The Republicans are really looking like fools over the way they've handled their opposition to something Americans really want to see get done--financial reform. They're sick and tired of the whiny CEOs and Wall Street honchos who rake in boatloads of cash and then cry that they haven't bought off enough politicians.

Mitch McConnell, who has taken the "Luntzification" of financial reform as far as humanly possible, is now flip-flopping on the issue and telling Americans that the GOP may be able to work with the White House after all:

A Democratic Wall Street overhaul bill may be gaining an unlikely champion: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

After a week of attacking the pending legislation as a ticket to new taxpayer "bailouts," McConnell is striking a different tone. Monday on the Senate floor, he called for lawmakers to move beyond "personal attacks and questioning each others' motives" to "fixing the problems in this bill."

And McConnell conceded, after being chastised by no less than President Obama in his weekly radio address, that "both parties agree on this point: no bailouts. In my view, that's a pretty good start."

On Tuesday, McConnell returned to the chamber and announced he was "heartened to hear that bipartisan talks have resumed in earnest." Senate Democratic leaders are preparing to bring the overhaul bill to the floor as early as Thursday, but all 41 Republicans have signed a letter stating their opposition to the bill in its current form. Unless Democrats can peel off at least one GOP senator to allow debate to proceed, a GOP-led filibuster could block financial regulatory reform indefinitely.

Sure Mitch, you 'wrote them a letter' and now everything is working just fine. Who does he think he's kidding now?

Richard Shelby chimes in with this one:

In fact, Sam Stein reports that Republican Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), the ranking member on the Banking Committee, said negotiations "have progressed to the point that the debate now centers on specific language rather than individual proposals.

McConnell lied all week that the 50 billion dollar fund paid for by Wall Street was somehow promoting taxpayer bailouts endlessly.

Halperin: What they're saying really doesn't make any sense.

--

I cannot defend what they're doing. They are willfully misreading this bill or they are engaged in a cynical attempt to keep the president from achieving something.

Do you think Mitch is reading the new polling data that says Americans want something done to reign in the Masters of the Universe?

A new Gallup poll said voters were siding with Democrats on the issue: 50 percent of those surveyed said they supported giving the federal government new powers to regulate Wall Street banks, while 36 percent were opposed.

Another recent poll — from the Pew Research Center — showed 59 percent of Americans want Washington to address financial reform before any other issue.

“Wall Street gambled with our economy, and we all lost out as a result,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. “We need better accountability to make sure taxpayers never get left holding the bag for giant Wall Street investment banks again . … So far it appears that Wall Street has found a united ally in the Republican Party to protect them.”

The White House commissioned a poll which shows that Americans are siding with President Obama over the frazzled GOP.

Democrats delight in the prospect of Republicans voting, en bloc, to keep the debate from even starting at a time when voters are furious at Wall Street. Support for a financial industry crackdown is far more widespread and intense – 77% favor legislation like Obama's, according to a poll conducted for the White House and Senate Democrats – than it was for Democrats' health care legislation.

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Glenn Beck seems to be increasingly rattled by having been designated by the ADL as the nation's "Fearmonger in Chief" -- though he continues, on his Fox News show at least, to avoid tackling his critics by name. (He's pushed back at the ADL on his radio show, but only briefly.)

Yesterday he went on his show and denounced the unnamed "they" who say he is encouraging violence with his extremist rhetoric (which would decidedly include us). Keying off his softball interview with Barbara Walters -- who never did bring up his serial falsehoods about Walters and her colleagues at The View, oddly enough -- Beck gets all worked up about the toughest point raised in the whole conversation:

Beck: Barbara Walters even played into this nonsense during her interview with me last night on her annual 'Fascinating People' show. Here it is:

[CLIP] Walters: Glenn Beck is somebody who incites people to violence --

Beck: Oh, I've heard a lot --

Walters: -- He is inflammatory, he makes us scared.

Beck: Yeah. People say Glenn Beck is someone who incites people to violence. Yeah, a lot of people are saying that, but what's the evidence?

