Month: November 2008

Angry Tears Of Betrayal

by digby

Someone needs to alert the religion industrial complex that their “outreach” doesn’t extend to the highest reaches of the Catholic church:

Via CNN, Cardinal James Stafford:

“His rhetoric is post-modernist and marks an agenda nd vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic. Catholic weep over his words. We weep over the violence concealed behind the rhetoric of our young president-to-be. What should be do with our hot, angry tears of betrayal?”

I particularly like the charge that Obama’s rhetoric is post modernist. Considering the “culture ‘o life” split the stem cell, execution happy, warmongering approach of the truly post modernist Bush administration it’s saying something.

I think this really gets to the nub of the issue:

Stafford said the truest reflection of the love between the believer and God is that of the relationship between husband and wife, and that contraceptive use does not fit anywhere within that framework. According to Stafford, the inner dynamic of a spousal relationship is much like the body itself, which ‘speaks’ in terms of masculinity and femininity.

I understand that he is speaking in intellectual and metaphorical terms. But down here among the plebes, the “inner dynamic” of the pregnant body pretty specifically “speaks” in feminine terms. And the fact that that has no special bearing on the issue of even birth control is the essence of the problem. To him, a woman is the vessel for this reflection of love between man and God whether she wants to be or not. I don’t quarrel with anyone’s right to believe that. However, I don’t believe it. I believe that I have sole dominion over my own body and free will when it comes to the “inner dynamic” of the spousal relationship — certainly the state can’t possibly make such intimate and complicated decisions for me. (Why, next they’ll be telling you who you can marry too ….oh wait.)

Speaking of which, Andrew Sullivan said:

The Vatican hierarchy has become radicalized under Benedict and John Paul II – so much so that they see the West since the 1960s as entirely a creature of resistance to Humanae Vitae, the papal declaration that all non-procreative sex is a moral evil. But the notion that the recent election of Obama is a sign of the Apocalypse has, until now, been restricted to Protestant loonies.

Actually, seeing the West since the 1960s entirely as a creature of sexual immorality is pretty much what defines social conservatism. I don’t think the Catholics are the only ones. Obama was elected by people who don’t believe such things. Therefore, he is the anti-Christ. What could be more obvious?

The good news is that American Catholics didn’t see the Four Horsemen in the eyes of Barack Obama and a majority of them voted for him anyway.There goes that pesky free will again.

Lying Us Into War Has Its Privileges

by dday

Just to put a coda on today’s heartfelt welcoming back of Joe Lieberman to the Democratic caucus (I swear, all this bipartisanship and comity brings a tear to my eye), let’s go over one loose end that Mr. Connecticut for Lieberman hyped endlessly throughout the election season. It was considered absolute by him that Iran was supplying weapons to Iraqi militia that were using them to murder American soldiers. This was the basis for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, which threatened to “combat, contain and stop” Iran if they continued these efforts against coalition forces. In fact, Kyl-Lieberman contained as evidence this language:

(2) Ambassador Ryan Crocker, United States Ambassador to Iraq, stated in testimony before a joint session of the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives on September 10, 2007, that “Iran plays a harmful role in Iraq. While claiming to support Iraq in its transition, Iran has actively undermined it by providing lethal capabilities to the enemies of the Iraqi state.”

(3) The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, published in August 2007, states that “Iran has been intensifying aspects of its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants, particularly the JAM [Jaysh al-Mahdi], since at least the beginning of 2006. Explosively formed penetrator (EFP) attacks have risen dramatically.”

(4) The Report of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, released on September 6, 2007, states that “[t]he Commission concludes that the evidence of Iran’s increasing activism in the southeastern part of the country, including Basra and Diyala provinces, is compelling… It is an accepted fact that most of the sophisticated weapons being used to ‘defeat’ out armor protection comes across the border from Iran with relative impunity.”

Set aside for a moment the fact that the current government in Baghdad is actively supported by Iran, and that Tehran was “in the room” during the recent negotiations on the status of forces agreement. Let’s focus on the fact that Lieberman was promoting this idea that Iran was supplying lethal weapons to Iraqi militias to kill American troops, an act of provocation that he was willing to go to war over to stop.

(CBS) The United States should launch military strikes against Iran if the government in Tehran does not stop supplying anti-American forces in Iraq, Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday on Face The Nation.

