Month: August 2007

What’s the frequency, Rudy?
by Dover Bitch

The tragedy in Minneapolis, like any disaster in America, provided another example of bravery and selflessness on behalf of everyday citizens and, especially, the nation’s first responders. Fortunately, we haven’t lived in the kind of country where disasters happen with extreme regularity. But when they do occur, there never seems to be a shortage of people willing to climb across wreckage or dive under a precarious pile of concrete.

Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner Michael Campion yesterday praised the rescue efforts and delivered a piece of unsurprising, but nevertheless gratifying news: The state’s investment in interoperable communications equipment had passed its first real test.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the 9/11 legislation the Democrats succeeded in getting signed into law this week (no, I’m not talking about the infuriating Senate bill on wiretapping) was the part that will fund interoperable communications systems throughout the nation. The chaos in New Orleans during Katrina was a stark reminder that every minute emergency crews spend trying to get information can be the difference between life and death for a victim — or themselves.

It is simply disgraceful that the federal government couldn’t get the funding together for these communications systems until this week, six years after 9/11 and 14 years after the first attack on the World Trade Center. That’s just another reason to wish for the premature departure of Alaska’s corrupt Ted Stevens, who, as former Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is as responsible for the delays as anybody in Washington.

It’s a good thing that Minnesota didn’t waste time waiting for the Republican Congress before implementing their radio plan. The results could have been much worse. Just ask Rudy Giuliani.

No responsibility is more fundamental and reflective of the nation’s values than that of its Public Safety agencies. The citizens’ legitimate expectation is that when their life or property is endangered, their government will respond. Vast federal, state, and local resources are committed to ensure this obligation is met. The effectiveness of police officers, fire fighters, emergency medical services (EMS) personnel, and other Public Safety officials is inextricably tied to communications capability. Today’s communications environment, however, impedes meeting this responsibility. Rescuing victims of the World Trade Center bombing, who were caught between floors, was hindered when police officers could not communicate with fire fighters on the very next floor. Similarly, the inability to communicate among the agencies that had rushed to the Oklahoma City bombing site required resorting to runners to relay messages. The lack of sufficient, quality radio spectrum suitable for Public Safety use deters technological innovation, diminishes the responsiveness and effectiveness of Public Safety, and ultimately compromises the safety of the responding officers and of the very individuals seeking their help.

That’s from the Final Report Of The Public Safety Wireless Advisory Committee (PDF), ironically presented to Congress on Sept. 11, 1996, five years to the day before New York had to deal with the exact same problem once again. The federal government had been slow to deal with this issue basically because of money and the revenue Congress expects to make auctioning off spectrum. The broadcast industry hasn’t exactly rushed to relinquish the frequencies they will be giving back as the nation moves to high definition television, which is one of the reasons you haven’t heard this issue discussed much on the brain vacuum.

It is likely that widely accepted use of commercial services may take longer than five years. The need for spectrum to provide interoperability is immediate, and the alternatives for short-term solutions are limited.

Public safety cannot afford to wait five or more years for spectrum relief assistance from the commercial sector as a solution to pressing interoperability problems today. By the time commercial services become more widely used for Public Safety applications, the amount of spectrum needed to accommodate yet-to-be-discovered applications will likely increase with those new requirements.

But Giuliani was willing to wait five years for the federal government to act. Nothing prevented the City or State of New York from working out their local communications problems themselves, especially in light of the attacks that had already been carried out there and the ample evidence of inadequacies. The Republicans like to say that we can all spend money better than the federal government, but the Republican mayor and governor of New York were perfectly willing to pass this job off to Washington. The results speak for themselves:

A NYPD helicopter pilot reported early, before the fall of the South Tower, that the North Tower was going to fall, but the fire chiefs did not hear of this. When the pilot saw that the South Tower was falling his announcement to police command was instant, and police command issued a forceful and robust order to evacuate the remaining building and to move all department vehicles to safety. Notwithstanding that this was a successful communication that resulted in the saving of many lives, the fire chiefs did not hear this order.

