Month: February 2009

Think Big

by digby

Check out this link to the streaming video of the Thinking Big Conference, happening all day in DC.

At 1pm eastern, Paul Krugmen will give the keynote.

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Evil Eye

by digby

Speaking of hate speech, check out what Michelle Malkin and her fellow cretins are saying about Henrietta Hughes, the woman who asked Obama for help at the Florida town Hall today:

Here’s Malkin:

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my comment earlier this afternoon about the savior-based moment in Ft. Myers this afternoon between President Obama and a woman named Henrietta Hughes — who demanded that Obama give her a home with her own bathroom and kitchen. The entire event was like a revival meeting. Naturally, I’m already being attacked as heartless for questioning the entitlement culture. Wrapping up a column on this for tomorrow

I never called Malkin heartless when she stalked the Frost family, although she behaved like a barbaric swine. I just said there was fetid compost where her heart should be. Some things never change.
Normally I don’t think it’s right to wish poverty, disease or hardship on someone, no matter how awful they are. But I think it’s necessary in this case. In fact, I’m having my friend Gloria call up her Sicilian grandmother’s evil eye on these Marie Antoinettes who apparently believe that nothing horrible can ever happen to them and they will never need help from anyone.
Joan Walsh writes about the town hall here like a normal, decent human being in case you have lost your faith in humanity. (And someone stepped up to help out Hughes, which is excellent.)
I, on the other hand, need a drink to wash the disgusting taint of reading that monster Malkin out of my head.
And BTW: Malkin also comments on the woman at the end of the Youtube who mouths wthe words “I love you Barack” and calls it creepy. Well, ok. But if you want creepy, I’ve got creepy:

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking–how to put it?–really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly “hot,” as in virile, sexy and powerful.

That wasn’t some random woman at a town hall meeting. That was a professional Republican speechwriter and “intellectual” named Lisa Schiffrin, most recently heard saying this:

Let’s say last night really did indicate that Hillary’s negatives will keep her off the ticket. (Or keep her from winning if she’s on it.) You know what? Deep in my psyche, in the place that kind of misses the toothache I’ve been prodding at with my tongue, I am having a tiny little pang of missing Hillary. Not her, but hating her. Hating Hillary has been such a central political impulse for so long now — 15 years — and I have had to work so hard to keep it up as she became more appealling looking, less shrill, more human — I don’t really know what I will do with that newly freed strand of energy.

She and Malkin should get together and share their hot fantasies George W. Bush torturing animals in the Lincoln bedroom. They are made to be bffs forevah.

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I Wonder

by tristero

After reading this, I wondered if anyone ever saw an article at the top of the CNN website about any liberal group pledging to support primary challenges to Blue Dog Democrats in the House and Senate.

I didn’t think so. And until we do, the nonsense we’ve seen over the stimulus bill will continue. Money talks. Bullshit walks.

When Hate Speech Finds Willing Participants

by dday

I wrote last July about the shooting at the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee by Jim Adkisson, which appeared to be a domestic terrorist incident motivated by “hatred of the liberal movement.” Sara Robinson at Orcinus points us to Adkisson’s “manifesto”:

“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them….

“This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.”

“I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me….Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

As Robinson notes, this is the fruit of a conservative movement which wraps its attacks on Democrats and liberals all too frequently in the language of eliminationism, preying on resentment (“Liberals are taking your hard-earned money for nothing”) and fear of the other to cast the opposition party as an enemy to be fought, physically if necessary. With the economy sure to be on the skids for a while, it won’t be long until the anger from the right builds, and seeks blame in their opponents. And obviously, this can lead to the kind of incidents we see with Jim Adkisson, who specifically cited conservative media for giving him a road map to channel his anger. Robinson closes:

A significant part of this country’s media infrastructure is thoroughly devoted to inciting people to commit horrific acts of violence against us — and now, we know for a fact that people are acting on those incitements. It’s time to start taking this far more seriously. What goes out across our airwaves these days isn’t all that different from what went out over Radio Rwanda a decade ago, spurring that country to genocide. At this point, it’s only a difference of degree […]

Adkisson’s “manifesto” should end any doubts we ever had about how virulent and dangerous hate talk is, or whether or not that talk will eventually translate into action.

Politically, it’s probably a good thing for Democrats if Rush Limbaugh becomes the voice of the opposition. But there are other consequences to that.

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Why They Did It

by digby

I’ve wondered why President Nelson and Collins decided that aid to the states, of all things, was something that should be massively reduced in the stimulus package. After all, most economists consider that to be the quickest and most essential stimulus of all.

