Rep. Mel Watt of Charlotte, whose campaign coffers are well-stocked with banking and financial industry money, yesterday tried, but failed, to derail an amendment to a House Finance Committee bill which would open the Federal Reserve to public audits. The longtime friend and ally of former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, and favorite of many local progressives, proposed his own amendment, presented as a “compromise” that would still increase transparency at the Fed. A close reading by the Huffington Post, however, showed that Watt’s amendment would have in fact decreased transparency by adding more restrictions. Watt’s amendment was supported by frantic, last-minute lobbying from Federal Reserve officials and a letter from a group of eight economists who were presented as a “political cross section of prominent economists,” although seven of the eight have extensive connections to the Fed, and half of them are on the Federal Reserve payroll.

Watt’s amendment was voted down, and the amendment to audit the Fed — proposed by two of the farthest-left and farthest-right Congressmen, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) — passed in a bipartisan vote of 43-26. Democrats’ support for the Paul/Grayson plan to audit the Fed was solidified after leading progressive economists and labor leaders posted a letter calling for a rejection of Watt’s amendment.

Watt gets much of his campaign money from businesses with intense interest in what happens at the Federal Reserve. In the 2008 campaign cycle, Watt’s four top contributors were Bank of America, Wachovia, American Express, and the American Bankers Association. Of the $458,000 received by Watt by PACs, $217,000 came from banking, finance, insurance and real estate PACs. Figures are from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Rep. Mel Watt: "Don't show me the money!"

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ThinkProgress.org calls Rep. Virginia Foxx “the gift that keeps on giving,” and today she gave us all a classic. On the House floor, Foxx, of “health care reform is more dangerous than terrorism” fame, claimed that the Republican Party “passed civil rights bills back in the 1960s without very much help from [Democrats].” Talk about revisionist history. The landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s was introduced by JFK and pushed through Congress by Lyndon Johnson, both Democrats the last time we looked. A substantial number of Republicans did vote for the civil rights bills, but those were the days when the GOP included a hefty number of moderate or even liberal members of Congress. If those bills were introduced today, you can pretty much bet everything you own that the vast majority of Republican members of Congress would vote against them, since the party has essentially purged all but a handful of its moderates. The primary factor splitting supporters from opponents of those particular bills was geography, i.e., if a Congressman was from the South, he probably opposed them; otherwise, he was probably for them. Thus, Southern Democrats voted en masse against the civil rights legislation, while nearly all the other Dems voted for them. If you take out the Southern Democrats from the equation, a higher percentage of Dems voted for the bills than did Republicans. The bottom line, though, is that those bills were introduced and pushed through by the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate. And Foxx, as usual, comes across as a confused loony.

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Wingate University in next-door Union County is home to the Jesse Helms Center. The JHC’s newest project is a portrait of Helms by artist Rene Dickerson, which was unveiled last night in D.C.’s ultra-conservative Capitol Hill Club. A crowd of Jesse fans oohed and aahhed when the portrait was revealed, and Union County D.A. John Snyder III, who once worked for Helms, said the portrait (or “picture,” as he called it) “captures his (Helms’) caring heart and his humility.”

We assume Snyder is talking about the caring heart that fought like crazy against any and all attempts to achieve equal rights for women and African-Americans; the caring heart that rose to fame as a race baiter and opponent of all civil rights bills; the caring heart that fought against the Clean Air Act and supported clear-cutting in North Carolina’s national forests; or the caring heart that repeatedly voted against Head Start, funding for day care, aid to colleges and college students, vocational education programs, and funding for handicapped education. Or maybe Snyder meant the caring heart that strongly supported a constitutional amendment that would force all women to carry a pregnancy to term, regardless of the woman’s desires or the circumstances of her impregnation, including rape and incest; or the caring heart that railed viciously against gays and lesbians, and opposed combating AIDS in this country (although he eventually supported the fight against AIDS in Africa, where most of the victims at least have the decency to be straight). Yeah, maybe that’s the caring heart Snyder’s talking about. As for portraits of ol’ Jesse, I prefer the one Creative Loafing ran on the cover three or four years ago, shown here.

All y'all libuhls can kiss my caring heart

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It’s amazing, but I’ve found myself agreeing with Sarah Palin twice in the past couple of days. At first I thought I might be coming down with something, but on reflection, I see that she that no, I’m not sick — Palin was actually right, for once. Or twice. First, there was her complaint about the current cover of Newsweek, which used a photo of Palin, originally taken for Runner’s World, in running shorts. She said the magazine’s decision to run the photo to accompany a story about her politics was “sexist and degrading,” and she’s right. The magazine is being blasted by critics from both the right and the left, and deservedly so.