The command of the North Tower was covered with debris when the South Tower fell, and Chief Joseph Pfeifer, in complete darkness, gave the order, “All units in Tower One evacuate the building.”

Just how many firefighters escaped in the twenty-nine minutes from Chief Pfeiffer’s order is not certain, but we do know that one police officer, at least five Port Authority police officers, and 121 firefighters were killed when the second tower collapsed. Others were killed on the street, including four ESU 5 officers and a number of other firefighters who had successfully evacuated the building. — 9/11 testimony of Dennis Smith, June 19, 2004 (PDF)

We ask these brave men and women to risk their lives when the unimaginable happens. Is it too much to ask that they have the proper equipment to do the job? Giuliani and the superficial media may believe that he owns 9/11, but he wasn’t willing to own the responsibility of providing for his own first responders. If he and his former GOP governor and administration want to own 9/11, they can start by accepting responsibility for the lack of effective communications systems.

Giuliani says he knows more about the threat of terrorism than anybody. I’d be willing to bet every single firefighter in New York (and Minneapolis) has forgotten more than he’ll ever know.

Just Say No

by digby

Deep, Heavy, Sigh:

The New York Times:

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not feel bound by the law or the Constitution when it comes to the war on terror. It cannot even be trusted to properly use the enhanced powers it was legally granted after the attacks.

Yet, once again, President Bush has been trying to stampede Congress into a completely unnecessary expansion of his power to spy on Americans. And, hard as it is to believe, Congressional Republicans seem bent on collaborating, while Democrats (who can still be cowed by the White House’s with-us-or-against-us baiting) aren’t doing enough to stop it.

The LA Times:

As it shifts into overdrive before a summer recess, Congress is debating whether to oblige the Bush administration with changes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that the administration ignored for five years as the National Security Agency — without court approval — monitored the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents suspected of ties with foreign terrorists.

Our advice: Hurry up and wait.

ACLU:

Tell Congress: Don’t Cave in to Fear

President Bush is creating a false sense of emergency in Washington, demanding that Congress rubberstamp a spying program it knows almost nothing about. Meanwhile, the White House refuses to comply with requests for basic information about warrantless wiretapping and Congress can’t get straight answers out of Attorney General Gonzales.

Unbelievably, President Bush says if Congress doesn’t pass his legislation this week, the Democrats will be responsible for any terrorist attacks that may happen in August ,even though he’s demonstrated no relationship between his proposals and a safer America.

The worst part is that Congress may actually be falling for Bush’s rhetoric.

Take Action: Tell Congress NOT to Cave In to Fear.

Obviously, I’m not the only one who can’t for the life of me figure out why the congress is doing this.

I just heard that Bush is going to keep the congress in session until he gets a bill. They should tell him they’ll stay until hell freezes over, but he still gets no bill. There is no good reason why this needs to happen like this, on the run, with the congress not even really knowing for what they are voting. This issue has been out there for years and Bush didn’t feel the need to keep the congress in session until it got passed. To hell with him.

I have the niggling feeling that there has been some pretty heavy cocktail and bar-b-que chatter in the capital this summer with the elders warning everyone that something is afoot, but they can’t talk about the details. Suddenly the villagers are all acting like nervous cats on a hot tin roof and dancing around like it’s the hot summer of 2002 again for no discernable rason.

If that’s so and little birdies are whispering in ears, the congress should stay in town and hash this thing out for real instead of signing off on something they haven’t read. And if that’s so, the president also needs to stay in town instead of rushing off to clear that poor brush again on his “ranchette” set in Waco and negotiate in good faith to protect the American people. The fact that nobody is doing this suggests to me that if there is some fear mongering going on, everyone involved knows it’s typical Bushian nonsense but they are afraid to take a chance just in case he gets lucky and hits another trifecta.

No. More. Executive. Power. Period. It’s their job to figure out how to track terrorists without trampling on the constitution. If that means staying in town for the month August in that sweltering heat, well, that’s what they’re paid for.

