OurFuture.org Blogs: Sam Boyd

"Obama's Marxist Harpy Wife" - [Updated!]

Sam Boyd — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:46:50 -0400

That's how a writer for the prominent conservative blog redstate.com described her. I copied the first bit of text in the post here, but since the whole post has been disappeared from the site this is all I've got (it wasn't up long enough to be cached apparently):

Is Obama Shagging Hookers Behind the Media's Back?

I assume not. I assume that Obama's marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him should he even think about it, but I ask the question to make one simple point: Barack Obama, like Elliott Spitzer, is a creation of the liberal media and, as a result, could be a serial killing transvestite and the media would turn a blind eye. Elliott...

Yes, forget all those silly voters! The whole thing was pretty crazy (I read it in my feedreader but closed it before realizing the post was gone from the main site) and I can see why they took it down, but go read the whole site to get a feel for the half-crazed fury that's possessing modern conservatives. It's a scary sight, and a scary site.

Update: Found it! The "marxist harpy" bit is the most remarkable, but the the whole thing is striking for the contempt with which the author, Erick Erickson the "Editor and Chairman of the Board" who runs the website full time, regards Obama:

Barack Obama could be pillaging poor people in Chicago, shagging every hooker in Washington, D.C., and going to Communist Party meetings with his wife and the media would (A) never look into it and (B) never mention it even if they knew. Obama, after all, represents audacious hope and change.

Obama is a media generated product. Few of his supporters can tell us what substantive issues he stands for beyond hope and change. His Illinois voting record is barely mentioned by the press. The background of his church, which would be deeply investigated by every major reporter were he a Republican, has been ignored.*

But I suspect that will now change. With the implosion of Elliott Spitzer and Obama's own campaign's implosion, the media is starting to see the error of their ways. The media, though harboring deep hatred toward the Clintons', does not want to be on the losing team. And the writing is more clearly starting to appear on the wall. Obama is failing to catch on. His state victories look impressive in terms of quantity, but the internal numbers show a man unable to garner significant support across party lines and outside of caucus states.

I say again what I've said before: Obama is a weaker candidate that Clinton. And the shtick of his surrogates screaming racism whenever anyone mentions his shallowness or middle name will not play in the general election like it does in the primary. After all, his middle name is what it is and he is a shallow man lacking much substance to the right of George McGovern.

Also, Erickson put the post up on his personal blog where it remains.

Diseased and Uncontrolled Centers for Disease Control

Sam Boyd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:03:21 -0500

The awesome new nonprofit online investigative reporting newspaper The Washington Independent has a great piece you really should read on massive problems in the CDC caused by, you guessed it, a Bush appointee:

Some departing scientists and outside experts have charged that senior CDC officials are failing to give the office the independence it requires to investigate possible harm from vaccines. The accusations have come at a time when the number of routine childhood shots is swelling—preschoolers now get 10 separate types of shots in most states, double the number in 2000. New vaccines are being administered to teenagers as well. In the latest addition to the vaccine schedule, a CDC panel on Wednesday recommended that all children up to 18 years of age receive yearly flu vaccination.

The bitterness and disputes at the Immunization Safety Office, moreover, are par for the course at the CDC under the leadership of Dr. Julie Gerberding, who took over in 2002 after handling the agency’s response to the anthrax mailings.

In more than a dozen interviews, senior CDC scientists complained that Gerberding has driven away the agency’s best scientists while embittering many of its 7,000 employees. She implemented a sweeping reorganization that centralized control and boosted public relations efforts while introducing expensive, often unworkable new management techniques. The officials charge that the once-independent CDC has been brought under tighter political control from the White House.

In 2005, five of the agency’s last six directors charged in an unprecedented letter that Gerberding’s management and politicization of the agency were harming CDC’s unparalleled international reputation in the field of public health. Daily complaints on a venting website provide a window into a dispirited, demoralized workforce.