“I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” Lieberman told Bob Schieffer. “And to me, that would include a strike into… over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers.”

Funny story about those Iranian weapons – they were a complete fabrication, representing an infinitesimal fraction of the weapons used in Iraq.

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi’a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to have been hidden prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk this week, the task force found and analysed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches during that same period.

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi’a militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi’a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi’a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

These were pretty obvious lies, considering that the military could never manage to give a coherent briefing about the origin of those Iranian weapons. But there was one man in the US Congress willing to believe these lies and pass a resolution seeking to escalate tensions with Iran over them – Joe Lieberman. This false narrative of Iraqi arms running pushed us to the brink of yet another war based on erroneous information.

For this, George Bush was used as the foil throughout Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign and one of the key reasons he will be 44th President. For this, Joe Lieberman got his Homeland Security Committee gavel and a hug.

And this is the kind of fearmongering, overhyping and agenda-driven bluster you can expect coming out of the Homeland Security Committee, in the name of “protecting Americans,” over the next 2-4 years.

Can’t say you weren’t warned.

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Top Cop

by digby

Eric Holder as AG sounds like an excellent choice to me. Check out what Jerome Corsi had to say about him in Newsmax last June:

Calling Guantanamo Bay an “international embarrassment,” Eric H. Holder, Jr., one of the two remaining appointees on Barack Obama’s vice presidential search team, said the next president must close the detention facility and transfer prisoners to military prisons.

In a speech given Friday evening to the American Constitution Society convention in Washington, D.C., Holder charged, “For the last 6 years the position of leader of the Free World has been largely vacant.”

In his half-hour address culminating in a standing ovation from the 350 attendees in the audience, Holder made no reference to the scandals which have forced Washington insider Jim Johnson to resign from Obama’ vice presidential search committee or to the controversial role he played as deputy attorney general pushing the Marc Rich pardon in the closing days of the Clinton administration.

Instead, in his Friday evening speech at the ACS convention, Holder devoted his entire time to criticizing the Bush administration on the conduct of the war on terror, strongly suggesting that a President Obama would pursue a rights-oriented approach to dealing with suspected terrorists and captured enemy combatants.

Holder charged the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was a “moral hazard,” which he compared to the original constitutional flaw that permitted slavery to continue, to President Lincoln’s decision to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War and to the decision by President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

“We have squandered one of our greatest strengths as a nation,” Holder said, taking a partisan swipe at the Bush administration.

He insisted it was disgraceful that the Supreme Court “had to order the president to treat detainees in accord with the Geneva Convention.”

In the months and years since 9/11, the Bush administration took many steps that were excessive and unlawful,” Holder continued. “We authorized torture and we let fear take precedence over the rule of law, as we overreacted to perceived danger.”

In addition to closing Gitmo, Holder insisted the next president should:

* Declare without qualification a policy that the United States will not torture political detainees, engage in forced interrogations or submit people to degrading treatment in prison;

* End all programs, covert or otherwise, to transfer detainees to nations that practice torture;

* Stop domestic search and seizures without warrant and end wiretapping of citizens.

“We have lost our way before,” Holder told the 350 attendees at the Friday evening session. “Now we must step back into the shining path envisioned by our founding fathers in such icons of liberty as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

“There is evil in the world and we face grave threats to our national security,” Holder admitted, “but we must reclaim our moral leadership by no longer letting fear rule our reactions.”

“When the new administration takes over on January 20, 2009, we will be looking for folks who share our values,” he proclaimed, assuming Barack Obama would defeat John McCain.

That was all meant as criticism of Holder, by the way.

According to Pete Williams on MSNBC, they vetted him with GOP Senators about the Marc Rich nonsense and he will be confirmed without a lot of drama. If he follows through on what he says above it would be good news.

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The Big Story

by digby

There is a lot about the incoming administration that’s making me nervous. But this, which I think must be the overarching storyline of the next few years, is looking very, very good:

Barack Obama is set to deliver a surprise speech via video to the bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles this morning.

Obama’s team sends out the speech video, which renews Obama’s commitment to battling global warming and casts it as an economic and national security issue.

It’s the tying together of these three issues as one that makes it so potent. They really are inextricable and making that explicit is going to give Obama far more power to move on them simultaneously.