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Dittohead In Chief

by digby

In spite of their paeans to patriotism and religion, I have always believed that the heart of the conservative movement was really just simple racism and authoritarianism and all their bleating about “values” is a nothing more than a weapon with which to hit Democrats over the head. After all, the highest rates of divorce, single motherhood and abortion are in the deepest of conservative red states. There’s a lotta preachin’ but not a lot of practicin’.

We are about to see if I’m right because if the Republicans nominate Giuliani, they will have shown their true colors once and for all. Via Steve Benen, Here’s John Dickerson at Slate describing this candidate’s strategy:

Running for the GOP presidential nomination, Giuliani is now the chief heckler of Democrats. He called Barack Obama and John Edwards “losers,” has revived the insult of “socialized medicine” when referring to Democratic health-care plans, and now charges the Democrats are trying to bring back the nanny state. He taunts Democrats to use the term “Islamic terrorists,” and when they don’t, he says it’s all the proof one needs they won’t keep us safe. I asked him in 2006 whether he thought Democrats were advocating appeasement with the terrorists. He said he didn’t see it that way. He sure does now, suggesting Democrats would invite another 9/11-style attack. I expect him to start showing up at Clinton rallies and making noises with his armpit.

Dickerson points out that Giuliani risks losing his “electability” cred by doing this because he is supposed to be able to bring in independents, but too much of this hyper-partisan bashing may chase them away. That’s true, but Rudy has no choice. Aside from the fact that African American New Yorkers hate his guts, he has nothing to recommend him to the GOP base except an extremely silly national security image he’s built out of his 9/11 press conferences. (His actual 9/11 performance doesn’t even qualify him to run FEMA, much less run US foreign policy.)

As both Kevin Drum and Benen point out, the substance of his speeches and public appearances are little more than gibberish — he’s the Italian George W. Bush, just trash talk and macho attitude. His personal life is so complicated that he makes Bill and Hill look like Ma and Pa kettle.

He has to go straight for the Republican id. And unsurprisingly the polls indicate that the Republican base is liking what it hears. And why wouldn’t they? Rudy’s campaigning as if he were a right wing talk show host. They didn’t care that Rush was a thrice married drug addict and they don’t care that Rudy’s a thrice married, pro-choice cross dresser. They just hate Democrats, period, and they don’t care what you do or even what you believe, as long as you hate Democrats too. Rudy is the first full-blown dittohead presidential candidate.

We’ll have to see if the country at large wants to take a trip to Limbaughland in the general, but if I had to guess, I’d say Rush’s schtick is way tired except to the hardocre talk radio haters. To the public at large it sounds like political Hootie and the Blowfish — a bunch of bad songs that were way overplayed and are now hideous reminders of an era that’s mercifully passed.

And that may end up being bad news for Rudy in the general. His Rushian soundbites are being dutifully archived for repeated playing if he gets the nod and I doubt people are going to enjoy hearing his version of “I Only Wanna Be With You” any more than Hootie’s. He can run as a dittohead but he can’t hide.

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The Golden State
by Dover Bitch

Have you heard the one about the liberal plot to use the issue of Global Warming to seize power?

Isn’t it amazing? As soon as the Democrats go from the minority to the majority, the Republicans stop calling them the “party of no ideas” to the “party of the craziest, most sinister ideas, ever.” Who could have predicted that?

Well, I’ll show you an example of how the issue of Global Warming is being brazenly used for political purposes at the expense of the least fortunate. What a shock to learn it’s the GOP putting their own interests ahead of the truly needy.

California’s state budget is over a month late because the GOP refuses to pass it. Why? They don’t like what Jerry Brown is doing to clean up California’s environmental policies.

The two-thirds majority required to pass a state spending plan gives the Republican minority leverage during budget negotiations that it lacks the rest of the year.

It is using that leverage to try win concessions on several other issues. In addition to eliminating the deficit, Republicans are seeking changes on other issues that are not directly related to the budget process.

