Political MoJo

Mojo - November 2007

Australians Vote Today: A Turning Point for the World?

| Fri Nov. 23, 2007 5:18 PM PST

Want a sneak preview of America-2008? Australians are voting today on 11 years of John Howard's ghastly ungreen rule and Kevin Rudd is predicted to become Australia's leader—a man who's declared the fight against global warming to be his main priority. The Telegraph reports:

The Labour Party leader said that he would immediately sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, describing it as the "number one" priority. "Australia needs new leadership on climate change. Mr. Howard remains in a state of denial," he said. He would personally represent Australia at a United Nations climate change meeting next month in Bali to discuss the next stage of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. He also promised that by 2020, a fifth of Australia's energy needs would come from renewable energy sources. Until a partial conversion this year, Mr. Howard has been a climate change skeptic [sound familiar?]. . . the latest poll indicates that Mr. Rudd is set to win with 54 per cent of the vote compared to Mr. Howard's 46 per cent.

If true. Well, halle-bloody-lujah. It will be no small victory. Aussies are the highest per capita greenhouse emitters on the planet. They're our fellow anti-Kyotoers, and likewise suffering hellacious droughts and wildfires. Where they lead, we can follow.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

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Wal-Mart Sues Brain Damaged Employee As Reward for Giving Her Health Insurance

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Fri Nov. 23, 2007 9:58 AM PST

Just when you think that Wal-Mart had already exhausted every last possible strategy for screwing over its employees, here comes this story in the Wall Street Journal. Deborah Shank, a Wal-Mart employee gets into an accident with a semi and ends up permanently brain-damaged a few years back. Her Wal-Mart health insurance paid her medical bills, but she also sued the trucking company for damages. She wins $700,000, which after legal fees and expenses, nets her about $400,000, which was put in a trust to pay the nursing home she now lives in.

But Wal-Mart gets wind of the settlement and turns around and sues Shank for $470,000, the money its insurance company paid for her care from the accident. Now, the woman is reliant on Medicaid and Social Security and Wal-Mart apparently got a much needed windfall.

Wal-Mart isn't alone in such behavior. Insurance companies seizing lawsuit winnings from catastrophically injured Americans is a common practice that gives lie to the notion that anyone gets rich off a personal injury lawsuit these days, as insurance companies often get first dibs on any judgment or settlement in such cases. But Wal-Mart's cruelty, as always, is extreme in this case. Not only is Shenk profoundly disabled, but while her family was fighting off the company in court, her son was killed while fighting the war in Iraq. Not even bad PR like this, apparently, can eke out a drop of compassion from the retail giant.

Publisher Softens McClellan Excerpt, But Doesn't Help Bush

—By Mother Jones

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 2:30 PM PST

The news of former White House spokesman Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong With Washington, hit the blogosphere full force this week, with a two-paragraph excerpt generating most of the excitement. This publicity play on the part of PublicAffairs Books may have worked too well, however, and the publisher's founder and editor-in-chief, Peter Osnos, is now trying to contain the storm he helped create.

On the PublicAffairs website Monday, McClellan wrote about the Scooter Libby-Valerie Plame scandal, saying in 2003 that while exonerating Libby and Karl Rove, he had "unknowingly passed along false information." He then goes on to specifically implicate President Bush and Vice President Cheney, saying they, along with White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Libby and Rove, were involved in the spreading of this false information.

Osnos has told NBC, however, that McClellan isn't saying that Bush lied and intentionally misled the public. Apparently those remarks were part of an unfinished manuscript, and McClellan is working under an April deadline. According to Osnos, Bush didn't lie to McClellan; in fact, Bush was himself unaware that the information that he was giving McClellan, mainly that Rove and Libby had nothing to do with the Plame leak, was false.

While Osnos' clarifications may be intended to smooth things over and say that Bush didn't lie, the unintended consequences are questions regarding who actually has the power in the White House. If Bush was giving false information to McClellan, then he must have been given false information, by Cheney, Rove, Card, or all three. So even if Bush comes out of this safe from investigation, he still ends up looking like a clueless puppet.

—Andre Sternberg

Falwell's FBI File

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 2:16 PM PST

The Washington Post has gotten a copy of the late Jerry Falwell's FBI file. It's mostly filled with threats made against the Moral Majority founder, but it has some humorous moments, including the part where the FBI dispatches investigators to infiltrate Cincinnati's gay bars in search of one of the alleged threat-makers. Read more here.

Meet the New, Old Newt Gingrich

—By Michael Mechanic

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 2:13 PM PST

What to make of the former gentleman from Georgia? Newt Gingrich devolved from being an outspoken member of the Sierra Club to helming a House of Representatives renowned for its hostility toward the environment. Now Gingrich has coauthored, with conservation professor and former zoo CEO Terry Maple, A Contract with the Earth, a tome released this month that calls for an era of environmental stewardship, albeit one driven by markets, science and technology. The chapter headings quote Emerson, Jacques Cousteau, John Muir and others, including revered Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who wrote the book's foreward.

