Month: January 2009

Shameless

by digby

Can someone explain to me why I’m seeing Republican after Republican on television advising Americans on the right way to run the economy? Is there any reason why we should listen to them sanctimoniously lecturing us on “what’s worked in the past” and telling us that the only way to cure the problems they themselves created are to do more of the same? They’ve always been known for chutzpah, but this takes the cake.

If a few Democrats could bother themselves to challenge their standing to make these assertions, that might be helpful. Or maybe one gasbag or spokesmodel could ask them why no matter whether the country is economically doing well or doing badly, their advice is always tax cuts. It would really be great if somebody, somewhere, could ask them why they think anyone should take them seriously on these issues considering the mess we are in today. I know that’s a lot to ask during this time of reconciliation but honestly, it’s infuriating to see them swarm the television and have to watch the media listen to their “analysis” and swallow it whole. If I didn’t follow politics closely, I would think these people are the ones who won the election.

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Howlin’ Dogs

by digby

I hope what dday writes below is true and that the stimulus works like a charm because if it doesn’t, it looks like this is going to be the only clean shot. The Republicans may be all over TV flexing and posing, but like the WWF wrestlers they imitate, they are all for show.

The real problem is, as we should have known, with the Blue Dogs:

Obama budget promise wins Blue Dog support

House Democrats won a key procedural vote Tuesday on the stimulus after a last-minute promise from the Obama administration to return to “pay-as-you-go” budget rules after the stimulus is approved.

In a 224-199 vote, the House approved a resolution allowing the stimulus bill to come to the floor for debate. Twenty-seven Democrats – 24 of them members of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition – bucked their leadership and voted against the measure.

But according to Democratic leadership sources, the number was almost much higher – and could have been high enough to hand the Republicans a monumental victory – had it not been for a letter from President Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag.

The letter addressed to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David promised to return to “pay-as-you-go budgeting,” and stressed that the stimulus was an “extraordinary response to an extraordinary process” and thus subject to different rules.

“It should not be seen as an opportunity to abandon the fiscal discipline that we owe each and every taxpayer in spending their money – and that is critical to keeping the United States strong in a global, interdependent economy,” the letter stated.

Orszag also emphasized that Obama’s support for paying for any temporary tax cuts in the stimulus that he would like to make permanent. The budget director said Obama would detail those offsets in his budget.

“Moving forward, we need to return to the fiscal responsibility and pay-as-you-go budgeting that we had in the 1990’s for all non-emergency measures,” Orszag continued. “The President and his economic team look forward to working with the Congress to develop budget enforcement rules that are based on the tools that helped create the surpluses of a decade ago.

“Putting the country back on the path of fiscal responsibility will mean tough choices and difficult trade-offs, but for the long-term health of our economy, the President believes that they must be made.”

Though addressed to Obey, Democratic sources said copies of the letter were distributed in a last minute flurry to Blue Dogs, many of whom were already on the floor and ready to cast their votes. The centrist group already was ruffled by the fact the package included far more spending than Obama had called for, and were prepared to vote as a block against the resolution, Democratic sources said.

If eight more of the 52-member Blue Dogs had voted against the resolution, it would have been defeated, ending any hope that Democratic leaders had of passing – or even finishing debate on – the stimulus bill this week.

The Orszag gesture did not arrive in time for some, but it did for some others, including Blue Dog Co-Chair Charlie Melancon (D-La.).

“In his letter, Dr. Orszag’s reference to restoring the pay-as-you-go requirements we had in place in the 1990’s is a clear and direct signal that President Obama is willing to make the tough decisions necessary to put our country back on a path to fiscal responsibility,” Melancon said after voting for the resolution. “After years of reckless deficit spending, the members of the Blue Dog Coalition are very encouraged to see that our new administration is serious about bringing responsibility and accountability to the federal government.”

Gosh, all we need is another dot-com bubble and the deja vu economic recovery will be perfect.

The Blue Dogs are conservatives who consistently vote on the deficit issue, whether against tax cuts or government spending. This is their main distinction from the Republicans who actually want to take money from working people and give it to corporations and the wealthy. But mostly, they are simply intellectually lazy people who I suspect find that it’s always a purple district crowd pleaser to make the anti-debt argument. It is one of those things you can say in a mixed political crowd that everyone can agree upon. Who likes debt? But it’s a governing cop-out. Sometimes debt is necessary to survive or invest for the future — a point which they have no problem making when it comes to military spending.

Unfortunately, we are in very difficult economic times which require that the government be free to act with some dispatch and creativity in order to keep this thing from turning into a catastrophe. This is not the time for their simple minded brand of fiscal discipline. As I’ve said before, it’s like telling the patient he needs to jog and go on a diet while he’s in the middle of a heart attack. It’s good advice, but not particularly relevant at that moment.

If things get demonstrably worse, I assume that the congress will have to act. But it’s instructive that these people are seen as principled, upstanding guardian’s of the nation’s well being, while the rest of the Democrats who are struggling to pass a bill that injects needed cash into this ailing economy to save it from depression are widely derided as corrupt, incompetent boobs. It’s a testament to how deeply conservative indoctrination still holds in our political discourse. And it shows just how toxic it is to the nation’s health.

I’m not crazy about Obama’s post-partisan schtick, because I think there is a villain in this piece and I think people need to know who it is. (That’s why I like Roosevelt’s line about “I welcome their hatred” and some of Obama’s sharper lines in his inaugural address.) But his rhetoric of “we are all in this together” is a step in the right direction to create an alternative narrative of politics besides the Randian vision of the brave individualist up against the evil government monopoly. If his policies succeed, and he cares to take up the task of reorienting people’s thinking seriously, it could begin to turn that around.