A half-dozen senior scientists told The Washington Independent that they now spend roughly a third of their time on administrative tasks that previously took up no more than 10 percent. In the view of many, Gerberding took a functioning, vibrant agency and subjected it to a needless purges and restructuring. In some cases, scientists who champion unpopular positions, like non-abstinence forms of birth control, have been muzzled. For the most part, however, the main complaint is that the administration is burying them in red tape.

So much for conservative opposition to regulation. And, unsurprisingly, an agency at war with itself isn't too good at, you know, controlling disease:

In a separate probe, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich) criticized the agency last year for failing to take more aggressive action against hospital infections that kill more than 100,000 patients annually.

Dr. William Jarvis, who left the CDC in 2003 after a period in charge of fighting hospital infections, charged that a reorganization of his division, ordered by Gerberding, had created “five years of dysfunction. During that time, an enormous number of qualified people left.”

While it is difficult to find other direct evidence that turmoil in the agency is affecting public health, many scientists there speak darkly of the dumbing down of the CDC. Too much emphasis is being placed on delivering a unified, pro-CDC message, and not enough on independent inquiry, these scientists charged, echoing complaints heard throughout the government’s professional corps.

And in adittion to being an example of conservative inattention to competent government, this is also an example of obsession with terrorism undermining other missions of public agencies. Recall from the first quote that Geberding was appointed after overseeing the CDC's response to the Anthrax attacks.

Sinkhole Swallows Minivan

Sam Boyd — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:20:14 -0500

Besides E. Coli the bread and butter of this blog has been our nation's crumbling infrastructure. Decades of neglect from conservatives have caused infrastructure catastrophes from bridge collapses to sinkholes and cost untold billions.

The latest example hits particularly close to home for me and Rick, literally since it happened right here in Chicago. Click through for the striking picture.

A water-main break on Chicago's West Side overnight created a sinkhole that swallowed a minivan parked on the street, police said.

The main broke sometime in the early morning Monday in the 2600 block of West Luther Street in the Little Village neighborhood, said Tom LaPorte, a spokesman for the Department of Water Management.

By daylight, police had received reports of the large sinkhole, Officer Marcel Bright said. City crews towed the vehicle from the hole and blocked off the residential street.

The hole measured about 10 feet by 10 feet and was about 8 feet deep, Bright said.

Yet More Conservative Personality Cults

Sam Boyd — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:10:25 -0500

Last week we brought you the story of Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao who replaced pictures of DoL projects in hallways with photos of herself. Now comes word of yet another photo tribute to a Bush cabinet member, secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson (see Think Progress for a picture):

Few visitors will venture far from the usual sites to see a spectacular exhibit -- just a short walk from the Mall -- that so very much captures the spirit, the essence, the greatness of this shining city on a hill.

Yes, it's the beautifully designed photo homage to one of our nation's leaders, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson. The photo exhibit is boldly and proudly displayed in the lobby of HUD's headquarters building, itself a dreadful gray relic of Great Society architecture.

Tour groups need not even go through the inviting metal detectors to admire 20 large, color photographs of the secretary, each about 2 feet by 3 feet. No fewer than five of them feature Jackson with President Bush-- in the Rose Garden, in the Oval Office, chatting together, coming down the steps at the Capitol.

The photographs cover an entire wall of the lobby as you enter, passing two other photos, the smaller official ones, of Bush and his old buddy from Texas days, side by side to greet you.

Jackson has a long history of corruption as we've written before. He's under several different investigations and may soon have to step down:

Jackson is under investigation by HUD's inspector general and the Justice Department for various alleged acts of favoritism in awarding HUD contracts. It's been reported that investigators are looking into whether he helped steer no-bid and inflated contracts for New Orleans and the Virgin Islands to friends and whether he lied when he told authorities he had not.

And investigators are looking into his alleged role in arranging a contract for a golfing pal who allegedly did repairs and remodeling on Jackson's South Carolina vacation home.

Should Jackson be indicted, he may well have to step down from his job, which could place the exhibit in jeopardy. And even if his term is not shortened, he and this example of Americana will most surely be gone early next year.