She also mentioned that I called Barack Obama a fascist. I don't know -- I, I don't think so. Maybe -- I don't think so, I do realize that Media Matters and MoveOn.org now just got an extra grant from Soros and they're moving into hyper-scramble to find, you know, an example. But I don't know if I ever even called him a fascist. I know I've said 'fascistic tendencies' -- sure, the administration is going in this direction.

Actually, what Walters said was this:

Walters: OK, you have said the Obama administration is fascist.

And in fact, that is exactly what he has done -- on multiple occasions, but most notably back on April 1:

Beck: Like it or not, fascism is on the rise. And that doesn't mean the Adolf Hitler kind of fascism. It's fascism with a happy face. I'll explain the exact definition of fascism in a second, and it will boggle your mind.

--

Beck: I looked up the definition of fascism yesterday, and I want to break it down. The first part is: "Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners." Wouldn't you say this is what's happening with GM right now?

As we noted then, this even included a segment with a time-traveling dime:

How far out to lunch was Beck here? Well, one of the goofier moments in this whole charade came when Beck trotted out the back of an old American dime -- first minted, as Beck says, in 1916 -- which has a fasces, the fascist symbol, on its reverse side:

This is the famed "Mercury dime", which was designed by sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who won a 1915 competition: "The reverse design, a fasces juxtaposed with an olive branch, was intended to symbolize America's readiness for war, combined with its desire for peace."

Now, the fasces has a long history of inclusion in various parts of American symbology besides just this dime. You can find it in the Oval Office, on National Guard Bureau insignia, on the American flag that flies in the U.S. House, in the Mace of the House of Representatives; on the seal of the U.S. Senate, on the Statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol building, and on a frieze on the facade of the United States Supreme Court building. Fasces are incorporated into the Lincoln Memorial.

But then, fascism as a political movement was not born until 1919. So for sculptor Weinman to have intended the fasces on the Mercury dime to imply a "fascist" intent, he'd have had to have jumped in a time machine, traveled to the future, met Mussolini, and come back to 1915 with that nefarious design in his head. Somehow I doubt this.

Beck had made the charge even before then, in a February conversation with Laura Ingraham:

Continue reading »

It's difficult to watch as our national arts organizations go begging for relatively small sums while bankers rake in taxpayer money and give themselves fat bonuses. Via the Baltimore Sun:

Over the weekend, my colleague Peter Dobrin reported on the Philadelphia Orchestra's emergency need $15 million to held ends meet. Here's an excerpt:

The orchestra is running a string of large deficits - $3.3 million for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, and a projected $7.5 million for the current year - and has maxed out its line of credit.

"Unless we, individually and collectively, provide critical financial support in the next several weeks, there is danger that our effort to fix and transform the orchestra will falter," incoming board chairman Richard B. Worley wrote in a four-page memo to the board. "Without financial stability, we will continually be forced to devote our energy to triaging short-term financial crises, making long-term sustainable change more difficult. We cannot shrink our way to a better future."

Discouraging news is everywhere in the arts world, of course. It's going to be another rough season. The situation in Philadelphia drives home what's happening here, where the Baltimore Symphony has been doing the battle of the budget since the Great Recession grabbed hold, and has done so with a remarkable degree of internal cohesiveness. For more on the local picture (just in case you missed it -- and we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?), I've got a story in today's paper.

Fifteen million? Chump change. Why not hit the bankers with a culture tax?

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The Glenn Beck show tried to sandbag Barney Frank with one of their roving reporters or producers or whatever they are, but they messed with the wrong guy. ACORN is Beck's villain of the hour and Biff Jenkins asked Frank if he'd hold hearings on ACORN because the right hates them. He got an answer he didn't expect.