Ed Kilgore hazards a guess:

[U]nless I’ve missed it, the “centrist” group has yet to offer any sort of explanation for why aid to budget-strapped state governments took such a conspicuous hit in their “compromise.” I mean, the fiscal crises affecting nearly all of the states are real. The recession-deepening cuts they are already making in personnel, in infrastructure programs, and in direct services to low-income Americans, are very real. Do the “centrists” think there’s enough money in the package as amended to head off these highly unhelpful developments, or do they just not care? Who knows?A cynic might observe that all of the four senators that Arlen Specter identifies as the organizers of the “centrist” coup-by-amendment–himself, Ben Nelson, Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman–happen to come from states where the governor is of the other party. But another factor, particularly given the timing, might have been a strange little statement put out by the Republican Governors’ Association last Thursday urging Congress to reject the stimulus legislation entirely, because governors really didn’t need the money. In quotes from RGA chairman Mark Sanford of SC, Gov. Sarah Palin of AK, Gov. Rick Perry of TX, Gov. Bobby Jindal of LA, and Gov. Haley Barbour of MS, the statement complained vaguely about “strings and mandates” accompanying the bill (although much of it either increases the federal share of costs for existing programs, or, in the case of the single largest program killed by the “centrists,” made $25 billion available for absolutely anything the states wanted to do), and called instead for tax cuts. This maneuver was obviously intended to undercut a statement made a week or so earlier by the bipartisan National Governors’ Association asking Congress to act quickly on the stimulus legislation–and noting the urgency of aid to states–and scattered press reports that many Republican governors were at least privately expressing support to Obama. Mark Sanford has been so adamant in his opposition to what he calls a “bailout” of the states that Rep. Jim Clyburn from SC secured language in the House version of the stimulus bill allowing state legislatures to bypass governors and apply for federal assistance if the governor refuses to do so. I don’t know if the “centrist” senators or their staffs read any of this “don’t help us” stuff, but it makes about as much sense as any other explanation of the specific steps they took to reshape the stimulus legislation.

I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. If the party is banking on the economy failing for a reversal of their political fortunes, this would be one way to do it. It seems like a tremendously risky, self-destructive thing to do, but then conservatives count on victimization and anger at liberals to create their patented backlash politics. It’s tempting to say,” let them reject themoney and we’ll use it got other things then,” but there are a lot of people, especially kids who don’t get to vote, who don’t deserve to have their states spiral into depression level economies just because their idiotic Republican leadership wants to score political points. (All the people who voted for these jackasses should lose lots of sleep, however. It’s going to catch up with them.)Obama was being bipartisan today down there in Florida with Governor Charlie Christ, who isn’t insane. But he can’t be bipartisan with people who are willing to stab their own constituents in the back for crude political and ideological reasons — or with their agents who play the roles of “moderates” on TV.

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Zombie Lies And The Puke Funnel: The Return of Betsy McCaughey

by dday

Media Matters chronicles the evolution of a wingnut talking point, where Rush reads something, distorts it, bounces it to Drudge and the Wall Street Journal editorial board and Fox, and then Rush cites the chatter as an “example” of how the talking point is growing. It’s all so depressingly familiar.

Wall Street Journal senior economic writer Stephen Moore and Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly promoted on February 10 the falsehood that the economic recovery bill includes a provision that would, in Moore’s words, “hav[e] the government essentially dictate treatments.” Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey apparently originated the false claim in a February 9 Bloomberg “commentary,” which Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge touted that day. Indeed, Moore credited Limbaugh, saying of the provision, “I just learned of this myself yesterday. In fact, Rush Limbaugh made a big deal out of it on his radio show and it just — it caused all sorts of calls into congressional offices.” Limbaugh later took credit for spreading this story, saying during the February 10 edition of his radio show: “Betsy McCaughey writing at Bloomberg, I found it. I detailed it for you, and now it’s all over mainstream media. Well, it’s — it headlined Drudge for a while last night and today. Fox News is talking about it.”

The name “Betsy McCaughey” may not be totally familiar to you, but it may interest you to know that perhaps nobody is more responsible for the fact that America is the only industrialized nation on Earth without a universal health care system than her. The latest distortion, that because of the health IT provisions in the stimulus – backed by every side of the ideological spectrum from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich – a National Coordinator of Health Information Technology will

…monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions.