Don't forget -- when you finish admiring this exhibit in HUD's southeast entrance, the one used by the public and folks on official business, there is another at the northeast-corner entrance just a few steps away.

This one is equally stunning but a bit smaller, with only 18 photos -- and only two with Bush. There are more photos of Jackson speaking, testifying and looking thoughtful, and one of him talking on a cellphone near a building, which again offers a clue as to his government job.

Your boss has forty-odd pictures of himself at the entrances to your office, right?

Rewarding Failure In Protecting Soldiers

Sam Boyd — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:49:31 -0500

Example five bazillion of failed military contractors getting what they so richly don't deserve (via Think Progress):

Sioux Manufacturing--the company currently in hot water for providing our troops with 2.2 million substandard Kevlar helmets--was also awarded one of three U.S. government contracts to provide armor for the new MRAPs. This happened in November, but to this point, it appears that few have made the connection.

And the fine for providing 2.2 million soldiers defective protection? $2 million dollars--less than $1 a helmet. Meanwhile the MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle) contract is worth $74 million. If at first you don't succeed...

More E. Coli Conservatism Than Ever

Sam Boyd — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:21:59 -0500

The USDA issued a recall over the weekend for 143 million pounds of beef produced over the last two years by a California company which, the USDA has recently learned had not been properly reporting "downer" cows--those too sick to stand. These cows have entered the food supply (links to a summary, see the USDA's recall notice here) and may carry E. Coli or mad-cow disease (BSE)

The USDA’s largest-ever recall is now under way — "approximately 143,383,823 pounds" (give or take a few ounces?) of raw and frozen beef products from the disgraced Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. in Chino, California. That’s almost half the amount of beef and poultry recalled since 1994 in the United States

What's more, the use of downer cows (see more on the topic from Rick) by the company was reported three weeks ago by the Washington Post after the Humane Society provided video evidence of downer cows being lifted with forklifts and sprayed with water in the nose for the same reason.

This is just the latest in a series of steadily increasing E. Coli recalls that have reached record levels in recent years. What's more, just because meat is recalled by the USDA does not mean it actually comes off store shelves:

The effectiveness of USDA-managed recalls has been the subject of much criticism in recent years. For example, in 2004 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) submitted a report to Congress (PDF) pointing out numerous weaknesses in recall practices of the USDA (and the FDA). Among the problems detailed by the GAO are a failure to know how quickly and completely the affected companies were carrying out the recalls, and an inability to verify that recall requests had fully permeated the distribution chain.

Basically, this is going to keep happening untill we realize that our food safety is very poorly protected. Conservatives and their contempt for government have systematically undermined consumer safety for the benefit of large agribusineses. For more read Rick and this guy.

Your Tax Dollars At Labor

Sam Boyd — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:56:40 -0500

Keeping track of Bush Administration scandals is difficult, in part because there are so damn many of them. For example, there's now an entire website dedicated to the various failings of Secretary of Labor (and wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) Elaine Chao. There's defiance of congressional oversight:

The acting assistant secretary for mine safety and health David G. Dye, along with the administrator of coal mine safety and health Ray McKinney, both walked out of a January 2006 hearing by a Senate subcommittee, claiming they were “too busy with their duties to stay.”

Appointing department employees to conduct "independent oversight":

: Despite complaints from miners and Congress, Elaine tapped former MSHA employees to investigate their own agency’s handling of the disaster as part of an “independent commission,” raising further questions about the validity of the investigation.

No-bid contracts:

: Despite complaints from miners and Congress, Elaine tapped former MSHA employees to investigate their own agency’s handling of the disaster as part of an “independent commission,” raising further questions about the validity of the investigation.

Electioneering:

During the 2006 midterm elections, Elaine and other administration officials traveled across the country awarding government funding, with great public fanfare, to districts where Mitch’s embattled Senate colleagues — including Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) — were fighting to hold onto their seats.

