They used to use the term “banana republic” to refer to countries in Central America in which the government was run as a tool for the oligarchies that became rich by exploiting the natural resources of the country.

Now we have the official transformation of a state with a proud Progressive tradition into a banana republic.

Josh is reporting that after the Wisconsin Assembly concluded debate on Walker’s anti-union bill, they went immediately to a vote. The vote lasted seconds, and as soon as there were enough Republican votes to pass it the Republican Speaker closed the voting.

The majority of the Democratic caucus didn’t even get to have their votes recorded, even though they were pounding furiously on their electronic voting buttons.

The Democratic members of the Senate are standing firm, and there are suggestions that the vote was illegal and may be subject to a court challenge, but Wisconsin has taken one more step toward being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.

A lot of what Obama has done has been a big disappointment, to me no less than to other liberals. I constantly hear people saying that Obama is no different from Bush, or from what McCain would have been if he’d been elected.

Today we have more proof that these claims are just wrong.

As of today, the Justice Department will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court.

Andrew Cohen reports in Politics Daily:

In announcing the surprise move, Attorney General Holder wrote: “After careful consideration, including a review of my recommendation, the President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny. The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the President’s determination.

Part of our job as progressive activists is to push our elected officials farther than they want to go.

They deserve credit when they get a big decision like this right.

Just fourteen minutes ago, Tom Salmon announced on his Facebook page that he is not going to run for re-election as Auditor of Accounts.

His statement:

I have enjoyed my service to the state but will not seek re-election as state auditor. It has been an honor to serve with such a talented team at the SAO (State Auditor’s Office). Thank you all.

As you know, Salmon has gotten a lot of flack in these pages for various things, including turning his coat to run as a Republican, his support for Republicans, and his farcical talk about running for Senate against Bernie Sanders.

There’s no word on whether he’s running, but he shows every sign that he will. There’s also nothing on his official web page.

Funny that he has so little interest in doing the job of Auditor, after running for election, getting Democrats across the state to volunteer to help with his recount, running again, and then taking office.

It doesn’t say much for his constancy of purpose, does it?

UPDATE

I spoke too soon. The Times has carried the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02…

The Chamber of Commerce holds itself out as the voice of business in the United States. But they’re not all crazy; they’re responsible businesses. That’s why they were happy to have Obama speak to them this week, even though there are lots of things they disagree on.

President Obama urged American businesses on Monday to “get in the game” by letting loose trillions of dollars being held in reserves, saying that they can help create a “virtuous cycle” of more sales, higher demand and greater profits that will put people back to work and turn around the sluggish economy.

. . .

But the chamber, too, is eager to tone down the rhetoric, according to senior officials there. At the height of the high-profile fight with the White House, several big-name companies left its board, citing concern about the chamber’s opposition to the administration’s efforts.

And how do they show their commitment to tone down the rhetoric and work constructively?

ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

Yup, American business at its finest.

Two questions:

1. What are the odds of reading about this in the Times or the Wall Street Journal?

2. How quickly will the Vermont Chamber criticize this bit of shady and unethical practise?

UPDATE. This just in from Peter Welch’s office:

Thursday, 10 February 2011 17:06

The Vermont congressional delegation – Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) – will hold a press conference in Burlington on Monday when President Obama will send Congress a budget which reportedly will propose to cut in half federal funding for home heating assistance.

The delegation led an effort in Congress that doubled funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program to $5.1 billion a year since 2008. The program provides critical heating assistance for senior citizens, persons with disabilities, and low-income families with children. In December, the Vermont delegation also successfully fought efforts in Congress to cut LIHEAP.

http://www.welch.house.gov/ind…

UPDATE: Bernie Sanders was on Vermont Edition today and in a response to a question from GMD, confirmed that the Vermont delegation will be fighting to maintain support for Fuel Assistance.

You can hear the broadcast at 7:00 p.m., or listen to it here:

http://vpr.net/episode/50484/

Interesting juxtaposition today.