But right now in Washington, it’s still a Republican/Blue Dog world and we just live in it. And because of that “what works” apparently means what works to keep Blue Dogs on the team.(And when I say Blue Dogs, I ‘m not just referring to the House, but also to the insanely overbearing egos in the Senate as well. I suspect the show is about to get even more surreal when it moves over there.) Without these bizarre Democratic figures, the Democrats don’t have a majority.

Luckily, they were able to appease them enough to keep them from defecting on the stimulus in the House, but they will continue to hold a gun to the president’s head while the Republicans are out spinning like dervishes to the same end. They make quite a tag team.

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Creationism: The Very Bad Idea That Just Won’t Die

by tristero

There isn’t enough time left in the history of the universe to untangle this truly awful post by “Jeffrey Dach MD” in support of creationism. I’ll pick just two examples. Here’s the first sentence:

If you asked me if I believe in evolution, I would say yes, of course.

Sigh. Right off the bat, Dr. Dach (our time seems to be blessed with wonderfully funny Dickensian names – Madoff, Drudge, Haggard) irresponsibly mixes the colloquial with the technical, the personal with the objective. Sure, I’ve said, “I believe in evolution” when speaking informally; I’m sure even evolutionary biologists have. But when I’m trying to persuade, or explain to someone what evolution is, I know that my belief in a theory is completely irrelevant. What matters in a substantive conversation is the efficacy of the theory, not whether I have faith in it so I never bring that up. But for Dr. Dach (I’ll never tire of that name!), faith trumps reason. Later he will preface several assertions with “in my opinion,” “as for myself” and so on without, in any way establishing his credentials for holding an opinion (his medical degree does not qualify him to opine on things evolutionary any more than my degree in music does).

The second one truly makes me wonder whether Dr. Dach skipped every class that required reason and logic in order to pass:

In my opinion, “Intelligent Design” is not a scientific theory and does not compete with other scientific theories about the universe and life in it. Rather, “Intelligent Design” is a way of thinking about the questions which Science leaves unanswered. As stated above, Intelligent Design can be regarded as a presupposition to the activity of Scientific Investigation. The subject of scientific discovery and investigation is the order or “design” of the universe. The subject of scientific discovery and investigation is the order or “design” of the universe.

Gaaaaaaah! First of all, if “Intelligent Design” is not a scientific theory, how can it compete – or not – with “other scientific theories?”

Secondly, if, as Dr. Dach writes, “Intelligent Design” addresses questions science leaves unanswered, then Dr. Dach is saying that “Intelligent Design” suffers from a classic case of God of the Gaps. As science provides explanations for those unanswered questions, “Intelligent Design’s” discursive space shrinks. In other words, “Intelligent Design” is simply a misnamed garbage pail. It should be labelled “We don’t know. YET.”

Finally, notice the sleight of hand in the last two sentences where the undisputed existence of design in the universe – say, the shape of a galaxy – is conflated with Dr. Dach’s unsupported belief in the existence of an intelligence that created that design. A universe with a design does not necessarily have to be an “intelligently designed” universe, but Dr. Dach’s thinking is so muddled that he fails to discern this elementary logical distinction.

There is much, much more wrong with this unbelievably bad post, not the least of which is his shameful invocation of Sean Carroll’s brilliant book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful as some kind of “alternative” to Darwinian evolution. If he had taken the trouble actually to read “Endless Forms,” Dr. Dach would have learned that evo-devo confirms and refines Darwin’s basic theory of evolution by natural selection in the most extraordinary ways. In no way does anything in “Endless Forms” serve as an alternative theory to Darwin – Carroll simply said that the astounding discoveries of evo-devo might make a better pedagogic tool than an approach that emphasizes abstractions.. Furthermore, nothing in Carroll’s book – which is a wonderful read, btw – provides a scintilla of positive evidence for “intelligent design” creationism. PZ Myers addresses some other whoppers, but by no means all. There’s plenty more.

It is a genuine mystery to me how creationists like Dr. Dach manage to get so much so utterly wrong in so little space.

Rethinking The Stimulus

by dday

Bernie Horn takes a look at the stimulus bill and declares it clean.

In fairness to all, the negotiations took place behind closed doors, leaving us little solid information on which to base opinions. And over the years, we’ve had good reason to be wary of backroom deals in Congress.

But there’s good news. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a remarkably “clean” bill. Only between 1½ and 3 percent is being wasted on tax cuts for business. Put another way, the bill is about 98 percent pure—money dedicated to good, progressive causes.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, released Monday, says the business tax cuts will cause “a net revenue loss of $13 billion over the 2009-2019 period.” See the discussion on pages 11-12 of this document.

As you probably know, the Senate Finance Committee intends to make larger business tax cuts than the House bill has. The analysis of the Finance Committee’s markup, evaluated by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, is on page 3 of this document. The Senate version includes both the bonus depreciation and 5-year carryback provisions, but the Joint Committee estimates these will cost a total of $22.5 billion instead of the House’s $20 billion. The Senate does not include the $7 billion tax increase and adds a bit more than $2 billion more in tax breaks for a total of $24.9 billion in business tax benefits.

The CBO tells us that the whole bill costs $816 billion. So if the Senate version is adopted, only 3 percent of the spending is for business tax breaks. If the House version is adopted, it’s only 1½ percent. Either way, this is a bill that is between 97 and 98.5 percent targeted toward good causes.