And finally a totally over-the-top self-promotion at taxpayers expense:

Elaine used taxpayer funds to line the walls of the Labor Department with 58 pictures of herself, embroider her name on lanyards and fleece blankets distributed at conferences, and hand out Elaine-themed gold-colored coins at public events.

Man, I want a gold-colored coin with a bas relief of my face on it. See the site for much much much more.

Conservatives Can't Even Rig An Election Properly

Sam Boyd — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:49:07 -0500

So let's say you're head of the Washington Republican Party (and really, who amongst us hasn't been?) and you're a supporter of John McCain. He's winning your state's caucus as the votes come in and most of the votes are in, and things look good. But Mike Huckabee is getting awful close. Why not just stop reporting the vote? If McCain is ahead, he'll stay that way and who'll notice? Well, that's what did happen last weekend it seems and as it turns out someone did notice--the good people at Talking Points Memo:

For probably the first time in all the primaries and elections I've ever watched, the folks running the election decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted. And this wasn't a 70-30 blow out, but a tight race where the two top vote getters were separated by less than 2% of the vote. Then this morning, state party chair Luke Esser decided to declare McCain the winner.

But it turns out to be even worse. The state GOP hadn't really decided how the votes were counted:

At a minimum, there seems to be serious questions about what exactly was being tallied Saturday night. Was it the presidential preferences of individual caucusgoers, which Snohomish County apparently counted? Or was it the presidential preferences of the delegates elected by caucus-goers, which the party says should have been counted?

Setting aside the issue of why Esser, the state GOP chair, called the contest for John McCain even before all the caucuses had reported, there seems to be an issue of whether everyone was even counting the same thing.

Can we agree that any election is bound to have some problems if the people running the election haven't agreed on what is being counted?

And, just to make things extra fun, here's an account of the suspicious rapidity with McCain jumped into the lead as results came in.

To summarize, they ran the caucuses contrary to their own rules, possibly fiddled with the results of those caucuses (remember the party ran this election not the state) and then just stopped reporting the results at all once they had their desired result. And we wonder why conservatives have trouble governing...

"They're Still Standing"

Sam Boyd — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:38:55 -0500

A willful inability to govern well is a hallmark of modern conservatism. Usually, we think of this failure as a result of conservatives being unable or unwilling to perform functions of government they don't believe in--regulation, food safety, et cetera. But if you have a culture where competence isn't valued there's no way to contain it. Once you're in the habit of retaliating against all criticisms and ignoring the actual performance of your agencies, it's easy to do the same thing for government functions you do care about (even conservatives admit the need for policing).

Consider the case of the United States Park Police, the men and women tasked with protecting the National Mall, Statue of Liberty and many parks and roads in the D.C. area. In 2001 the Bush administration chose Teresa Chambers as its head. In 2003 Chambers gave an interview to The Washington Post in which she pointed out that the Republican-controlled congress had given her insufficient funds and that, as a result, officers were working 12 hour shifts, traffic accidents were up in areas where patrols had been cut back, and that she didn't have the resources to prevent homeless people from taking up residence in some parks. The administration's response? It fired her.

Fast forward to 2008 and, what do you know, things haven gotten worse and, as a result, many of our nation's most important landmarks are essentially unsafe. Private contractors have been brought in, but they seem basically incompetent and the force that remains is deeply dysfunctional:

The U.S. Park Police have failed to adequately protect such national landmarks as the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and are plagued by low morale, poor leadership and bad organization, according to a new government report.

The force is understaffed, insufficiently trained and woefully equipped, the report by the Interior Department's inspector general concludes. Hallowed sites on the Mall are weakly guarded and vulnerable to terrorist attack, the inspector general's office found.

And guess what, the guy they hired to replace Chambers isn't doing too good a job:

Park Police Chief Dwight E. Pettiford, although not identified by name, is singled out for criticism, and one of the report's 20 recommendations is that the National Park Service examine whether he is "equipped to effectively advance the mission and operations of the agency."...