This is very smart stuff. I hope he doesn’t get so bogged down in the details that he loses the narrative thread. It’s essential.

More Laying Of Landmines

by dday

Yesterday I mentioned all the internal challenges that President-elect Obama will be facing. Today’s Washington Post reveals how Bush is trying to institutionalize those challenges.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department’s top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies — including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions — into senior civil service posts.

The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called “burrowing” by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.

I hope nobody thinks that this is about stopping Obama appointments. This is about getting civil service protections for hardcore conservative loyalists. In past transitions, this has been done to protect new rules or regulations that the outgoing President would like to see maintained, and that’s true here as well. Recent rule changes in the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service will be harder to reverse with a champion inside the agency. But I hardly think it ends there. The same with all those career Justice Department officials whose political ideology was a factor in their hiring. And burrowing all of these officials at once will ultimately make it harder to root out the partisan career personnel who were hired into the civil service in the first place.

In a few years, we’ll see some whistleblower on Hardball, talking gravely about corruption in the Obama Administration, and she’ll be feted by the gasbags and made into a media darling. And nobody will notice the fact that she was hired by Monica Goodling.

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Redirecting The Hate

by digby

I was going to make note of this, but I see that Eric Boehlert is there ahead of me:

Of course, Clinton has not been tapped for the position, but a number of pundits, in what may be a Beltway first, have wondered out loud about how Clinton would be/could be fired as Secretary of State.

Does that strike anybody else as odd?

Not me. The Clintons simply drive some people crazy. It’s a clinical diagnosis.

I heard someone on the radio yesterday talking about it as if she should be fired for the corruption in the State Department of the past few years (Blackwater etc.) Seriously.

I actually think Obama may be picking her for this purpose. She can absorb all the looney criticism from the right and the Village and he can go about his business above the fray. It’s actually smart to give them someone else to hate. And if the Clintons are good at anything, it’s being hated and successful at the same time. Indeed, they seem to thrive on it.

This works out for everyone.

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Holy Moly

by digby

This is from Newsweek, not Newsmax:

According to a 2006 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a third of white evangelicals believe the world will end in their lifetimes. These mostly conservative Christians believe a great battle is imminent. After years of tribulation—natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets)—God’s armies will vanquish armies led by the Antichrist himself. He will be a sweet-talking world leader who gathers governments and economies under his command to further his own evil agenda. In this world view, “the spread of secular progressive ideas is a prelude to the enslavement of mankind,” explains Richard Landes, former director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University.

No wonder, then, that Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America’s millennialist Christians. Mat Staver, dean of Liberty University’s law school, says he does not believe Obama is the Antichrist, but he can see how others might. Obama’s own use of religious rhetoric belies his liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, Staver says, positions that “religious conservatives believe will threaten their freedom.” The people who believe Obama is the Antichrist are perhaps jumping to conclusions, but they’re not nuts: “They are expressing a concern and a fear that is widely shared,” Staver says.

Fearing that Obama is the Antichrist isn’t at all nuts. After all, he speaks in religious terms but he’s pro-choice and anti gay-marriage. What more do you need to know?

Testing The Young President

by dday

A day after the Iraqi Cabinet approved a withdrawal agreement that would remove US forces entirely from the country by the end of 2011, the White House is trying to snooker the press by saying that they agreed only to “aspirational dates.” There is nothing aspirational about this agreement. It is a firm deadline for withdrawal that wouldn’t even allow for residual forces in the country.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is out there today claiming that no we can’t leave on this kind of schedule. This is just the beginning of the pushbacks that we can expect to see from the military as we move into a new Administration.

The U.S. military would require two to three years to remove its roughly 150,000 troops and equipment from Iraq safely, and the timing of that withdrawal should be based on security conditions on the ground, the nation’s top military officer said today.

“To remove the entire force would be, you know, two to three years,” Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

While Mullen said that he and the top commanders for Iraq and the region, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, were “comfortable” with the status of forces agreement signed with Iraq today, he described some logistical hurdles to a U.S. troop withdrawal along a fixed timeline.

“We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that’s there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions,” he said.

“Clearly, we’d want to be able to do it safely.”

This isn’t some option thrown out at a briefing. This is a signed agreement between the US and Iraq that has very strict demands on withdrawal. Mullen is treating it like some war game scenario that he doesn’t like. And he wants a word with Obama.