This was written before the Senate added an alternative minimum tax (AMT) patch to the package, which will cost another $70 billion and target the middle to upper-middle class, and is not all that stimulative. The AMT patch is always an annual exercise in humiliation, as a patch is passed without any offsets, and that would likely be the case this year as well. But it tips the balance of tax cuts and spending on the package.

In addition, this bill is one of the rare chances to both create jobs and provide something lasting for the future, and even if you agree with Horn that only 15-20 billion is “wasted” (and I’m not totally convinced), it’s wasted at the expense of an investment and a transformation.

Even though most House Democrats say they will back the plan, many reject the administration’s argument, saying that infrastructure projects could easily be expedited, that the economy will need additional infusions for years to come and that the real reason for shunning infrastructure was to make room for tax cuts. Obama, with a public mandate to do something big, is missing a rare opportunity to rebuild the country, they say.

“Every penny of the $825 billion is borrowed against the future of our kids and grandkids, and so the question is: What benefit are we providing them? What are we doing for the country? It’s the difference between real investment that will serve the nation for 30, 50 years and tax cuts, and that’s a very poor tradeoff,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.). “I go to my district and people say, ‘Yeah, I can use 10 extra bucks a week, but I would rather see more substantial investment.’ We’ve gone through a couple bubbles that were borrowing and consumer-driven. We want a recovery that’s solid and based in investment and productivity, and that points us at building things that will serve us decades to come.”

Even some Republicans echo the call for more infrastructure spending, saying they would be more willing to support the bill if it showed more tangible and focused benefits, instead of being scattered across an array of existing programs. Rep. John L. Mica (Fla.), the ranking Republican on the transportation committee, called the proposed infrastructure spending “almost minuscule” and expressed regret that the administration had not crafted its plan around an ambitious goal such as building high-speed rail in 11 corridors around the country, which Mica said would cost $165 billion.

“They keep comparing this to Eisenhower, but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they’re going to put $30 billion” in roads and bridges, he said. “How farcical can you be? Give me a break.”

The fact that transit concerns don’t have the money to currently meet increased ridership puts the lie to the idea that they couldn’t use money quickly. And surveyors, urban planners, environmental impact studies, they create jobs too.

There is good news here. First, respected economists are coming around to supporting the plan.

“I think it’s a reasonably well-designed package,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for forecaster Moody’s Economy.com and a former adviser to the presidential campaign of Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain.

The key to the plan’s success won’t be its design, but its implementation, he cautioned, particularly the public works spending on roads, schools, ports and military bases.

“It runs the risk of turning into pork projects that are done more for political than economic reasons, but if it is well managed and run, it could” do much good, said Zandi, who’s been a frequent expert witness before Congress as lawmakers drafted competing plans.

House Republicans have lampooned some modest spending provisions in the package that have little to do with stimulating the economy, but those measures account for only a small portion of the money.

Second, the aid for state governments is huge. Here in California, the state controller is delaying tax refunds indefinitely because the state is out of money. If the infusion of cash stops the states, which by and large must balance their budgets, from cutting spending in the midst of a recession, that’s a big plus. Also, much of the spending targets the working poor and unemployed. Anti-poverty advocate Deepak Bhargava said that the bill is the “best piece of legislation for helping poor people he had ever seen.”

Now, Republicans are just chipping away and collecting scalps, and they’ve been moderately successful, but in a really haphazard fashion. Yesterday, out of nowhere, conservatives started complaining about the lack of housing aid in the bill, which is rich for them. And check out what nutball Michelle Bachmann tried to pass as an amendment (it didn’t make it through the Rules Committee) – requiring a state spending cap for any state that receives funds from this legislation, the kind that almost destroyed Colorado a few years back (Republicans are the party of state’s rights). I’m not seeing a lot of strategy, just a general lurching from one outrage to the next.

Sadly, it’s working. I guess the provision to refurbish the National Mall has been excised. From a raw policy standpoint, it’s not a dealbreaker, but it shows a troubling trend where GOP hissy fits bear fruit. Democrats are plowing forward on this bill, but what happens with the next one? Who has the ear of the President? Democrats who want to cement legitimate progress? Or Republican know-nothings who appeal to elites to create firestorms? And the idea that this will buy Obama votes down the road for other liberal initatives borders on the insane.

If Horn is right and the bill is relatively pure, that’s fine. But the politics have been anything but pure. Conservatives through their wailing have set up themselves to be proven right in the event of failure, because the argument was never made about progressive economic philosophy versus conservative failure. Instead we got a mix and let conservatives define the terms of the debate. Now Obama is beholden to whether or not the stimulus works. He always was, of course, but by pre-compromising the bill and offering what is still too imbalanced a package, he has made it more difficult to succeed than he needed to.

There is a silver lining. Instead of just whining on the Internets, Chris Bowers led an effort to get an amendment from Jerrold Nadler onto the calendar that would increase transit funding by $3 billion. It was hard-fought but now the full House will vote on it, and I urge you to call the Congressional switchboard at 202-225-3121 and ask your representative to vote “Yes” on the Nadler amendment to H.R. 1. In the face of Republican crankiness, we have the ability and the duty to be a louder and crankier voting bloc.

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Uriah Heeps On Parade

by digby

It’s Republican day on the cable networks. They are crawling over every show like fire ants. I presume the Democrats must be too busy combing the bill for what they can take out of it to stop the cacophonous whining. But they really should be out there trying to defend themselves because the conventional wisdom is gelling that Obama is going to fail in his most important mission — his promise to end partisanship — because the Democrats are corrupt spendthrifts who want to lard up the stimulus with pet projects and defy their own president’s allegedly heartfelt desire that conservative policies be continued.