Asked about the accusation that the monuments were not adequately protected, the police chief declared: "They're still standing."

A Conservative Condemns E. Coli Conservatism

Sam Boyd — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:16:29 -0500

David Frum is certainly a man who knows which way the wind is blowing. In 1994 he wrote Dead Right, an argument for purer anti-government conservatism and a criticism of the Reagan and Bush administrations which nicely played into the Republican Revolution of 94. In 2003 he published The Right Man, a laudatory account of Bush in the white house before and after 9-11 that rode a tide of pro-bush pro-war jingoism. In early 2004 he published, with Richard Perle, An End to Evil which stands as the most prominent summary of Bush-era neoconservative ideas.

Today, with Republicans in disarray and Democrats united and exuberant he's written a book called Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again.None of this is to say Frum is dishonest. As Keynes said “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Frum clearly has a unusually strong focus on the fragility of the present state of the political world. As he says in the closing chapter:

“The fact of change is the great fact of human life. The necessity of adapting to change was the impulse that inspired me to begin this book. And the dangers that threaten any institution or party or political idea that fails to adapt—those were the nightmares that drove me to finish.”

So what does a thoughtful conservative think of the modern Republican party? Nothing good. In fact, it could be that the most persuasive and bitter critic of the modern Republican party is none other than the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil.” Don't get me wrong, he's no liberal, but he has come to believe his party is deeply misguided and that the basic Republican program of the past decade—cut taxes no matter what, hate on the gays, and continue an imperialistic policy in the middle east—is fundamentally flawed.

The first point Frum makes is that Republicans' obsession with Ronald Reagan is deeply embarrassing and destructive. Reagan governed in an era where crime was a top concern, run-away inflation was a recent memory, and welfare was, for better or worse, on the minds of many voters (Reagan helped put it there). None of those things are the case any more. Governing by parsing the utterances of a man who's been out of office for twenty years and essentially senile for most of them is deeply absurd. If this book has one message it's that.

Nor is this criticism merely empty words. It's pretty shocking to see a former Bush speechwriter argue that “while many of the courntry's most pressing domestic problems can be traced to government... few of them can be fixed by Reagan-style tax cutting and deregulation.” Try getting your average Republican to admit to that! And it's pretty amazing to hear a man who co-wrote a book described as “a kind of neocon orgy, a Bohemian Grove weekend for militaristic moralists, a chance to get naked and do tribal, Lord of the Flies dances -- 'Invade Iran! Kill Yasser! Drink Kim's blood!'” write that “to reconcile others to American power, that power must be seen to be somehow constrained.”

What's more Frum essentially accepts the basic critique of conservatism as a fundamentally incompetent ideology that has been advanced by, among others, OurFuture's own Rick Perlstein. He writes that “to vindicate our claim to be the party of the nation, we must make clear that we value public service as much as private wealth creation; that we appreciate the duties of government fully as much as we defend the rights of the marketplace.”

He also accepts that conservatives, for all their high minded talk about freedom and small government, have essentially won by exploiting the resentment of middle class white people against less well off groups who have the temerity to try and improve their lot in life. He writes that Democrats have been the party of “those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: slaveholders, indebted farmers, immigrants, intellectuals, catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays—people who identify with the “pluribus” in the nation's motto” and that, as those groups have become more numerous, the fortunes of the Republican party have declined.

He writes that “Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of century,” but that it won't work any more. Fewer Americans get off on beating up on hippies these days and Republicans aren't doing as well as they used to. Frum asks “how many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale?”

The BigCon section of this site has one big idea and it's that an ideology that rejects the role of government in society can't govern well. We've seen it in tainted meat and deadly spinach. We've seen it in lead-laced toys, unsafe bridges, and gaping sink holes. We've seen it in dissembling administration officials and absurd economics. David Frum has a good record of sensing the zeitgeist and the fact that he's sensed the same thing should be more evidence that not only are we right, but voters are starting to agree with us.