For example, they want assurances that billions of dollars in transportation bond money approved last year by voters will be spent as intended in the ballot measure. They also are trying to rein in efforts by Attorney General Jerry Brown, who has been pressuring local governments to address the negative effects on global warming of their various development projects.

Republicans fear Brown’s actions hold the potential to delay or stop housing and road projects.

Schwarzenegger said he was willing to address that issue later but told reporters, “It shouldn’t be part of the budget.”

Without a signed budget, the state controller’s office said it could not pay $326.6 million to community colleges; $170 million to school districts for programs such as special education and summer school; $140 million to companies that sell products to the state; and $300 million to preschool and day care programs.

Controller John Chiang said he will be unable to pay $2.1 billion due in August unless there is a budget agreement by the end of the month.

On Wednesday, one of the GOP senators, Abel Maldonado, voted with the Democrats to try to pass the budget, but it still came up one vote short. To fully appreciate how hard the GOP is playing here, understand that Gov. Schwarzenegger has line-item veto power and offered to remove parts of the budget that the GOP senators found objectionable. They turned him down.

This isn’t about fiscal responsibility, but then, it never is. The Republicans love spending taxpayer money, just not on services for the less fortunate. They are playing with people’s lives, fragile lives, and they don’t seem to care at all. How else can you describe this kind of avarice?

At nursing homes, the cash crunch threatens not only their ability to pay staff but to buy essential supplies, such as food for elderly residents.

Eduardo Gonzalez, who with his wife owns the Fillmore Convalescent Center in Fillmore, said their food supplier may soon stop delivery. Of the home’s 88 patients, 64 are on state-funded Medi-Cal.

[…]

Small homes for developmentally disabled adults are another immediate casualty of the state budget fight. They rely completely on state funding.

Bob Horrigan runs 19 homes, each with six beds, in La Verne and throughout San Bernardino County. He said he had suspended all repairs on vans, houses and wheelchairs, and soon would be unable to pay his employees. He and his wife, who together own the homes, are exploring ways to borrow money. But Horrigan said that his bank is balking and that other potential sources of money carry steep interest rates.

“Times like this you get money wherever you can,” he said. “You alienate your family. You go behind on your mortgages.”

[…]

The inability of the state to cover its bills is equally hard on the thousands of in-home child-care providers whose clients pay them with state subsidies. The caregivers, many already living on the margins themselves, rely on the state checks to pay their own rent and utility bills. This week the checks stopped coming.

“They will eventually get the money, but they need it right now to pay the rent,” said Cliff Marcussen, the executive director of Options, a West Covina nonprofit that facilitates state payments to 1,000 child-care providers.

The state has suspended the subsidies for more than 250,000 children.

“Without payment from the state very soon, our programs — full of children of low-income parents — will have to close, leaving them with no child care,” Kathy Lafferty, North President for the Child Development Administrators Assn., said in a written statement. “How does this serve the people of California or its businesses?”

Even if some of the larger institutions that provide state services are able to weather the budget impasse, many of the small businesses that are a backbone of their operations may not.

“I’m already living on borrowed time, as far as my bills, insurance and payroll,” said Daniel Rojas, general manager of Midway Care Medical Transportation, an Artesia company that shuttles about 300 dialysis patients from their homes or nursing facilities to treatment centers. Rojas, who employs 25 people, said 95% of his funding comes from the state. He is frantically trying to secure a bridge loan, but his prospects are uncertain.

“If this doesn’t get settled by the 10th, I would have to shut the doors down,” Rojas said. “It’s going to put us out of business.”

There you have it: The Grover Norquist Republican Party. Dialysis patients and low-income children, used as pawns because the GOP doesn’t approve of Jerry Brown and his environmental agenda.

Here comes another one
by Dover Bitch

Just two weeks ago, we read this chapter in the closing-the-barn-door-too-late saga of the Bush years:

“Many of us feel very badly burned because of what both Justice Alito and Justice Roberts told us about their belief in stare decisis,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a Judiciary Committee member who voted against both nominees. “So we will be very very cautious with respect to the next nominee — very cautious.”