Today, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Palin’s sentiments about N.C.’s own Sen. Richard Burr. Atlantic magazine is running a story on tensions within the McCain-Palin campaign. In it, an October 26, 2008 e-mail from Palin’s staff to the McCain campaign declares that Palin had voiced “her displeasure” that, after a long day of campaigning in North Carolina, “U.S. Senator Richard Burr was allowed to ride the [Straight Talk Express II bus] with her.” Hell, who can blame her? After an exhausting day, would you want to spend your downtime with Richard Burr? Or, for that matter, any other time? Didn’t think so.

Burr and Palin in happier times

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For this baby boomer pop culture fan, the most important thing happening today is the 50^th anniversary of the first episode of animator Jay Ward’s Rocky & Bullwinkle. For a show with so-so ratings at the time, produced on a shoestring by a small group of smartasses, Rocky & Bullwinkle had an enormous impact, if only for its influence on Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. An irreverent, mocking tone in a cartoon? Taking on current issues and pop culture fads? Talking directly to the viewers? Arguing with the narrator? Spoofing other shows? All stuff we take for granted today, all those things started — and that’s no exaggeration — with R&B.

Cartoons on television were a bland wasteland in the medium’s early years, when, out of the blue, here came a flying squirrel and a dimwitted talking moose who wisecracked, were silly for silly’s sake, and treated kids as if they were smart enough to get all the jokes. (Although, at times, the jokes were for grown-ups’ enjoyment, such as the intro for an episode of Fractured Fairy Tales that started, ”Once upon a time there was a little village on a hill, called Daniels on the Rocks.”)

Rocky and Bullwinkle’s adventures, largely spent fighting two Cold-War-spoof Russian spies, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were matched by other segments that became as popular as the title duo. Peabody’s Improbable History, in which Peabody, a bespectacled, talking dog, and his young adopted human son, Sherman, traveled in the “Way-Back Machine” to famous historical events, is still hilarious; the pair even showed up in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons. Many boomers, though, claim that the stories and exquisitely awful puns in Fractured Fairy Tales were a highlight of their childhood. In any case, here’s the show’s opening sequence.

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Yesterday’s disclosure by the Associated Press regarding Charlotte law firm Moore & Van Allen and its behind-the-scenes work against health care reform was a stunner. There’s nothing illegal going on, but the law firm’s activities have a bad smell nonetheless. The story revealed that MVA is engaged in advocacy against a public option, and in favor of requiring Americans to buy health insurance. Although MVA wouldn’t identify the clients, it’s pretty obvious that a group of health insurance companies are paying the law firm to conduct anonymous campaigning for them. Note that MVA isn’t doing legal work here, but rather things such as enlisting trade groups to oppose government-run health coverage, or helping anti-reform advocates get on the radio or post opinions on conservative blogs.

One big problem with MVA’s activities is that the clients they’re working for are anonymous and are paying others to conduct their political action for them. As MVA spokesperson Matthew French told the AP, “They want to stay in the background and off the front page. They want the message to be the important thing.” In other words, they’re trying to evade responsibility. Not to mention that in a democracy, issues should be openly discussed in debate that makes it clear who, or what corporate entity, is standing for what.

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Many conservatives like to see themselves as rugged, no-nonsense defenders of freedom, clear-thinking patriots, ready to slap down America’s enemies at the drop of a hat. Too bad, then, that they’re actually cowards.

The right’s current collective nervous breakdown over plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York for his role in planning the 9-11 attacks confirms once again something we wrote about last year: the American right wing is scared stupid. When Attorney General Holder announced the forthcoming KSM trial, conservative members of Congress, columnists, TV newscasters, and bloggers just, there’s no better way to put it, completely freaked the hell out. “Dangerous!” “Irresponsible!” “What if he’s acquitted?!” “It invites more attacks!” Yesterday on Fox & Friends, Gretchen Carlson seemed genuinely terrified, practically on the verge of a stroke over the prospect of KSM’s trial.

Here’s what the stalwart patriots of the right can’t seem to understand: the whole point of terrorism is to make a country’s population walk around in fear every day. Conservatives, as far as I can see, threw in that towel a long time ago. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes the conservative position as, “We’re too scared to have real trials in our country,” which, as he points out, “is the textbook definition of ’surrendering to terrorists.’”