Ain’t post-partisanship grand? More from MSNBCW:

A.B. Stoddard: If he doesn’t get Republicans tomorrow in the House, he’s hoping he can get Republicans in the Senate that the senate Democrats will move a bit towards the Republicans, which forces the House to vote on a new bill in a week’s time or more. So I think that’s why you hear Robert Gibbs talking about how the debate is still open and that the process is still open and that they’re exchanging ideas here because they want it to stay fluid.

Contessa Brewer: I’ve gotta tell you AB, when you hear that the bill that the House came up with is not the plan the Obama White House put out, it’s surprising to me that given how important it is that president Obama bring Republicans into this and get everybody into the same big tent that the Democrats would add to this bill, unrelated programs, things that maybe in their own right should be passed, health care reform, medicaid issues. Maybe that’s something that should be looked at. But what is it doing in an economic stimulus plan?

Stoddard: And that is the Republicans’ very fair question. Obviously the congress is a co-equal branch of government, they are the legislative body and they write the laws for this country, the president does not write the law by himself….

Brewer: But doesn’t it put the president in a rough position? He has promised not to allow pork spending in this bill!

Stoddard: Yes it does. And that is the problem. That is why he’s removing the 200 million in the bill for contraceptives because that is not emergency spending and there’s no way you can define it as such. And I think that is why, when those Republicans go to meet with Rahm Emmanuel, the chief of staff at the white house, I have a feeling that more is going to come out by way of concession. Because it is a problem he is having with Democrats. The Democrats have written the bill. Chairman Obey, chairman of the appropriations committee has been writing this bill since November. It is not President Obama’s bill. They have to work together.

That is why you’re hearing Republican leaders say, “his problem is not with us, his problem is with the Democrats.”

“

The GOP hissy fit has worked like a charm. The villagers are all on the same page: the “problem,” as always, is that Democrats are not doing everything they are precisely told to do by the Republicans. They are being partisan. The Republicans weeping and wailing like Victorian spinsters works every time.

Brewer went on to harangue a Democratic spokesman about all these allegedly superfluous programs in the bill and finally demanded: “The Democrats were wrong, right? They were wrong!” Now, Brewer is a very silly media person. But she doesn’t think this stuff up on her own. She follows the party line. And it’s pretty clear which party that is.

Here’s Mike Pence again five minutes later on Hardball:

Pence: Look, this bill is a long litany of liberal pet programs that will have very little to do with actually getting the economy moving again. Look, there’s token tax cuts in the form of rebates, but Chris, I would ask you, and many members asked this, what is 50 million dollars for the National Endowment for the Arts going to do to create jobs? What is 200 million dollars in improving the National Mall going to do to put Americans back to work?

This is a flawed bill, and as I said to the president personally, this is a bill that was not fashioned with what I believe is his very genuine desire for a bipartisan compromise on issues like the stimulus. The Democrats in congress, as I told him, have completely ignored his call for bipartisan compromise and they’re bringing a partisan Democrat bill to the floor tomorrow that will not create jobs and will not lift our economy and Republicans are poised to oppose it.

They smell blood. You can see it in their eyes.

But it gets worse. Matthews then channeled Dick Armey and completely misrepresented the tax provisions in the bill as well:

Matthews: It seems like there’s a real fight over taxes here. It’s not just the amount of tax cuts, it’s who gets them. You want a reduction in the rates. Even working people who pay 15% will get a lower rate maybe 10%. Instead, he wants to give a lot of the tax cuts to people who don’t even pay income tax, people who are way at the bottom. What do you think of the politics of that? is he going for the very poor people as opposed to the working people? What’s he doing and what are you guys trying to do politically?

John Ensign: What we’re trying to do is choose the right policy. Something that actually stimulates the economy, that creates jobs. It’s not just what we give to individuals, it’s also the kind of business tax cuts to actually create jobs. You know, we have the second highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. Microsoft, which is a great American country, has zero exports from the United States. They have a lot of exports from Ireland because, guess what, Ireland has a 12 1/2% corporate tax rate. We have a 35% corporate tax rate. If we could lower the corporate tax rate that would be one of the best things we could do to make American business more competitive in the world.

Matthews: Congressman Pence, do you agree that the presidents tax cuts have been aimed at the very poor and they should be aimed at people who work and pay taxes? What’s your philosophy about this. What’s your policy goal here?

Pence went on to say that we’ve already done the rebate thing and 10 bucks a week won’t lift the economy or create jobs.(!) Then he cried again that the Republicans hadn’t had the opportunity to present their plans in the spirit of bipartisanship, and if they had, average married couple would be looking at three thousand dollars in their pockets. Then he whined some more about bipartisanship.

I expect this from Republicans. They are doing what they are trained to do which is oppose. And they are good at it. The bigger problem is the way this debate, such as it is, is being held for the public. I saw very few Democrats talking about this and the media are either dumb or in the tank for the Republicans.

Look, I blame the Democrats for this too. They needed to explain that the government has to spend money directly to create jobs, whether it’s a job working backstage at Shakespeare in the Park or putting in new lawns on the mall or staffing family planning clinics. It’s all jobs, many of which already exist and will be kept rather than lost if the feds can kick in some money. Tax cuts are used to stimulate demand, but the last round didn’t halt the slide. Neither has interest rate cuts. None of the usual stuff is working. That’s why a direct injection of federal money into the economy is required.

Republicans babble about tax cuts no matter what the situation. (They talked about them after 9/11 and Katrina, fergawdsake. They have nothing else.) You would think this was obvious at this point, but apparently everyone in Washington has been so indoctrinated in conservative propaganda that they just can’t grasp it.