Feinstein supported a filibuster of Alito, after initially opposing it. She seems, from her votes and the above statement, to understand that Bush’s nominees are willing to say anything to get a lifetime appointment to the nation’s top courts. And, once there, they promptly go to work dismantling the progress America has made towards equal justice.

When Bush narrowly won reelection and the GOP controlled Congress, they were quick to throw the word “mandate” around. Today, Congress is completely in Democratic control and the president is as unpopular as any in history. One would think that his nominees would be more reflective of the nation as a whole. At a minimum, one would think that the nominee would be representative of the state from which he or she hails.

But it’s George W. Bush we’re talking about so, naturally, the nominee the Senate Judiciary Committee considered today is Leslie Southwick, Bush’s third choice for the Fifth Circuit Court. His first two picks for this seat — Charles Pickering and Michael B. Wallace — didn’t make it out of committee.

If the Republicans want to take advantage of their opportunity to fill these seats, they should have to present candidates that don’t just satisfy the National Review and Wall St. Journal editorial boards. Especially in light of the fact that there’s a distinct possibility that the next president will be a Democrat.

Here’s what kind of move to the middle Bush was willing to make:

In 1998, Southwick joined a ruling in an employment case that upheld the reinstatement, without any punishment whatsoever, of a white state employee who was fired for calling an African American co-worker a “good ole ni**er.” The court’s decision effectively ratified a hearing officer’s opinion that the slur was only “somewhat derogatory” and “was in effect calling the individual a ‘teacher’s pet.'” The Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision.

In 2001, Southwick joined a ruling that upheld a chancellor’s decision to take an eight-year-old girl away from her mother and award custody to the father, who had never married the mother, largely because the mother was living with another woman in a “lesbian home.” Southwick went even further by joining a gratuitously anti-gay concurrence which extolled Mississippi’s right under “the principles of Federalism” to treat “homosexual persons” as second-class citizens. The concurrence suggested that sexual orientation is a choice and stated that an adult is not “relieved of the consequences of his or her choice” – e.g. losing custody of one’s child.

At the confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin asked Southwick for an example of when he stepped up to defend the powerless and he couldn’t think of a single example. Today, Durbin revealed that he, in fairness, asked Southwick for an answer in writing, to give the nominee time to think of a good example. Again, Southwick was unable to think of a single episode.

The “Congressional Black Caucus, NAACP, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Magnolia Bar Association, Mississippi NAACP, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Society of American Law Teachers, Human Rights Campaign, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way among others” have all expressed their opposition to Southwick’s nomination.

But Sen. Feinstein had a meeting with Southwick and he assured her that he is “not outside the mainstream.” Despite her promise to be “very, very cautious” with Bush’s nominees, Feinstein voted with the unanimous GOP to send Southwick’s nomination to the Senate for a vote. When she announced her vote, she conceded that she “could be wrong” and that “maybe” she’s been wrong before.

This president and his nominees have zero credibility on civil rights and most other issues. Why is Feinstein trusting them now?

Ragged Nation

by digby

I’m sitting in an airport watching footage of this awful bridge accident and it makes me sick. Since I was a kid, I’ve had an irrational fear of bridge collapse and this one is like my worst nightmare.

Again, you cannot look at something like this and not wonder if the years and years of infrastructure neglect at the hands of GOP propagandists who have been starving government for decades now is finally coming back to haunt us.

The 40-year-old bridge was rated as “structurally deficient” two years ago and possibly in need of replacement, the Star Tribune reported. The newspaper said that rating was contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database.

“We’ve seen it, and we are very familiar with it,” Jeanne Aamodt, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said of the 2005 assessment of the bridge.

Aamodt noted that many other bridges around the country carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received. She declined to say what the agency was going to do to address the deficiencies found in 2005.

Governments all over the country have been robbing Peter to pay Paul, shifting money to immediate needs like health care and child welfare and hoping against hope that the roads and bridges and buildings built during the new deal era held up. “No New Taxes” has been the rallying cry for decades now, but nobody ever said how we were supposed to pay for the things we all take for granted. And, of course,when things like this happen, the wingers blame the government and everyone decries taxes even more.