Mullen emphasized that he still believes any U.S. troop reductions should be based on the levels of violence in Iraq – a position that runs counter to the official Iraqi stance.

Anticipating possible policy shifts on Iraq under the Obama administration, Mullen indicated the Joint Staff was planning for a range of options. “We’re always taking into consideration plans based on what we understand possibilities might be,” he said.

“President-elect Obama has also said is that he would seek the counsel of myself and the Joint Chiefs before he made any decisions. And so I look forward to that discussion, look forward to the engagement,” he said.

This lays the groundwork to undermine the agreement, and to push the President-elect in that effort. And by the way, the most likely outcome of this is to erode support in the Iraqi Parliament, which only trusts the US as an honest broker because of the presence of Obama. If the agreement is vacated there will be a very early showdown between militia and the occupying forces, which could prove deadly for US troops and embarrassing to the incoming President.

They have a word for this, I believe – sabotage. And this isn’t the only area of military/national security issues where we might see something similar. While Obama and the military may be able to salvage a productive working relationship, we have examples like the Air Force general who is already pushing Obama on the missile defense boondoggle:

The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon’s missile defense projects said that American interests would be “severely hurt” if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told a group of reporters Wednesday that he is awaiting word from Obama’s transition team on their interest in receiving briefings […]

“What we have discovered is that a lot of the folks that have not been in this administration seem to be dated, in terms of the program,” he said. “They are kind of calibrated back in the 2000 time frame and we have come a hell of a long way since 2000. Our primary objective is going to be just, frankly, educating them on what we have accomplished, what we have been able to do and why we have confidence in what we are doing.”

Note the framing in terms of how American interests will be “severely hurt” if the incoming President, who’s totally ignorant about us big boys and our big toys, by the way, cancels this program. Indeed, the contractors and the military-industrial complex are already gearing up to push back hard if one dime of military spending is cut.

The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.

They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.

Let us be clear: There is no indication that the president-elect intends to cut defense spending, and indeed, during his campaign he promised to increase the size of the ground forces, which makes an increase in spending almost inevitable. As with any transition, there will be some adjustments to specific programs, but cutting individual weapon systems is not and has never been synonymous with cutting spending overall.

There are so many things wrong with this emerging process that it is hard to address the issue concisely. Promoting overspending on defense in order to forestall popular social spending is undemocratic – it creates a false tension between national security and other public policy goals.

The informal alliance between the services and conservative think tanks threatens to further politicize the military. The abuse of national security arguments to win political arguments is both morally suspect and threatens the security of the nation by delinking strategic assessment from public policy.

And now there’s this Mullen incident, which is very reminiscent of how the JCS rolled Clinton in 1993 on the subject of gays in the military.

In yesterday’s 60 Minutes interview, which had a lot of positive signs in it (including Obama’s desire to keep moving forward on a new energy economy despite falling oil prices, to dismiss neo-Hooverist griping about deficit spending and instead use government to stimulate the economy, to overhaul the auto industry, and more), Obama was clear that he would have his national security team execute a drawdown policy in Iraq as soon as he entered office. Mullen is already laying down the marker that he disagrees. This tension will also spill over to the intelligence community, as has been ably covered here. One of the brightest moments in the interview was this exchange:

Kroft: There are a number of different things that you could do early pertaining to executive orders. One of them is to shutdown Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

Mr. Obama: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture. And I’m gonna make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

That is excellent news, and yet there’s still the matter of implementation, and without new leadership at the top, expect similar Admiral Mullen-like scenarios as Obama attempts to climb out of the muck of the Bush Administration.

“I am confident President-elect Obama understands the need for new leadership of the intelligence community and will appoint competent, capable people who will work aggressively to ensure the safety and security of Americans without undermining our laws and Constitution,” Feingold said in the statement.

“For eight years, the current Administration has shown contempt for the rule of law, including in intelligence-related matters, while repeatedly refusing to work cooperatively with Congress. At the same time, the Administration has failed to develop comprehensive strategies to protect our nation against our most immediate threat, al Qaeda and its affiliates. New leadership is needed to move our intelligence policies in the right direction,” Feingold’s statement concludes.