Matthews betrays a common fundamental misunderstanding of how the tax code works, which the Republicans are cynically using to advance their own agenda. Nobody seems to get this one except for Barney Frank (and he didn’t have a good explanation for it either when I saw him talk about it this morning.) If you give a credit to just the people who work and pay payroll taxes (medicare and social security) but who don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes, you are directly targeting the working poor, by definition. Rich people usually don’t do their own taxes so they never look at the tax tables. But those of us who do see that many people at minimum wage jobs don’t end up paying any federal income taxes — after they take their standard deduction and other tax credits. It’s not that they don’t work or pay anything fergawdsake. In fact, the federal government holds on to their money all year and then refunds it to them after they file.

If, on the other hand, if you do what the Republicans cynically want Obama to do, and lower the rates from 15% to 10%, you are lowering the rates for every taxpayer in America, even the millionaires. No matter how much they earn, everyone pays the same rate on the first 20 thousand or so of their earnings. Just as everyone then pays the same rate on the next 20 thousand and so on. (Say, 10% on the first 20 and 15% on the second 20%) The rate goes up the more you earn, but not on the whole amount you earn, only the difference between brackets. That’s one reason that all the nonsense about being in a “higher tax bracket” isn’t exactly correct. Only the amount you earned above the lower bracket is taxed at the higher rate.

The Republicans want to give a tax break to people who don’t need it and want to deny a targeted tax credit to the working poor, as usual. Nothing new there. I’m sure Matthews has an accountant to deal with the five million plus he earns each year, so these details are beyond him and he just takes Rush’s word for it. (In fact, from comments later on the show, he thinks it’s a great idea that Obama wants to send checks to people who don’t work for purely political reasons. With friends like this …)

This debate is a mess. Hopefully old Harry doesn’t decide to listen to his pal Ensign and add a bunch of useless corporate tax breaks to the bill, but I suppose it doesn’t matter anymore. It appears to me as if they don’t even care what’s in the bill at this point, they just want to get something out there. I would guess they believe the psychological jolt alone of passing the bill will get the economy moving. I’m skeptical about that, but then I’m just me and these are the best and the brightest so I guess we just have to have faith that they know what they’re doing.

But I think any hopes we might have had for the bill being seen in the short term as a vindication of progressive economic philosophy and the antidote to conservative economic failure are probably gone. The idea of government spending vs tax cuts was never fully debated so tax cuts remain the default cure and government spending (except for defense) is all “entitlements” and “pork.”

But again, the proof is in the pudding. If the economy sharply turns around, Obama will be the winner. Let’s hope that predictions of market psychology work this time.

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Lack of Labor

by dday

So after huffing and puffing for weeks, Arlen Specter got what he wanted out of the Eric Holder nomination hearings (his main potential primary opponent declined to run against him) and decided to back the Attorney General nominee. After all the talk of principle and judgment, it just took improved electoral prospects for Specter to have a change of heart. Funny how that goes.

But there’s another nominee that is languishing, perhaps the only true progressive in Obama’s cabinet, and many of us would like to know why. Greg Sargent at his new digs reports on Hilda Solis’ nomination:

Why hasn’t Hilda Solis been confirmed as Labor Secretary yet, and why haven’t we heard from the unions or from the Obama administration about it?

Some top operatives in the labor movement are frustrated with the Obama administration for not giving them the go-ahead to publicly target Republicans who appear to be stalling Solis’ confirmation, people in the labor movement familiar with the situation tell me.

The silence from Obama aides on Solis is ominous to some labor officials, because they view the Republican efforts to hold up Solis as a first shot in the larger coming war over the Employee Free Choice Act, a top labor priority. Some labor officials worry that the Obama administration’s refusal to make an issue of the hold-up on Solis is a sign that the Obama team won’t act aggressively on Employee Free Choice.

“The anonymous hold on Solis is a clear proxy fight for Employee Free Choice,” says a top operative at a prominent union. “And from the Obama Adminisitration … crickets.”

Solis’ confirmation hearing was January 9 (you can track cabinet nominees here). If anyone from the Obama team or in the entire Democratic Party has said two words about her since then, I’ve missed it. Her position on the Employee Free Choice Act is well-known (she voted for it last year, after all) and so the talking point that she wasn’t “forthcoming” in her hearing is bogus. Labor is apparently willing to make a lot of noise about this, but want a go-ahead from the Administration, according to Sargent.

“People are just frustrated because they are not getting a clear signal of when and where to fight,” the official says, though he adds that a second school of thought within labor holds that there’s nothing to worry about, and that labor should be “comfortable” with Obama’s “timing on the Solis nomination.”

(Actually, the UFCW is demanding confirmation. Good for them.)

Still, some in the labor movement were already worried about the administration’s commitment to acting on Employee Free Choice in his first year, as Sam Stein recently reported. And for these people, the administration’s silence on Solis is making it worse.

If this is more of that post-partisanship and Obama’s team not wanting to tear down bridges to the business community though “divisiveness,” consider that those same businesses have no problem being divisive on their end.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

“This is the demise of a civilization,” said Marcus. “This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I’m watching this happen and I don’t believe it.” […]

“This bill may be one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life,” he said, explaining that he could have been on “a 350-foot boat out in the Mediterranean,” but felt it was more important to engage on this fight. “It is incredible to me that anybody could have the chutzpah to try and pass this bill in this election year, especially when we have an economy that is a disaster, a total absolute disaster.”

Remember that “decline of civilization” line the next time you need some hardware and have a choice of purchasing options.