I have to wonder if any Republicans were on that bridge last night. If there were, they must have realized that sometimes we really are all in it together.

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Reflexive Fear of Wimpification

by digby

When I read this this morning, I thought I might be hallucinating:

Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

[…]

In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

“We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement Monday night.

Let’s set aside the idea that “trusting” the Bush administration with warrantless wiretaps is like trusting your four year old with a zippo lighter, what kind of bucket-of-lukewarm-spit kind of politics is this? What are they afraid of, that the Bush administration will blame them if a terrorist attack occurs and they didn’t approve another blank check? Guess what? It wouldn’t matter if the Democrats named Bush king with the power to draw and quarter hippies and Muslims on the white house lawn, they will still blame the Democrats if there is another terrorist attack.

I do not know what this latest program is, but whatever it is, it needs to be approved by somebody other than the White House. I’m sorry, but that should be non-negotiable. Dick Cheney has delegated to himself virtually limitless power and he is borderline insane. The executive branch cannot be trusted with additional power of any kind. They have quite enough, thank you.

Here we are trying to pry from the Bush administration just what in the hell was in the “other intelligence activities” they were doing before the entire upper management of the Department of Justice threatened to resign, and the Dems are now publicly capitulating to white house demands that they give them more warrantless surveillance powers — and Harry Reid is whining about how he hopes the Republicans will work with him? Talk about muddying the waters. The substance is nuts and the politics are nuts.

I feel like I woke up this morning and it was 2002 all over again. We have the two top Democratic contenders arguing about invading Pakistan and the Democratic congress is rushing to sign off on another secret surveillance program. (Hey, let’s burn some Dixie Chicks albums just for fun! It would be irresponsible not to…)

I don’t know what it’s going to take to convince Democrats that trying to “out-tough” each other or especially trying to “out-tough” the GOP is always playing to the Republican’s strength — the authoritarian lizard brain. If this keeps up, by the time we get to the election, the Democratic candidate will be vying with the Republican over who will be the first to sign a new law legalizing torture for double parking. We don’t win that way, never have, never will.

Update: I should be clear that I’m not saying that Pakistan does not have to be addressed. But it’s a complicated situation and just hate to see the Democrats reducing this stuff to cheap sound bites just like the Republicans do. It just makes things worse in the long run.

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Brown Is The New Black

by digby

I’ve been waiting for some right winger to point this out as if it means something since I read the Democracy Corps poll the other day, and right on time, here comes David Frum:

Maybe you’ve heard about the recent polls showing a huge Democratic advantage among young voters. The latest , conducted by Stanley Greenberg for the Democracy Project, shows (among other dismal tidings) a 19-point party identification lead for Democrats among voters younger than 30.

[…]

Read the report in full, however, and you come across an interesting nugget on page 6: White young people continue to favor Republicans by a thin but real margin of 2 points. The Democrats owe their advantage among youth to a huge lead among young African-Americans (78 points) – and a very large lead (43 points) among Hispanics.

In the past, Republicans could win elections despite their unpopularity among ethnic minorities. But with the huge surge of immigration since 1980 – and especially since 2000 – the voting map of the United States has been redrawn in ways inherently deeply unfavorable to the GOP.

[…]

… the legacy that will damage his party is the legacy of immigration non-enforcement. This has imported a large new community of people who are both economically struggling (and thus open to Democratic arguments) but who lack deep attachment to the American nation (and who are thus immune to the most potent of Republican appeals). It is these voters who will sway elections in future. And thanks to this president’s immigration policies, there are going to be a lot more of them than there might otherwise have been.