First, the Shriver Center on Poverty Law (what used to be called Clearinghouse, and which publishes Clearinghouse Review, the indispensable journal of poverty law, published its Poverty Scorecard.

Vermont’s delegation did pretty well: A’s across the board. Not A+, but A is pretty good.

http://povertyscorecard.org/st…

Obama, on the other hand, not so much.

As reported in the National Journal:

President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget will cut several billion dollars from the government’s energy assistance fund for poor people, officials briefed on the subject told National Journal.

It’s the biggest domestic spending cut disclosed so far, and one that will likely generate the most heat from the president’s traditional political allies. Such complaints might satisfy the White House, which has a vested interest in convincing Americans that it is serious about budget discipline.  

http://www.nationaljournal.com…

That’s more than ten times what the Republicans want to cut the program, and their cuts would come out of the no less vital contingency fund.

Members of Congress from the Northeast are already calling for full funding of the program, and demanding that the administration retract the proposed cuts.

We can expect our delegation to come out strong in support of LIHEAP. They’re all good on poverty, and Senator Leahy visited at least one meeting of the state’s Fuel Program Advisory Committee while I was a member. I’ve seen speculation that this is no more than political kabuki to boost the administration’s budget-cutting cred, but still, cut vital heating assistance to low-income families?

Obama, WTF?

Our Representative, Peter Welch, continues to protect the rights of Vermonters and all Americans.   This morning Welch's efforts to protect whistleblowers from intimidation, harassment, and retaliation makes the front page of Talking Points Memo:  

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) is pushing back against Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA) investigation into whether the Obama administration is politicizing Freedom of Information Act requests.

 It's not that Welch opposes the general thrust of Issa's probe. He's just worried about what could turn out to be some pretty serious unintended consequences — squelching interest in filing FOIA requests by revealing the identities of the private citizens making them.

 

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo…

Yesterday, Welch was also among those Representatives who voted against extending the so-called PATRIOT Act.

As reported in the Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON – The House on Tuesday failed to extend the life of three surveillance tools that are key to the nation’s post-Sept. 11 anti-terror law, a slipup for the new Republican leadership that miscalculated the level of opposition.

The House voted 277-148 to keep the three provisions of the USA Patriot Act on the books until Dec. 8. But Republicans brought up the bill under a special expedited procedure requiring a two-thirds majority, and the vote was seven short of reaching that level.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

And yes, Welch was among those who blocked the externsion.

Good work, Peter. Keep up the good work!

Tomorrow Is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, and we just passed the thirtieth anniversary of his inauguration as president, so we have already been subjected to hagiographic portrayals of him, his life, and his supposedly classic American virtues.

That makes this an appropriate time to consider some of the truth of Ronald Reagan as an antidote to the lies, half truths, and mythology that we are about to hear. There are many reasons to despise and scorn the memory of Ronald Reagan, so I’ll just concentrate on a few of them.

Racism. It’s impossible to consider Reagan’s presidency without confronting the centrality of his appeals to racism. He opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city most famous for the murders of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. His speech made an appeal to “states’ rights”, a code word for segregation and racial oppression since the earliest days of the Civil Rigjhts Movement (not to mention the Civil War). His announcement was an explicit message to any who would hear that he would support the aims of the racist South. In this way, Reagan’s presidency can be understood as the culmination of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

As he ran, so he governed. From his support for the racist policies of Bob Jones University to his references to “big bucks” abusing Food Stamps; from his support for apartheid to the clear understanding of his aide Lee Atwater, who explained how Reagan and Bush used concealed racism to win Southern votes, Reagan’s presidency was suffused with racism, but you won’t hear any of his acolytes discuss it this week.

Support for dictators. If you listen to the Reagan apologists this week you’ll hear endless recitations of claims that he revered and valued democracy and freedom. Of course, the opposite is true. As I mentioned, he supported apartheid and resisted any efforts to attack or dismantle it. His foreign policy is characterized by support for the most vicious dictators, with his support for the incumbent dictator in El Salvador and his creation of the contra mercenaries in Nicaragua to restore the Somoza dictatorship there the most outstanding example.