Corporate titans are going to fight for their interests. We can’t wait for others to fight for ours. Yesterday thereisnospoon launched a citizen lobbying campaign to find out who is holding up Solis’ nomination. He has numbers for a bunch of Republicans, but the calls should really go to Harry Reid, who had no problem ignoring Senate holds last year when Chris Dodd was threatening them. Another good phone call would be to the White House switchboard, so Mr. 78% can expend a smidge of political capital to get his own nominee confirmed. Hilda Solis is completely qualified to be Labor Secretary, and in this economic climate the Labor Department needs to be running at full speed.

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Republican Wedgie

by digby

I understand that a lot of this posturing about bipartisanship is kabuki. (Dday unpacks the unfortunate results of it brilliantly, here.) But if I may indulge in a little bit of partisan rancor for a moment, may I just say how galling it is to have to listen to a whining, wingnut conman like Mike Pence wax on about his support for the president’s call for bipartisanship?

It literally makes me nauseous when I hear this:

Andrea Mitchell: What did you hear in that meeting that indicated any flexibility on core issues for you?

Pence: I think the most important thing about today was not what we heard but what we saw. And what we saw was a democratic president of the United States come in in an unstructured environment and he spoke for about ten or fifteen minutes and then he took more than a half hour of questions from members. And he heard the concerns of House members about the spending in this bill, he heard our proposals to add more tax relief for working families and small business owners and he responded in an extemporaneous way to all the comments and all the questions. As I told him we are grateful and the door of our conference will remain open.

But I also told him ,as I just said, at this point, the House Democrats on capital Hill have complete ignored President Obama’s call for a bipartisan compromise on this bill. Tomorrow’s bill will not reflect any negotiation between the parties on Capital Hill and I think tha’ts regrettable because the tone the president set today was very different.

Mitchell: Well there have certainly been a couple of signals from senator Reid on the Senate side that they’re willing to do more talking and permit amendments on the floor. But you’re correct that the House Democrats have not been, and we were with barney frank earlier, and he was making the point that elections really do have consequences and that philosophically, they disagree with your positions. That the free market approach, lack of regulation, all of the allegation of abuse is why we have reached this point.

Pence: Sure, you know, I have great respect for Chairman franks and I have great respect for that kind of a partisan attitude, but I don’t think that’s where the American people are at right now, Andrea. I think the American people are hurting, many people have lost their jobs,many millions more are worried they’re going to be next and they want all the best ideas regardless lof party politics to be brought to the table, debated in the light of day and to bring forward a truly bipartisan compromise. But we have to see a different attitude than we’re seeing from Democrats.

I wanted the president to know we were grateful for him coming by and his graciousness. We take his desire to reach out to house Republicans as genuine but we’re just not seeing any of that attitude, as you can see from Chairman Frank’s comments, and the American people deserve to know that.

I know it’s just politics, but I’m human and it makes me see red. Which is what they want, of course.

You have to give them credit. When it comes to wedge politics nobody does it better and they are attempting to drive a big fat wedge between Obama and his party using Obama’s own rhetoric to do it. I assume the administration understands this, but I’m not sure the public or the villagers get it. The Democrats in congress have to publicly eat shit, liberal activists get angry at Obama for kissing Republicans asses and Democratic voters in general get mad at the partisan Democrats in congress. (All they hear is that the Democrats are failing to fulfill Obama’s vision, which, coming from Republicans is absurd, but sounds plausible in this allegedly post-partisan utopia.) In this case, the Democrats really haven’t been stabbing Obama in the back, but the Republicans are making it look like they are.

With the help of the brain dead media herd may, this wedge may very well end up both influencing the administration to capitulate beyond what is reasonable (as they did with the contraception hissy fit) and creating the impression that the bill is bad because Democrats are spendthrifts who insist upon shoving their socialist agenda down the throat of the nice popular president against his will.

Maybe it’s worth it to Obama to triangulate on this, but the political price down the road could be quite high. If the economy turns around sharply by 2012, it may not matter. But if there’s any residual effect, it’s Democrats who are being set up as the villains. Therefore, no matter what anyone says, the policy must be good if there is any chance of success both for the party and the country. Watering it down purely for the sake of bipartisanship, as dday argued below, is therefore useless.

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Old Faithful

by digby

I like Chris Cilizza. But every once in a while he writes something that unwittingly implies that he’s been asleep for about 15 years, or at least walking around with only one eye open. His post today is one of those times. Check out this headline:

Is Rush Limbaugh the New Face of the GOP?

He does acknowledge in the piece that Limbaugh is credited with being instrumental in creating the Republican majorities that began in 1994, so it’s not like he’s oblivious to Rush’s influence. But let’s face facts. Rush Limbaugh has been the face of the Republican Party for a long, long time. And they have been happy to acknowledge it themselves, sending presidents to his show,giving him prestigious awards and writing paeans to his patriotism.

Limbaugh may be the last man standing but that’s a sign of his enduring strength as the face (and the id) of the Republican Party. There’s nothing new about it.

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Post-Partisan Pain

by dday

It was a good week, with a lot of progress packed into it, and many hoped that would be the pattern of this next Administration. However, there’s enough data to map out an alternate scenario, one where President Obama tries to keep his personal approval ratings high by placating Republicans and stiffing Democrats.

First we have the pre-compromised stimulus package, which is about to get more compromised thanks to a GOP hissy fit.

House Democrats are likely to jettison family planning funds for the low-income from an $825 billion economic stimulus bill, officials said late Monday, following a personal appeal from President Barack Obama at a time the administration is courting Republican critics of the legislation.

Several officials said a final decision was expected on Tuesday, coinciding with Obama’s scheduled visit to the Capitol for separate meetings with House and Senate Republicans.

The provision has emerged as a point of contention among Republicans, who criticize it as an example of wasteful spending that would neither create jobs nor otherwise improve the economy.