Frank: As you know, the Bush administration, every year of the eight years of the Bush administration gave them well over a million dollars for housing counseling, and nobody has shown me any sign that any of that federal money was misspent. You know, I think people are being somewhat unfair to President Bush and his secretaries of HUD who consistently funded ACORN for, as I said, for a total of about 14 million dollars during the Bush years. If someone has evidence that the money that President Bush made available was misspent -- that's what I have jurisdiction over, I don't have jurisdiction over election activities by another ACORN organization -- but if anyone has any evidence, and no one has sent it to me yet, that the Bush administration ignored the misspending of that $14 million, I'll look into it.

Biff: Yes, sir, but would you hold hearings or an investigation ...?

Frank: I think you're being very unfair to President Bush.

OK, his name is not Biff, it's Griff. Frank used this against Michelle Bachmann and when you hit them with facts like this, they really have no response other than to ignore what Barney Frank said and continue with their smears.

I wonder why Beck never asked Republicans to investigate the missing $9 billion in Iraq? I guess Beck still feels like a fool after being exposed as a liar by the ladies of The View.

Via CBSNews.com:

Paramedic Annette Gasten and her German shepherd, Greta, had a grim weekend searching amid the piles of wreckage left by one of the strongest tornadoes to rake across the Plains.

Every business on Greensburg's main street was demolished and officials estimate as much as 95 percent of the town was destroyed. Tree trunks stood bare, stripped of most of their branches. All the churches were destroyed.

At least eight people in this community of 1,500 were dead, putting the state's total death toll at 10. No one was found Sunday in the debris.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said Sunday evening that the state's response will likely be hampered because much of the equipment usually positioned around the state to respond to emergencies — including tents, trucks and semitrailers - is now in Iraq. Read more...

This is just another example of how the extended occupation of Iraq has left us more vulnerable at home. Imagine if the ferocious F-5 tornado that hit Greensburg had hit a major city. A sad side note to this tragedy, 4 troops from Ft. Riley, Kansas and a reserve police officer were arrested for looting cigarettes and alcohol from a local Greensburg store. Apparently, they weren't part of any official detachment and it's not clear why they were there.

If you'd like to help the victims of the Greensburg tornado you can make your donations to the Red Cross or The Salvation Army .

UPDATE: A survivor has been found in the rubble.

UPDATE II: Kansas is not the only state feeling the loss of their National Guard troops

Mike's Blog Round Up

Early Warning: Simply the best reporting on National and Homeland security matters out there. Go look and read his recent posts. A truly valuble resource.

A true story about Bill Bennett: "He told me...he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education."

The Ink Stained Rake is Washington-based, journalist Rick Walter's weekly take-down of our pathetic press corpse.

Presstitutes: Pre$$titutes & Polls: A Self-Perpetuating Loop

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I've been asked to reprint a few guest blogs I did and will continue to do for The General

Dear Dr. Dobson,

I was very troubled by the recent actions of the St. Petersburg, Florida police the other day when they hauled off that 5-year-old girl away in handcuffs.

I thought they acted in a clearly puritanical manner. However, after receiving your book " Temper Your Child's Tantrums " from my Opus Dei recruiter, I realized that she was acting out in obviously the state you so beautifully described in the chapter called " Challenge the Chief."

Normally I'm all for a little corporal mortification. A day is not complete until I take off my Cilice, and rake my back with a cat-o nine tails for a few hours to cleanse myself of the sins of this unholy world and get right with the Lord if you know what I mean.(wink,wink) However, I wasn't all that much in favor of flogging our children to make sure they keep their pie holes shut.

After reading the blissfully written passage where you say, "corporal punishment is an act of love on our children" I was really impressed. So impressed that I now feel that the police didn't go far enough with this little out of control, activist judge err…girl. I have written the school board, the principal and the PTA demanding that they take her out to the school yard and hang her up by the thumbs from the monkey bars until she realizes what she has done was wrong. Then I have suggested that we should set aside a little time each day so we can administer a "spank-a –thon" to our kids so that they... and if I might use that great South Park Conservative Eric Cartman's words" Respect my authority"

The sooner we get these little bastards in line the better.

Heterosexually yours,

Crooks and Liars