It’s quite something when you see a headline like Democratic Pressure on Obama to Restore the Rule of Law. But this is not totally about Obama’s instincts by themselves, but the need to fight against and, in some cases, clear out those who may have more loyalty to the status quo than following the orders of their new chief executive. This has historically been an issue for Democratic Presidents in the modern age, and in this incoming Administration it will be no different. If Obama thinks he can just use his own personality – or force of character – to stop the challenges from inside his own government, I wouldn’t call him naive, but let’s say he’d be shouldering a heavy burden. One that he plans to make heavier by seeding the government with even more Republicans at every level.

This is something that Obama needs to think about, IMO. A “Team of Rivals” government is a nice theory on paper, but Lincoln’s era was quite different – the real “rivals” split off and formed their own government and seceded from the Union, and Lincoln’s political foes were kind of thrown together by circumstance. Obama is doing this by choice, and he had better be prepared to be undermined at the highest levels. In many respects, it’s already happening.

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Sticker Shock Doctrine

by digby

Jane Hamsher has an informative and interesting post up today about the proposed GM bailout. It’s a complicated issue, but in the final analysis, Krugman simplifies it significantly for me merely by pointing to the big picture:

Under current circumstances, however, a default by GM would probably mean loss of ability to pay suppliers, which would mean liquidation — and that, in turn, would mean wiping out probably well over a million jobs at the worst possible moment.

You simply can’t wipe out a million jobs or more as we are just going into a terrible worldwide recession. It’s like telling someone they have to go on a diet when they are in the middle of a heart attack. There has to be a bailout.

But there is something else going on, which I mentioned last week in this post — the Republicans’ reflexive political response is to take the opportunity to break the unions and it’s a smart move on their part. Shock Doctrine all the way.

This is why you see this (from Marcy Wheeler):

I wanted to draw your attention to two statements about an auto bailout to show where this is going to go ideologically. First, Richard Shelby:

The financial straits that the Big Three find themselves is not the product of our current economic downturn, but instead is the legacy of the uncompetitive structure of its manufacturing and labor force. The financial situation facing the Big Three is not a national problem, but their problem. I do not support the use of U.S taxpayer dollars to reward the mismanagement of Detroit-based auto manufacturers in such a way that allows them to continue and compound their ongoing mistakes. [my emphasis]

Note his emphasis on “competitive” structures of doing business–and paying labor. What Shelby doesn’t mention, of course, is that Alabama is a right to work state. Shelby also doesn’t mention that Alabama is home to Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes plants. Shelby also doesn’t reveal that many of the cars those manufacturers make in Alabama, without unions, are precisely the kind of behemoths critics attack Detroit for making–only these have foreign nameplates: M-Class SUV, GL-Class SUV (a new model), Pilot SUV, Santa Fe SUV, plus engines for Tacoma and Tundra pick-ups and Sequoia SUVs. In other words, Shelby isn’t opposed to car companies that are stupidly committing and recommitting to SUVs. Rather, he’s just opposed to car companies that make SUVs with union labor.

She adds in this post:

John Boehner: Boehner opposes the bailout, claiming the plan doesn’t move the auto industry back towards competitiveness. I assume this is code for “free me of the UAW,” since many of Ohio’s workers are union auto employees. Jim Cooper: Democratic Blue Dog Congressman from TN opposes the bailout, calling for conditions on it. TN is another state with auto manufacturing–both the old Saturn plant and Nissan and Volkswagen plants. John Kyl: In addition to Richard Shelby, Kyl was the other Republican attacking a bailout yesterday. Kyl, of course, is the second-ranking Republican in Senate leadership after Mitch McConnell. I take his appearance on the Sunday shows to be a bit of a surrogate for McConnell, who doesn’t want to take the lead on opposing a bailout, though that’s just gut feel.

McConnell has some political conflict, what with a bunch of auto plants in his state. And, in my view, the Republicans are making themselves a regional power for decades if they decide to run with the Deep South Republican Rump leadership on this. But I don’t think they can help themselves. Breaking unions is in their DNA — if they get the opportunity they will do it.

That’s all political positioning. Judging from the gasbags today, the right has actually accepted that Chapter 11 will result in catastrophic national economic consequences. So, they are likely to support some kind of bailout. The negotiating point will be the breaking of the unions.