The report is that Obama personally called Henry Waxman, who has jurisdiction over the provision, and told him to ditch it. So now we’re listening to Republicans who have no imagination and don’t understand the economy. Family planning is a demand-based service that requires staffing. That means jobs. Jobs that now won’t be created or will be eliminated by the states because it makes Republicans feel icky.

Then there’s the mortgage provisions which Democrats would like to put in the stimulus bill that would allow homeowners to get their principle reduced by a bankruptcy judge, but which Obama wants out of it because big business and their Republican puppets might get mad at him. And once again, the President is prevailing.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chief Senate sponsor of the bill, said Obama persuaded him in a White House meeting Friday to remove the bankruptcy proposal from an economic recovery package — to ensure it doesn’t jeopardize the stimulus bill. But Obama pledged his support for the bankruptcy solution, Durbin said.

Obama said he would work with Durbin to attach the proposal to other ”must pass” legislation — with the hope that supporters of the overall bill would not vote against it because of the bankruptcy provisions.

Right, and then that “must pass” bill, like the stimulus, runs into trouble because of the cram-down provision, so it’s removed, and on, and on, and on… Chris Bowers notes that future passage of cram-down is not going to be easy, considering that 11 Democrats voted against it the last time it came up. So hundreds of billions of dollars for financial interests, but no sensible reform which would actually clarify their balance sheets and keep people from going homeless. All in the name of bipartisanship.

And then there are lingering concerns, like the ineffective corporate tax breaks still embedded in the bill.

At least $23.8 billion in corporate tax breaks have been included in the $825 billion economic recovery package in order to win backing from key business groups and their Congressional allies, even though the team that put the legislation together believes the breaks have little value in stimulating the economy and creating jobs.

Top beneficiaries include banks, telecommunication companies, railroads and oil, hotels, casinos, and both commercial and residential real estate firms.

“Everyone knows these provisions are not going to do much, but some members of Congress need to be able to say ‘the bill has a business tax cut.’ So we put them in,” said an Obama transition team architect, adding that the corporate breaks were carefully written to be temporary so that the drain on the treasury will be brief. According to another source: “This is just one of those things that you do to get a bill passed. It may not be pretty. We are talking about billions, but in reality it’s only a tiny fraction of the whole bill.”

That’s a bit of honesty there. They’re including ineffective giveaways to industry for no reason but to seem bipartisan. By the way that bipartisan support won’t be coming, leaving a bunch of tax breaks in there for no reason. And there is a cost. By contrast, mass transit and rail spending really IS a tiny fraction of the whole bill, in fact pathetically tiny, at a time when ridership is up but funds are down.

The dramatic spike in gas prices that began in 2005 sent Americans flocking to trains, buses and subways, a trend that appears to have held up even as gas prices have dipped. But 2009 could be a year of crisis for the agencies that run them — a time of more riders but much less money.

Some new funding could come as part of House Democrats’ proposed $825-billion stimulus package, which, in its current form, sets aside $9 billion for public transportation. But all of that money would be used for new capital projects, not operating costs. And it is operating budgets — the money agencies need to run the systems they have now — that are getting hammered.

If service cuts or increased fares become widespread, transit operators around the country fear they will drive away the new converts they picked up when gas prices were high.

Operating existing transit and rail lines keep jobs intact and reduce carbon emissions, as well as regularize mass transit as a factor in people’s lives.

The stimulus isn’t a horrible bill, and there’s a lot to like in there, particularly in the energy and health care provisions. But it’s certainly Chamber of Commerce-friendly at a time when their member organizations are laying off tens of thousands. Obama has maintained this sugar plum fairy vision of bipartisanship, yet his bill manifestly does NOT value “what works” over ideology. Quite the opposite. It makes room for ideology, conservative ideology, and pre-empts provisions that would work much better in bringing back the economy. Despite a mandate for major new social and economic programs from the public, Obama is still playing small ball. He’s responding to Republican hissy fits and teaching them that all they have to do to wring a concession is scream for a day or so and let their media allies whip up a frenzy. He’s offering half-measures when they won’t do the job.

If this bill is a blueprint for the next four years, it’s going to be a missed opportunity. Also painful.

UPDATE: Good thing all that nastiness was taken out and those nice corporate tax breaks put in. It’s really seemed to bring everyone together.

President Barack Obama is coming to the Capitol this afternoon to curry favor with congressional Republicans. But it appears GOP leaders have already made up their minds to oppose his $825 billion stimulus plan.

House Republican Leader John A. Boehner and his No. 2, Whip Eric Cantor, told their rank-and-file members Tuesday morning during a closed-door meeting to oppose the bill when it comes to the floor Wednesday, according to an aide familiar with the discussion. Boehner told members that he’s voting against the stimulus, and Cantor told the assembled Republicans that there wasn’t any reason for them to support the measure, according to another person in the room. Cantor and his whip team are going to urge GOP members to oppose it.

Ahh, post-partisanship.

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The Problem

by tristero

There has been a lot of discussion recently clustered around Jay Rosen’s post, Audience Atomization Overcome, including on this blog. While I tend to agree with Bob Somerby that Jay’s post is old news and omits or de-emphasizes some key characteristics of modern mainstream discourse – roughly speaking, they include journalistic incompetence, laziness, and the knowing distribution of unadulterated bullshit – I think Bob misses a crucial point. Jay’s post is an extremely well-written introduction for newbies to get a grip on how the bizarro world of our public discussions happens. It’s certainly not the whole story, but it’s a good place to start (and the jargon doesn’t grate on me as it does on Bob).