Illegal immigrants can’t vote and weren’t polled. So in this poll we are talking about young legal citizens between the ages of 18-29, the vast, vast majority of whom were born in this country. Most of them have never been to Mexico except on vacation, many of them don’t speak Spanish and they have all been educated in American schools and raised on MTV and fast food. In other words, these young people are Americans with all the same attachments to country that all young Americans have. I have no idea how he explains the fact that 78% of young African Americans also loathe Republicans — perhaps they’ve never established any attachment to America either. (I don’t suppose the fact that Republicans are the party of racists has anything to do with it.)

Frum is just carrying on the long tradition of stupid commentators and Republican shills who constantly point out that Republicans would win in a landslide if only white people voted (although in this case, they don’t win decisively among young whites either) as if that’s some sort of meaningful metric. I even heard someone break down the poll numbers for Clinton by saying that she wouldn’t stand a chance if women couldn’t vote. I have never heard anyone note the opposite —- that if white males couldn’t vote, no Republican could ever get elected to any office in the land.

But aside from the racist assumptions about these young Americans, Frum is actually laying the groundwork for the right’s attack against any expansion of the safety net. This is one of those recurring themes in American politics.

Here’s a post I did long ago, and have reprised a time or two, about how our history of slavery and racism have shaped American ideas about public welfare and why we simply can’t seem to get past the legacy of race hatred to create a sense of the common good. It’s a rather ugly argument, but it is persuasive to me. When I see it rear its ugly head once again with people people like Frum pulling the old xenophobe card about young American born citizens of “certain” descent not having any ties to the culture, it’s hard to argue that the old impulse has completely died out.

Here’s a little piece of that post, (which was written in response to those who think we can convince southern white conservatives to vote for Democrats with populist appeals):

In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard, who has long been interested in America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality” which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

AGS [Alesina, Glazear and Sacerdote] report, using the World Values Survey, that “opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. For example, according to the World Values Survey, whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view…. 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said …poor people could work their way out of poverty.”

[…]

“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)

“Endogenous” is economics-ese for saying we have the political system we do because we prefer the results it gives, such as limiting redistribution to the blacks. Thus the racial factor as well as a wider net of social beliefs play a key role in why Americans don’t care about income inequality, and why, not caring, they have no great interest in expanding the welfare state.

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected. But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, they were dependant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependant, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

This latest explosion of nativism has to do with new migration patterns of seasonal illegal immigrants, class anxiety among whites on the lower end, exploitation by media con men, among other things. But I believe that the result will be just as it was in the past: opportunistic politicians and wealthy interests will stoke these impulses in order to stymie the growing movement to expand the government safety net, particularly universal health care. They are already making a simple crude argument (couched in socially acceptable terms, of course) that your tax dollars are going to support a bunch of lazy Mexicans and you’ll get nothing in return. That is the underlying theme of all these appeals and the result is the same as it ever was: because certain people would rather their own family suffer than contribute to the betterment of those whom they despise, the US government cannot be used as a vehicle for social welfare. The question is whether it will work this time.

The sheer numbers of non-whites are changing things, and that has the rightwingers working themselves into a full blown panic. The Bushies were right on this one. They needed to cool the racist ardor of their base, but they couldn’t get it done. And now you see neocons like Frum trying to join the wingnut populist bandwagon with thinly veiled racist appeals to solidarity with the Pat Buchanan wing. (His conflation of “illegal immigrants” who allegedly have no stake in the country with the large numbers of young Hispanic Americans who were born here gives the game away.) But the numbers are just not on their side.

I suspect that this impending panic attack may even be at the root of Karl Rove’s rather desperate US Attorney “voter fraud” gambit. They needed to cool the racist base, pass some kind of worker program as a sop to business AND suppress the vote in the west and southwest in order to keep winning 51% elections. Even a real genius would have had a hard time pulling that off. The whole thing fell apart — and now we are on to them.

So, go ahead, Mr Canadian immigrant. Keep telling young Hispanic Americans that their parents shouldn’t have been allowed to come into the country. Keep talking about blacks like they aren’t real Americans. This isn’t 1860 anymore. It isn’t 1960 anymore. This is the new brown America and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. You can bash “illegals” and “welfare queens” and run your patented “law and order” campaigns all you want, but you have lost the war. There are way more of them (along with us white liberals from all over the country who also loathe and despise your racist fearmongering)than there are of you now.

