to be taxes that should be minimized, eliminated, or not even proposed?
Roberts is no fool. In one stroke, he both protected the Court from charges of ideology and became categorized as a “moderate,” while enshrining two metaphor-based legal principles that can be used to promote and implement conservative policy in the future, with devastating broad effects.
We are as happy as other Democrats that the Affordable Care Act has mostly been declared constitutional. But we caution Democrats throughout the country to keep an eye out for conservative uses of the two metaphors that played the central role in the latest Supreme Court rulings - and for ways to keep them from being extended to impose conservative beliefs and doctrines.
|
|
n a better America, Mitt Romney would be running for president on the strength of his major achievement as governor of Massachusetts: a health reform that was identical in all important respects to the health reform enacted by President Obama. By the way, the Massachusetts reform is working pretty well and has overwhelming popular support.