What often intrigues me are less the egregious examples of media bias, distortion, omission, and obtuse reporting but the hot air that wafts by, completely unnoticed, even by those of us who make a point of lambasting the msm. This is a crucial component of the situation Hallin/Rosen describe. These tiny belches of media gas are so numerous they form what pop musicians call a” pad,” a thick cushion of undifferentiated sound in the background that fills up the perceptual space and helps, unconsciously, to set the mood. It can be something like a New York Times gossip columnist complaining of boredom because she’s been forced to sit through an entire evening listening to Al Gore talk about global warming (scroll down to “Letter to the Times”), for example. We skim crap like that, we don’t really notice the hidden assumptions, but it affects our perceptions nevertheless.

Here’s a very recent example which touches upon one of Jay’s main points, that there are some assumptions that are so widely accepted that the press simply can’t understand when they’re criticized for it. It also illustrates Bob’s observation about the pervasive existence of prime-grade bullshit in the mainstream discourse. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a very tiny thing, but that’s the point. The corruption of the discourse is deep.

In a nearly tossed-away aside last week, Nick Lemann of the New Yorker reminded us:

…Bush adeptly, if briefly, harnessed the hunger for leadership that always follows a major crisis. In those days [9/11 and its aftermath], incredible as it may seem now, Bush was often compared to Lincoln.

As I said, it’s hardly anything, just a mundane observation that’s been made again and again. Yet, the way Lemann described the situation post 9/11 seemed a little off and it got me thinking.

Lemann’s not talking about a bunch of average folks shooting their mouths off in a bar. That’s not his beat; he usually (always?) reports on influential political players. And Lemann is absolutely correct. I saw people on TV compare Bush to Lincoln or Churchill or (name drop an Unquestionably Great Man here) in the days and months following the 9/11 attacks.

But Lemann neglects to include a crucial qualifier, indeed the most important point of his anecdote: No one competent at reality testing or possessing a nanogram of integrity has ever compared Bush favorably to Lincoln, not even in the days following 9/11. Problem was, hardly anyone competent at reality testing or with a nanogram of integrity could get remotely near the mainstream media in those days. Problem was, the media were overrun by the kind of clowns who actually would shamelessly compare Bush to Lincoln. Problem was, that kind of preposterous comparison was acceptable mainstream opinion.

The problems remain. To this day, those who got it wrong – perhaps even worse, those who gave the incompetent bullshit-slingers a free ride – retain their access to important media. Case in point: Nick Lemann. Yes, it’s a small, tiny, trivial detail but Lemann could have easily inserted at the end of the last sentence “by people who really should have known better.” He didn’t and it probably never occurred to him to do so. In fact, serious reporters like Lemann regularly coddled those who ridiculously asserted Bush=Lincoln and failed to report the opinions of those who insisted upon remaining intellectually honest. Lemann’s not Tom Friedman or Bill O’Reilly, he’s not incredibly stupid and he’s certainly not a malicious rightwinger. He’s just, well… his mindset’s typical.

I can never forget this astounding article he wrote on the odious Project for a New American Century on the eve of the catastrophe known as the Bush/Iraq war. In many ways, it was a terrific piece. Lemann introduced his readers to PNAC’s longstanding plans to invade Iraq in order to remake the Middle East. But, after going into considerable detail about PNAC’s notorious paper “A Clean Break” and David Wurmser’s book, which speculated that a positive domino effect would sweep the Middle East if Saddam was toppled, Lemann wraps up with this:

A few things should be said about this vision of the near-term future in the Middle East. It is breathtakingly ambitious and optimistic.

Again, Lemann was absolutely right. A few things absolutely should have been said about PNAC’s plan and Wurmser’s book. Problem was, and is, that Lemann said the wrong few things.

PNAC”s plans weren’t “breathtakingly ambitious.” They were absolutely nuts. As in screaming yellow bonkers nuts. The notion that invading Iraq would lead to Iran abandoning its nuclear ambitions wasn’t “optimistic.” It was unhinged from any remotely conceivable future reality.

That’s what Lemann should have said (and, btw, I wrote him back then about this). He didn’t. Worse, by phrasing his reaction the way he did – “breathtakingly ambitious and optimistic” – he signaled, if not exactly approval, then that these bold, audacious ideas were worth serious discussion. They weren’t.

Now, there were people who said the Bush/Iraq war was crazy back in February, 2003, before it happened. And we said it loudly. Millions of us, here in the US and around the world. But we weren’t merely dismissed as dirty fucking hippies, and serious journalists like Lemann didn’t simply ignore us. No. We were literally erased from American public discourse (scroll down to the post entitled “The Incredible Shrinking Protests”.)

Nick Lemann is the head of Columbia Journalism School. He is considered a Very Important Journalist, in some cases rightly so. (Full disclosure compels me to tell you we have friends in common and my wife is a partime teacher at the J School.) But in February of 2003, Lemann was quite irresponsible. After describing to us some of the craziest foreign policy ideas any American president has ever seriously entertained, Lemann went beyond failing to note the obvious: he rhetorically admitted these nutso notions to the realm of serious discussion.

Today, Lemann still can’t admit, or perhaps discern, the true nature of mainstream American political discourse. It is a tale told by idiots, signifying catastrophe. It’s not that he’s unobservant. Rather, he works in a media environment in which it would never occur to him to challenge, let alone, ignore people so foolish and/or compromised as to compare Bush to Lincoln. And it never occurred to him or anyone else in the mainstream, until it was too late, to pay serious attention to those of us who, from the getgo, rightly compared Bush to Ed Wood.

“Breathtakingly ambitious.” Jeebus.