The Epic Ballad of Eric Massa

The Massa debacle is unfolding in an increasingly hilarious way. Having already invoked the names of Limbaugh and Beck in my post earlier today I think I’ll use them again now- they do a great job of exemplifying the Old School of Crazy Conservatism and the New School of Crazier Conservatism, respectively.

To recap where Massa has been: Last Friday, New York Representative Eric Massa announced that he was stepping down. His initial justification was that health issues required him to vacate the seat, but that then changed to something about vulgar language and an unusual episode where he made some inappropriate comments towards some of his male roommates. Then it changed again, to a claim that the White House and Democratic leaders were forcing him out. Then it changed once more to ethics charges related to the alleged groping of the aforementioned male roommates. There was also something in there about Rahm Emanual threatening Massa whilst he was naked in the House showers, which if true would absolutely redeem Emanual in my eyes because everything about that is hilarious.

You would assume it’s perfectly obvious that Massa is a bizarre mess, and that it would be hard for anyone to score political points off of this train wreck other than in the most general ‘hey look, another Democratic screw up’ kind of way. You would assume incorrectly.

Limbaugh and Beck, opportunists that they are, dove in the moment Massa claimed that he was forced out by a vicious cabal of corrupt Democrats. Limbaugh got right on it:

LIMBAUGH: “He was asked in this appearance: "Well, why don't you rescind your resignation?" He said, "The only way I can do that is if this becomes a national story." So Congressman Massa, we're doing our part here to make it a national story. But he then said, "But you have to understand something, if I don't quit, the ethics investigation continues and they're going to ruin me that way." They're going to ruin him anyway. He sounds ticked off enough that I would stay. This guy is as fired up as anybody I've ever heard anywhere opposed this, and the process and how they're getting it done. This guy is going to have so much support from people.”

Gotta help the guy out, make it a national story! He's just doing his job and he's being attacked by these evil Democrats. Beck scored an interview with Massa, and claimed that it was going to be a very important moment in the anti-Obama campaign:

“Tomorrow at five: congressman Massa for the full hour. I just spoke with him off air. All Americans need To hear him. Exclusive 2morrow fox”

Formatted stupidly because it was on twitter, naturally. So there you have it: this Massa guy is going to bring down the entire Obama administration with his earth-shattering revelations. Except then his story continued to evolve, and by today no element of it remained the same. Forced out? Massa proudly claims he ‘forced himself out.’ Haha ok, whatever. Cue the damage control brigade!

"LIMBAUGH: Yesterday, I had never heard of this guy. All I knew was this guy was telling great stories about Rahm Emanuel. Here we have a legitimate kook, anybody who embraces this guy is going to get caught. He's not a media hero and he's not a conservative. This guy is a loose cannon and he's a risk."

The man is backpedaling so furiously he's going to throw off the rotation of the Earth and make the Sun rise in the west! Beck was burned even worse by his interview, which featured a bizarre photo album from Massa and saw the former Representative recant pretty much every element of the story that Beck initially found attractive.

Just seven minutes into Glenn Beck's hour-long interview of Eric Massa on Tuesday evening, things had already gone very wrong.

Conservatives had hopes that the now-former Democratic congressman from Upstate New York, who resigned abruptly under an ethics cloud, would deliver the goods about corruption and strong-arm tactics in the Obama White House and Congress. But instead, Massa served up an icky new confession.

"Now they're saying I groped a male staffer," he volunteered. "Yeah, I did. Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday."

Hahah this is literally the opposite of what Beck wanted to hear from the man he wanted to make into an icon.

Massa... had nothing to support his hints that Democratic leaders had made corrupt bargains and used thuggish tactics. "Name names," Beck pleaded. "Show us where to throw the dirt."

But no matter how many times he was asked -- Anything new? Actionable stuff? Anything specific? -- Massa came up empty. "I don't know how to be specific," he said.

Good lord, Massa just trolled Beck harder than anything Beck has ever pulled off on anyone. So much so, in fact, that Beck cut Massa off at the end and apologized to his audience for ‘wasting their time’ over the previous hour. 

If any news story will ever top the Falcon Heene/ electric space balloon/ farting and puking at Wolf Blitzer saga for pure comedic value, this is it.

Glenn Beck Insanity Theater: Death to Social Justice!