I think Tom Friedman probably set the parameters in his column last week. The Democrats, the unions and the executives are equally responsible for the problem and as punishment, the Democrats should be vilified, the executives should take their golden parachutes and spend some time at their vacation homes before landing new jobs and the unions should be punished by ceasing to exist and leaving their members to fend for themselves in a terrible economy. After all, it’s really their fault the Big Three are failing, right?

Uhm ,no. Here’s Kathy G on whether or not those fat, lazy, spoiled union members really are less productive:

I’ve written about this before, but I’m doing it here again, because the wingnuts really need to put an end to this irresponsible bullshit, and pronto. Repeat after me: unions do not cause lower productivity. The latest conservative to lie about this is Soren Dayton (who, last I heard, was “suspended” from the McCain campaign for peddling a sleazy, racially charged anti-Obama video). In a recent post about “card check,” aka the Employee Free Choice Act (a proposed law that will make it easier to organize a union — see here for more), Dayton wrote:

The unions and their lackies in the Democratic party are intent on a path that will destroy our productivity for a significant period of time.

Um, not hardly. Even if you didn’t know what the economic literature says about this topic, if you stop to consider that the postwar era saw the record high union density in this country as well as unprecedented economic growth and productivity gains, it might give you pause. Indeed, Ezra made just this argument recently. But actually, there have been some good studies looking at the impact of unions on productivity. Overall, the empirical findings have been mixed. About as many studies show a positive impact on productivity as show a negative impact, and in any case the effects that are found tend to be small. Which is why, for example, economist Barry T. Hirsch, in a survey of the literature on this topic (it’s in chapter 7 of this excellent book), recently wrote that “[t]he empirical evidence does not allow one to infer a precise estimate of the average union productivity effect, but my assessment of existing evidence is that the average union effect is very close to zero, and as likely to be somewhat negative as somewhat positive.”

And, in the big scheme things, I think we can all agree that well paid, secure employees make for a stable society. The problem with the Big Three has far less to do with their employees than it does with their management — and a capitalistic ethos that requires a myopic obsession with quarterly profits over long term investment. The union members just make the cars they’re told to make. It’s not their fault if Americans insisted on buying behemoth gas guzzlers and the auto executives insisted on giving them to them knowing full well a day of reckoning was coming.

Update: Kevin Drum
, commenting on another (very interesting) question also observes that union busting in in the conservative DNA. It’s a defining characteristic.

One Party State

by digby

The minute I read this, this morning, I knew the fix was in. Corporate whore Tom Carper giving Holy Joe a good public scolding could be nothing more than kabuki. A deal had been reached and Joe was going to keep his gavel. They’d slap him with some kind of superficial “sanction” and maybe he’d apologize, but that’s the end of that. That appears to be the case.

But then readers of this blog know that I never thought for a minute that he’d lose it. The current fetish for bipartisanship makes “party discipline” oxymoronic.

Speaking of which, Tweety referred to this on his show earlier and it is an interesting insight into just how far the administration plans to go with this bipartisanship and how they hope to keep everyone on the same page. Evidently, it’s all about Obama’s personal abilities:

Obama has made clear that he wants a bipartisan look and cast to his administration. The transition team has been told to hire Republicans at all levels of government, not just as token cabinet appointments. ” ‘Team of Rivals’ has become a term of art here,” says a senior Obama staffer, who refused to be identified discussing strategy. “It’s less about Lincoln than a reinforcement of his theme that we need to move forward and get beyond the old partisan politics.” This staffer says that Obama and his top aides are wary of over-hyping the Lincoln comparison. He also says that Obama believes he can—by force of character—bring Republicans into the fold without sacrificing Democratic principles. “I don’t think he looks at this and says, ‘Because I appoint Republicans, I have to compromise my positions’,” says the aide.

It sounds like he really means to have a real bipartisan government from top to bottom. Combined with the Republican operatives the Bush administration salted throughout the civil service, there will be many, many Republicans still running things, so the villagers should be able to relax a little bit and enjoy their holidays. (Too bad for all you Democrats who thought you’d be getting jobs in a Democratic government, though. Maybe when the Republicans take over again, they’ll hire you as a gesture of similar good will. They’re very fair that way.)

Obama is going to have his hands full if he expects to keep Republicans in line purely by “force of character,” however. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds exhausting.

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