Spain held open trials for the terrorists who bombed trains in Madrid in 2004. The Brits tried the London subway terrorists in, you guessed it, London. The terrorists who bombed a nightclub in Bali? A regular trial in a regular courtroom. The 2008 massacres in Mumbai? Same thing. More to the point, we’ve already tried terrorists in America: remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? Zacarias Moussaoui? Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy who launched the World Trade Center bombings in 1993? Will you Fox-Rush folks please get a damned grip?

It’s actually the right and their fear-mongering leaders who are being irresponsible by their public displays of terror. Again, as Greenwald put it, “It’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.” Frankly, these sunny day patriots’ ongoing surrender to terrorism would be kind of pitiful if they weren’t so damned cocky about being scared to death.

Gretchen Carlson: Help - the terrorists will kill us all!

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“When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases.” According to the New York Times, that’s how Stephen Schondelmeyer, a pharmaceutical economics expert at the University of Minnesota reacted to the news that drug companies have raised prices an average of 9 percent in the face of upcoming health care reform. In other words, Schondelmeyer is saying, that’s just the way these guys work. When there’s a chance the government could cut into the industry’s obscenely high profits, up go the prices. Researchers at Harvard found the same kind of price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare earlier this decade.

Oh, and the “agreement” the drug industry had with the White House to cut $8 billion per year from America’s drug bill via rebates to seniors and the government? You guessed it — this year’s 9 percent price increases cancel out the agreement’s first year savings.

Writer  Timothy Egan wrote a piece last week in which he noted that more and more Americans are angry because they now feel that our system – our social contract, if you will – is rigged against them, to the benefit of large corporations. Personally, I wonder what’s taken folks so long to make the connections, but with drug companies and health insurance companies gouging consumers for all they’re worth and more – not to mention taxpayer-rescued financial giants giving out $30 billion in new bonuses – the illusion that corporate honchos give a flying damn about average Americans is fading faster than a Wal-Mart shirt.

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The latest bad news about Memorial Stadium should – it probably won’t, but it should – move the county to reconsider its stadium and baseball park plans. As we’ve written before, an opportunity to solve two problems at once is at hand. Lots of people want the Charlotte Knights to move to a new ballpark downtown, but lawsuits over the complicated land-swaps proposed to facilitate putting the park in Third Ward — and gripes about using land previously designated for a large uptown park — have kept the Knights in Fort Mill. Meanwhile, the county is sitting on the Memorial Stadium land, the stadium is a wreck, and will cost nearly a million dollars to repair. It was a fine stadium for a long time, and is a great historical relic, but it’s not worth the price it’ll take to fix it.  At one point, the county considered using Memorial Stadium’s land for the baseball park, until someone figured out a way for Uptown big wheels to make more money. But the deal cobbled together by Center City Partners is going nowhere, and Memorial Stadium is in limbo. It’s time now to reconsider the Memorial Stadium option for baseball. Now, will someone on the commission please put 2 and 2 together? Maybe county manager Harry Jones could claim he thought of a great way to save the county money and bring baseball downtown, and incidentally save his skin after his recent controversies.

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God knows there were plenty of events and people to choose from for the weekly Stupid Thing of the Week. Locally, the school board went along with Supt. Gorman’s idea to gut one of CMS’ most successful programs – and did it at the last meeting of the board’s current line-up; needless to say, the new board will start reconsidering the moves at their first meeting. Nationally, Carrie Prejean got all pissy on Larry King Live; singer Fergie let everyone know she’s bi but her husband is well-endowed; Lou Dobbs quit his job at CNN and said he’d been hounded by a mob mentality, “similar to what we saw in Italy in the 1930s” (you might want to re-read your history, Lou, and maybe stop the pity party); a beaver on CBS’ The Early Show peed in the announcer’s face; Sarah Palin went on Oprah and dissed the people who’d chosen her to run for VP in the first place; and Sammy Sosa revealed he’s been using a skin lightener for some damned reason.

But for sheer tone-deaf cluelessness – which is always a plus when you’re vying for Stupid Thing of the Week – you can’t beat our winner, Ian Campbell, a re-enactor and tour guide at Latta Plantation Park. Campbell, an African-American history buff who has devoted a lot of time to bringing history to life at the park, was giving a tour to about 60 fifth-graders from Rea View Elementary in Waxhaw when who did he pick to represent plantation slaves? Why, the only three African American students in the group, of course! Kids were humiliated (and in fifth grade, that’s huge), parents were enraged, and school administrators vowed never to send their kids back to Latta. It doesn’t appear that Campbell meant any harm, but again, a history buff being that clueless about race relations is kind of mind-boggling.

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