Now that the word 'liberal' is considered tainted and people are moving to identify themselves as progressive instead, the Right is moving to redefine the terms of the debate once more. The most prominent, as always, are Beck and Limbaugh. Both have sought to conflate progressivism with Nazism and socialism/communism (completely interchangeable, in their book) simultaneously, confusingly enough. Beck is now taking it a step further and tying in any church which has social justice on the agenda:

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

Uh... alright.  Social justice has been around for a while, and I'm reasonably sure that a bunch of major sects advocate it. Going by the definition proposed by the Catholic church, the seven tenets of social justice include:

"That human life must be valued infinitely above material possessions; institutions must be judged by how much they enhance the life and dignity of human persons; every human has the right to what is required to live a full and decent life such as employment, health care, and education; our words, prayers and deeds must show solidarity with, and compassion for, the poor; workers have a right to work, to earn a living wage, and to form trade unions to protect their interests; all the peoples of the world belong to one human family; and that we cannot use and abuse the natural resources God has given us with a destructive consumer mentality."

Oh OK, I think I see the problem. Whatever shitty god Beck et al loudly worship can't be arsed to actually care about people- the guy who said you get to heaven by selling all your possessions and giving to the poor must have been some kind of crackpot!  Let me go ahead and rewrite this to a more Beck-friendly format:

"Material possessions must be valued infinitely above human life; institutions must be judged by how much they they profit from human persons; the upper class has the right to what is required to live a full and decent life such as employment, health care, and education; our words must show solidarity with the poor around election season; the rich have a right to earn an extravagant wage, and to form corporations to protect their interests; all the conservative straight white Christian peoples of the world belong to one human family; and that we must use and abuse the natural resources God has given us with a consumer mentality."

Actually, I could see Beck unironically endorsing this, if you just re-encode it a little bit. Anyway the bizarre sight of a conservative pundit telling people to stay away from churches sorta sidetracked me for a minute, lets get back to his bit:

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. "Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That's what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: 'social justice.' They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy."

Honestly I'm pretty surprised Beck managed to limit himself to cards, because this seems like a great opportunity for a chalkboard depicting the inexplicable connections between contradictory ideologies. "That's what people say" is my favorite part, by the way- "people" in this case apparently refers to "anyone who knows what they're talking about." As opposed to "guy who makes stuff up to scare people on TV for a few hours every day," that is.

Bill Halter, The Man Who Will Defeat Blanche Lincoln

If you've spent any amount of time reading this blog, you know my feelings about Blanche Lincoln. In a Democratic Douche Caucus that contains Ben Nelson, Max Baucus and Evan Bayh, Blanche Lincoln may actually be the most loathsome character of them all.

It's not just that she's in the pocket of every industry that congress is attempting to regulate, she has taken an active role in killing almost any meaningful element of the Democratic platform. The Employee Free Choice Act, meaningful health care reform, climate change, on just about anything you can think of, Blanche Lincoln attempted to make it worse, or helped kill it altogether.

Any time you criticize someone like Lincoln, Ben Nelson, or Evan Bayh, you can practically script the excuses that their defenders trot out: "Arkansas isn't Washington DC", "She needs to vote her state" and so on and so on.

Here's the thing about those excuses: I happen to believe that being a corporate whore is about as popular in Arkansas as it is anywhere else in the United States. Find me the state where huge giveaways to the health insurance industry are popular, and I'll gladly help Blanche Lincoln become their next Senator.

Unfortunately, that mentality is usually successful in warding of better candidates because of the party's strategy of "keeping the seat" at the expense of employing truly terrible human beings.

Luckily, Arkansas has been kind enough to give us another choice in the form of Bill Halter. Like many others in the Netroots, I was first introduced to Halter when he supported free health care clinics in Arkansas while Lincoln was busy killing the public option. Then, as Lincoln continued to be a worthless Senator, she alienated enough of the traditional environmental, labor and women's groups in the state that it left the door wide open for a legitimate primary challenge with institutional backing. Her putrid poll numbers sealed the deal, and Bill Halter's candidacy was born.

I'll can't guarantee that he'll make us happy on every issue, but one thing is clear, he will be an immense improvement over the vile human being he is replacing.

Send a message to the Douche Caucus, support our first ever TRAIN ACTION candidate, Bill Halter!

Omnipotent Republican Staffer Strikes Again

A few years ago someone (I think it was Franken?) noticed that the ever offensive, gaffe-ridden documents that periodically leak from the GOP are always blamed on an anonymous 'staffer.' These leaks always line up with the actual strategies that Republicans use, but instead of owning up to it we always get these pathetic excuses about how those damn staffers are up to no good again!