So have at it. Every time you make one of these racist appeals to your dittohead base, another young Democratic voter gets her wings.

Update: Rick Perlstein asks Frum an uncomfortable question.

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Dreaming of Drones and Iwo Jima

by digby

Kevin Drum directs me today to this post from 2005 from Kung Fu Monkey that I missed the first time out. Aside from the fact that it’s hilarious, it also contains at least one insight that I think remains important: that Bush (Cheney actually) based US strategy on the trash talk and recruiting fatwas of fundamentalist freaks rather than a real assessment of their capabilities and goals.

Either Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he’s saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic. Neither bodes well for the republic.

Well, Bush and Cheney are delusional themselves, in different ways, so we have been dealing with a triple whammy. And to make matters even worse, their strategy is based on a delusional goal of their opponents (which isn’t even as delusional as they say it is) and they believe they are capable of it. Mushroom Clouds! Drone Planes! No wonder the whole world has a headache.

But it’s more than that.I’ve written a lot about why these Greatest Generation wannabes are so anxious for an existential struggle they can pretend to be fighting, and it’s a fascinating topic to explore. But at some point, this country is going to have to look at Islamic fundamentalism and try to actually figure out how to deal with it. The wingnuts’ puerile desire to live out “Saving Private Ryan” on a video game just isn’t going to cut it.(For a primer on where this crazy mode of thinking comes from, look no further than the Godfather of the Neocon family himself, Norman Podhoretz.)

A lot of the young smarties in the wonkopshere are beginning to talk about the sad state of foreign policy discussions in the campaign so far and they are right. But it’s because we’re stuck in this delusional “War on Terror” framework that makes it very difficult to talk about the state of the world with any precision. Hence we get silly spats between the candidates about who they would meet with that aren’t very illuminating. That is not to say they don’t have advisors who are addressing the problem, but more that the candidates have not yet come up with a rational way of discussing it with the public. Edwards’ dismissal of “the war on terror” slogan was met with a thud and I’m afraid nobody else is going to tackle it.

It’s important that they find a way, or we’re going to be stuck with this ridiculous nonsense about the arab hordes coming over in drone planes to kill us all in our beds because the oceans can’t protect us. That’s the only thing people have really heard and while they don’t necessarily buy it 100%, it’s the kind of thing that has the ability to penetrate the national consciousness and cramp the decisionmaking for years to come. (And that means that the terrorists will have won!)

I’m not really joking: like the “Commie Menace” it replaces, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is more than just a foreign policy challenge. It’s a domestic cultural and political challenge as well and not because we are being infiltrated by sleeper cells. It’s a challenge because it tends to empower the authoritarian right which is more than happy to do the fundamentalists dirty work for them. Which is, of course, why they are so desperately flogging the GWOT. It’s the thing that will keep them going during their time in the wilderness — especially if they get lucky and the terrorists stage another splashy attack.

(I hate to ascribe base motives to people and posit that they might dream of such a thing, but when they constantly say we are rooting for “failure” in Iraq for political reasons, it’s perfectly fair to point out they are obviously rooting for another terrorist attack for political reasons. It may just be their only hope at this point.)

We need to set the nation straight on what the fundamentalist terrorists’ goals really are, what we can do to meet the threat and inspire confidence that no matter what happens, we are not going to be forced to wear burkas and pray to mecca five times a day any time soon. This seems to me to be an ignored area in the campaign rhetoric — the antidote to fear. I think it might ring some bells with people.

Update: And who else but Joe “Scoop” Lieberman could put it in words so perfectly:

“I think either [Democrats] are, in my opinion, respectfully, naïve in thinking we can somehow defeat this enemy with talk, or they’re simply hesitant to use American power, including military power,” Lieberman said in a wide-ranging interview with The Hill.

“There is a very strong group within the party that I think doesn’t take the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously enough.”

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