Is Gingrich jumping on the hottest (no pun intended) national trend to keep himself in the game? Or is he merely bouncing back to his old views now that he's unencumbered by intense political pressures? To wit, Gingrich's voting record on conservation and pro-environment measures deteriorated fairly steadily during his years in Congress, according to the annual voting scorecards of the League of Conservation Voters. When he was a newbie in 1979-80 (tail end of the Carter era), the League gave him a 44.5 percent score--pretty darn good for a Republican. Gingrich fared nearly as well during the Reagan years (1981-1988), with an average score of 39 percent.

But then something happened: His LCV scores from 1988 (Bush I) through 1994 (Clinton mid-term) fell to a dismal 11 percent on average. In '94, the year Gingrich rode his Contract with America to the speakership of the House, he was awarded a big fat zero. ...

[Read more]

The Gays Have Won Republican Minds; Hearts to Follow?

—By Jonathan Stein

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 1:26 PM PST

The users of Conservapedia care about one thing, and one thing only.

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Republicans Candidates Who Beat Cancer Would Be Terrible for Fellow Cancer Survivors

—By Jonathan Stein

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 12:55 PM PST

Fact of the day: Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain are all cancer survivors, but all are putting forward health care plans that would likely deny coverage to other cancer survivors who are not seeking insurance through government or job-related plans. Cancer survivors, even if they have been cancer-free for years, are regularly denied health insurance when they try to purchase it as individuals. Fact of the day 2: Republicans are jerks.

(H/T Think Progress)

Examining Mike Huckabee's Fiscal Record: It's Very Un-Republican

—By Jonathan Stein

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 12:11 PM PST

Mike Huckabee is the Republican in the presidential race who spends the most time talking about middle Americans—their health care needs, their lack of job security, the crumminess of the schools that educate their children, etc. His attention to these seemingly left-of-center issues—and the lengths to which he went to act on them as governor of Arkansas—has gotten him branded as an irresponsible tax-and-spender by some parts of the GOP establishment. Bob Novak, for example, called him a member of the "Christian left."

So with the help of the magnificent FactCheck.org, let's take a look at Huckabee's financial record.

Huckabee claims to have cut taxes "almost 94 times" while Governor. (An odd construction, but whatever.) He adds that he saved "the people of Arkansas almost $380 million." That's true. Huckabee cut taxes 90 times from 1997 to 2005, reducing state revenues by $378 million.

But Huckabee also presided over 21 tax increases, none of which he mentions on the stump. And those tax increases totaled much more than $378 million. According to the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, the "net tax increase under Huckabee's tenure was an estimated $505.1 million," adjusted for inflation.

Spending did go up under the Huckabee regime—the state budget was $10.4 billion in his first year as Governor (again, adjusted for inflation), while it was $15.6 billion in 2006. So he is, technically, a tax-and-spender. But Huckabee balanced the Arkansas state budget every year he was governor (balancing the budget is a requirement under Arkansas state law) and in the end, Huckabee had a positive effect on the state ledger: He faced a $200 million deficit in 2002, but ended his term with a $844.5 million surplus. That's a billion dollar turnaround, taxing-and-spending be damned.

A bit more, after the jump.

[Read more]

Fred Thompson's DIY Phone Bank

—By Stephanie Mencimer

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 11:20 AM PST

It's either a sign of severe desperation or a novel campaign innovation, but GOP candidate Fred Thompson has just debuted a do-it-yourself phone bank. "Phone for Fred" allows volunteers to download voters' phone numbers off his website, and encourages them to get the word out about their candidate. Oh, but they should be nice about it and only call in the evening. The campaign seems like a formula for disaster, but hey, at least it's cheap!

Mulling Over the Case for Hillary Clinton

—By Jonathan Stein

| Wed Nov. 21, 2007 11:09 AM PST

If you read MoJoBlog regularly, you know I have my reservations about Hillary Clinton. But I find Princeton professor Sean Wilentz's endorsement of her compelling.

[Clinton] understands how American politics works. She understands the trajectory of American political history for the last 40 years because she's lived it in a way that the others haven't, really.

Okay, fair enough. She's most able to win the game of politics as it is currently constituted. She makes this argument on the stump. But I happen to think that game chews up good people (like Al Gore, for example) and no longer works for the benefit of everyday Americans (if it ever did). As naive as it sounds, I'd like a candidate who can think beyond that game. What do you think of Obama, Mr. Wilentz?

You cannot have a president who doesn't like politics. You will not get anything done. Period. I happen to love American politics. I think American politics is wonderful. I can understand why people don't. But one of the problems in America is that politics has been so soured, people try to be above it all. It's like Adlai Stevenson. In some ways, Barack reminds me of Stevenson.... There's always a Stevenson candidate. Bradley was one of them. Tsongas was one of them. They're the people who are kind of ambivalent about power. "Should I be in this or not... well, yes, because I'm going to represent something new." It's beautiful loserdom.

Okay, interesting...

The fact is, you can't govern without politics.

Now wait a minute. How do we know that for sure? We do know that it is very, very hard to get elected when you don't like politics, but we don't know for a fact that it is very, very hard to govern when you don't like politics. We don't have an example in recent American history of a president who tried to change Washington instead of working within it.

Keep reading, after the jump...

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