So now the GOP has accidentally released yet another document, detailing their attempt to cry socialism and apparently comparing Obama to the Joker? I don't know, it's pretty stupid, but my first thoughts on reading it were 'ah, that staffer is back!' But Michael Steele surprised me:

"You don't defend it," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele said Thursday in an interview on Fox News.

Whoa! That's huge! No lame attempt to pass the buck, just a clear admission of guilt and a nice dash of personal responsibility-

"A staffer was putting together a presentation for a small group of nine or 10 folks and thought they would intersperse their presentation with humorous shots. They're inappropriate."

Augh, damn you Republican staffer! Your ability to function as a scapegoat, while potentially not even existing at all, knows no bounds!

Train of Thought Lounge: Broken Bells

Yesterday I just happened to be looking at the wikipedia page for Dangermouse when I noticed that he has a new album listed... that's coming out today. I'm completely unsure about how this could have sneaked past all of us, but he's formed a new band with the singer from the Shins, called Broken Bells. Here's the only song they've made a video for yet- not even the best song on the album, IMO:

Introducing Train Action

Ranting about how much certain members of congress suck is all well and good, but we've been looking for more ways to increase the activism on the blog.

Train Action will be a clearinghouse of candidates endorsed by the blog, ones that we feel are worthy of sending a few dollars to help their cause. If you feel the urge to donate, doing so though our site will allow us to see how much Train readers raised for a certain candidate.

I've never given a sizable amount to a candidate (I think $20, multiple times to Donna Edwards is my record), and there's no pressure to do so (my job as a low level cog in a labor union hardly gives me that kind of income, either). But in the current era of fund-raising, a few contributions of 5 or 10 dollars can make a huge difference in boosting a candidate's ability to get more money from the people who actually do make those 100 and 500 dollar donations.

The nuts and bolts of this effort will be done by Act Blue, which is a great site that exists for the purpose of allowing site's like ours do things that are out of our league technical ability wise.

We'll be introducing our first candidates soon, and we're open to suggestions. Let me know if you have any questions/ideas suggestions in the comments, or at thetrainofthought @ gmail.com

Chinese Democracy

After the Google/China showdown went public a few weeks ago the media spent a few days solemnly debating whether or not China would allow Google to operate uncensored in China. As far as I can tell, this debate is pretty silly- censorship is vitally important to the Communist Party's grip on power, so I'm reasonably sure they won't even entertain the idea of relaxing restrictions on Google unless they think they can somehow game the system by blocking individual websites and pages after Google stops doing the dirty work for them.

Hong Kong has stayed in an unusual holding pattern since the Chinese retook control in 1997. A number of positions in Hong Kong are elected, but others are controlled by businesses, and still more are directly named by Beijing. Most accounts seem to agree that Beijing has been pretty good about sticking to the "One China, Two Systems" agreement, probably more out of a fear of accidentally ruining the massively profitable island rather than any stand on principles. China promised that Hong Kong would be allowed to fully democratize within the next decade or so, which makes this a little bit worrisome:

China has warned that a plan by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong to use a special election as a de facto referendum on democratic reform is a threat to stability in the former British colony.

Labeling something a "threat to stability" is often a prelude to a massive crackdown in China. But Hong Kong hasn't yet been trampled on the same way most places in mainland China have been- there are annual vigils in remembrance of Tiananmen, people have the right to gather and to speak their minds, and the judiciary is still independent. It's hard to say what will happen- as democracy activists push their luck, Beijing will have to choose between messing with a system that produces piles of cash, or allowing the people to take more of the reins. I think this is going to be a far harder decision for them than the Google one.

Meanwhile, some on the mainland are making unusually detailed criticisms of government policies. Director Yu Jianrong, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Rural Affairs, has publicly warned that:

Hardline security policies are taking the country to the brink of 'revolutionary turmoil.'

Deepening social fractures were caused by the Communist Party's obsession with preserving its monopoly on power through 'state violence' and 'ideology,' rather than justice, Professor Yu said.

Disaster could be averted only if 'interest groups' - which he did not identify - were capable of making a rational compromise to subordinate themselves to the constitution, he said.

'Interest groups' probably refers to specific groups within the Chinese leadership, most likely the Hu/Li group, whose ideology has led to the current use of harsh tactics to preserve Communist Party power at any cost from even the slightest of threats. The argument that the leaders should 'subordinate themselves to the constitution' is a similar one made by a broad spectrum of critics, from human rights activists to minority spokesmen among the Tibetans or Uyghurs. It remains to be seen if Beijing will take the message well or not.