Day: March 23, 2008

Dean Comes Under Fire for 48-State Strategy

Trish

Dr. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, as Jon has come to call Howard Dean around me and Buck, since just a mention of his name to Florida folks Gets Us Started, is taking well-deserved criticism. Time’s Tim Padgett asks all the good questions: Does Dean really plan to pursue a 48-State Strategy for victory, and if so, where is his leadership? More importantly, will Dean cost the Democratic candidate the votes of Florida and Michigan? We’ve been wondering the same things.

Dean and the DNC now look all but AWOL when it comes to resolving a mess they did so much to create, leaving it to the states to figure it out.

Florida’s famously feckless electoral system usually deserves the ridicule it gets. But not this time. Instead of the typical jokes about Flori-duh, the Sunshine State debacle currently gripping the Democratic Party has evoked reminders of the Dean Scream — the notorious petulance of Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean. He, along with the other sage bosses of the DNC, has left Democratic voters in what is arguably the nation’s most crucial swing state feeling dissed, disenfranchised and, it now seems, disinclined to back whomever the Democratic candidate is in November. And that could harm the party’s White House bid as severely as any butterfly ballot or hanging chad ever did.

According to a poll conducted this week for various Florida media, almost a quarter of Florida Democrats say they’ll be “less likely to support” the party’s nominee if their state’s delegates aren’t seated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August — and by seated they mean counted in the final tally to choose the presidential nominee.

I don’t agree with those who would withhold their votes from the Democratic candidate over this. But I do understand where they’re coming from. Dean claimed it was of vital importance that states like Iowa and New Hampshire, with tiny homogeneous populations, get to go one-on-one with the candidates because this intimate voter contact is what makes democracy work. He then forbade any candidate to be heard or seen by Florida voters.

[…]

The Dirty Little Secret of Globalization

Trish

On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton tries to distance herself from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) worked out by her husband’s administration more than a decade ago. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and the Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, sums up where globalization has brought us.

When corporate America tied its future to globalism, it made a deal with the devil. The record profits reaped by outsourcing U.S. manufacturing abroad came at a high price: the risk to the good names of the country’s biggest companies.

“Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many knockoff handbags and other luxury goods are made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not paying for quality goods anymore — we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers.”

…In today’s globalized economy, top companies have lost control of the quality of the goods that display their logos. They are powerless to prevent a recurrence of the toxic-toy tragedy–and they are terrified that their brands could be dragged through the mud when the next epidemic of dangerous products strikes.

…The problem is a business model in which companies outsource manufacturing under short-term, low-cost contracts to the firm that will follow their design standards most cheaply. All that is really Fisher-Price about Dora the Explorer is the design–the product itself is made in a factory over which the company has almost no control. It doesn’t manage the working conditions, environmental standards, or safety practices. As a result, it no longer controls the product itself.

…Fisher-Price didn’t want lead used in its products. But it did want to drive the best bargain it could with toy manufacturers in China and to be able to shift to new suppliers if it found a lower price. Faced with this pressure and already located in the cheapest labor market in the world, subcontracting manufacturers realized the only way to cut costs was to cut corners, and lead is a cost-effective corner to cut.

The joke is on the companies who exploit cheap foreign labor. It’s also on those of us who are willing to shell out big bucks for new items with the right labels.

So brands no longer mean what they used to: Globalism has turned brand-name manufacturing into a fraud. Many of the knockoff handbags and other luxury goods you can buy on the street in Shanghai–or even New York City–are actually made in the same factories as the real thing. We’re not really paying for quality goods anymore–we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers producing inferior products using shoddy safety and environmental standards.

Eliot Spitzer Kept His Black Socks On During The Act

Trish

O.K., I have to admit I really don’t get strippers and prostitutes and lap dances and all that stuff, but I’m female so there you go. I mean, how do you pay for it and keep up the illusion in your mind that there’s anything but contemptuous nose-holding disdain going on in the mind of the payee? You know that this woman would not look at you twice if you weren’t giving her cash, so how much fun is that?

That said, wouldn’t you expect that if you were in fact paying thousands and thousands of dollars to someone to have sex with you that you would at least be able to take off all your clothes — socks included? Not if you’re Eliot Spitzer.

Almost four months before New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer “used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida.

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from “a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”

“…The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone’s understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,” the letter said.

“It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Gov. Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information,” the letter said.

The entire Spitzer scandal is one big exercise in demoralization, but this is just sad. Roger Stone, legendary Republican consultant best known for the Willie Horton ad that helped put Bush I in the White House by its appeals to fear and racism, not to mention staging fake protests of the 2000 recount, was most recently behind a smarmy 527 out to smear Hillary Clinton. He’s also had a long-time feud with the Spitzer family. For him to be the one to expose Eliot Spitzer’s embarrassing sex life has to hurt.

Fox News Anchor Lectures Fox News Morning Bubbleheads for Trashing Obama’s ‘Typical White Person’ Remark

Jon Ponder

Via Pam Spaulding at Pandagon, the first video below offers a snippet from “Fox and Friends,” which is hands-down the worst morning show this side of home shopping, as the airheads natter on about Obama’s comment that his grandmother was a “typical white person” because she said she felt trepidation when she encountered a black man in public.

The second video picks up the broadcast a few minutes later when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who, unlike the morning show bimbos, had a career as a legit news reader before debasing himself at Fox News, comes on and lectures the rightwing fluffers about their incessant trashing of Obama.

The question, of course, is whether Wallace’s criticism was legit or just a pathetic attempt to bring back Fox News’ now-banished tagline: “Fair and Balanced.”