Bargaining with terrorists. Maybe a smaller point, but remember that part of Reagan’s support for the contras was giving weapons to terrorists to free American hostages.

Corruption. Let’s not forget: Reagan’s administration may have been the most corrupt in our history.

Superstition. It’s a daily event that American presidents engage in superstition and mythology to gain public support. (Hint: when’s the last time you heard a presidential speech that didn’t end with “God bless you and God bless the United States”?) Reagan went beyond this by basing his public decisions on the favorite superstition of the soft-headed, astrology.

Taxes. Even today, every Republican pledges loyalty to Reagan’s anti-tax ideology. We know that after he cut taxes he raised them again, so take it as stipulated that he wasn’t as consistently opposed to taxation as his worshippers claim. Nevertheless, the message stuck. This is what I would say is the worst of the many evils that Ronald Reagan is responsible for: he convinced a wide swath of the American people that they can have all the benefits of our American society and government without paying for it.  When the teabaggers claim him as their political and spiritual godfather, this is really what they’re talking about.

Or Mubarak = Pahlavi?

I have the feeling I’ve seen this movie before. A dictator who is largely friendly to the United States and its foreign policy goals is in trouble, shaken by massive street demonstrations.

It’s not quite the same as Iran, because in this case the dictator wasn’t installed by the United States. Still, things are not looking too stable for Hosni Mubarak.

It’s very hard to feel bad about what seems to be happening to Hosni Mubarak, who seems to be a born henchman. And it’s almost impossible not to identify with the demonstrators in the street, to say, as a friend of mine just observed, we are all Egyptians now.

If you’re old enough you remember the same feeling watching the students in Tehran, risking murder by Pahlavi’s SAVAK. I sure did. In fact, when I was in law school I had the chance to represent an Iranian student who was arrested on campus at the University of Michigan for wearing a mask at an anti-Pahlavi demonstration.

My problem is that I also remember what happened next. All right-thinking Americans supported the Iranian students. None of us thought that the result would be installation of an Islamic fascist dictatorship that holds power to this day.

I don’t know the answer, but my question is this: Is there any chance that Mubarak can be escorted out without creating and Iranian-style Islamic dictatorship?

And does anyone have any suggestions on how to get there?

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:  

We've seen a rapid swing on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, from the initial charges on the left that the shooter was encouraged by wild rhetoric from the extreme right, to an almost immediate backlash from the wingers who denied that he was motivated by right-wing views, to even claiming that he is a leftist.  

Now we have a report that examines the actual content of his writings and guess what: his writings are saturated by some of the most extreme, right-wing anti-government ideas, conspiracy theories, and lots of pet claims by the extreme right (denial of the legitimacy of paper money, for instance).  

Is this a claim that he was acting at the direction of Sarah "Crosshairs" Palin? No. I'll stipulate that Crosshairs wasn't seriously trying to provoke an assassination attempt when she published her violent campaign poster.  

But there is no question that, to the extent Loughner's writings set forth any political ideology, it is the ideology of the extreme right.

It's been just a week, and we've gone from an outcry against the violent rhetoric of the extreme right to an equally rapid backlash, with “responsible” opinion cautioning against blaming the right-wingers for talk about crosshairs, reloading, and being armed and dangerous.

Now that backlash appears to be infecting our news coverage.

Today the Associated Press ran a story about a former Congressional candidate facing criminal charges for threats against Indiana judges.

 Here's how the AP describes the defendant:

 What party, you might ask, was this woman a member of? Well you might as, but in the AP coverage you will never find out, because her party affiliation appears nowhere in the story.

If you're interested, she's a Republican.

 But apparently, we're not allowed to say, or even know, the party affiliation of someone who engages in violent rhetoric.

That would be irresponsible.