Now, I can’t think of anyone who should be more worried about electronic medical records being made public than Rush Limbaugh, but McCaughey is predictably peddling nonsense here. It talks about doctors having “complete, accurate information” to guide patients’ care, but nothing about a federal bureaucracy having any authority to do the same. It’s a deliberate lie, a misreading of the language of the bill.

But McCaughey, a Hudson Institute Senior Fellow, has a long history of distorting legislation to scare Americans about “socialized medicine.” She was the writer of the long New Republic piece, allowed into the magazine by then-editor Andrew Sullivan, that slandered the Clinton health care plan with one lie after another. James Fallows provides the history, with a telling reminder of how the Village worked to screw health care reform in the 1990s:

Much of the problem for the plan seemed, at least in Washington, to come not even from mandatory alliances but from an article by Elizabeth McCaughey, then of the Manhattan Institute, published in The New Republic last February. The article’s working premise was that McCaughey, with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean. The title of her article was “No Exit,” and the message was that Bill and Hillary Clinton had proposed a system that would lock people in to government-run care. “The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better,” McCaughey wrote in the first paragraph. “The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you.”

George Will immediately picked up this warning, writing in Newsweek that “it would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem ‘necessary.'” The “doctors in jail” concept soon turned up on talk shows and was echoed for the rest of the year.

These claims, McCaughey’s and Will’s, were simply false. McCaughey’s pose of impartiality was undermined by her campaign as the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of New York soon after her article was published. I was less impressed with her scholarly precision after I compared her article with the text of the Clinton bill. Her shocked claim that coverage would be available only for “necessary” and “appropriate” treatment suggested that she had not looked at any of today’s insurance policies. In claiming that the bill would make it impossible to go outside the health plan or pay doctors on one’s own, she had apparently skipped past practically the first provision of the bill (Sec. 1003), which said,

“Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services.”

It didn’t matter. The White House issued a point-by-point rebuttal, which The New Republic did not run. Instead it published a long piece by McCaughey attacking the White House statement. The idea of health policemen stuck.

Plus ca change, plus ca la meme chose, n’est-ce pas? Gary Wills has more on McCaughey’s lies.

This is how the conventional wisdom often gets set in Washington – an article that “the right people” read builds among the chattering class and then is distilled out to the people, no matter its veracity. While zombies like McCaughey are still churning out the lies, there’s a whole new set – Rush, Drudge, Fox – of opinion leaders that get to set the agenda on these matters. Drudge still rules their world.

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Priorities

by dday

Apparently Presidents Nelson and Collins got it in their heads to include a billion dollars to the National Nuclear Security Administration for “weapons activities” in the stimulus. Once again we see that, while fiscal responsibility is deathly important, and fixing up dilapidated schools is not in the public interest because big gubmint shouldn’t be messing around with education, building another generation of muclear weapons is legitimate because military spending is magic and it never affects the budget bottom line.

By the way, here’s a list of the main sites for US nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production. You’ll notice that they’re conveniently located all over the country so that lots and lots of Senators have a vested interest in their continued production.

This is one issue where the Obama Administration has actually been pretty clear. They are implementing a full review which will examine the needs for nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War environment, and they are seeking sharp reductions in stockpiles in a comprehensive treaty with the Russians. There is absolutely no need for additional funding of nuclear weapons given that the President has called to rid the world of them.

But we can’t afford more money for Head Start, you see.

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Priorities II

by digby

I’ll just pile on dday’s post above with this bizarre piece of legislative salami:

Unfortunately, Sherman told me that he believes the executive compensation limits added to the Senate’s stimulus are going to get removed during conference talks with the House. The reason: a new Congressional Budget Office estimate that the pay caps will cost the government $10.8 billion in lost tax revenue over the next 10 years. “The plan is to take out the executive compensation provisions … and blame the Republicans for setting out the level [of $800 billion]” for the final version of the stimulus, Sherman said. “The question,” he added, “is whether the two senators from Maine, in particular, want to see their insistence on a [maximum] dollar amount [for the stimulus] … be the reason why the executive compensation stuff comes out of the bill.”

Now I appreciate a good wedge as much as the next person. And I think it’s great for the Democrats to be finding ways to try to make the Republicans look bad. But what in the hell are they doing telling the press about this? Is their some rule that says Democrats must indulge the press and tell them what their strategy is ahead of time? Sheesh.Of course, there’s always the possibility that they really want to cut the executive compensaiton provision. Nah … they wouldn’t do that would they?

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Selling Sanity

by digby

Chuck Todd says:

Obama’s 24-hour media blitz to get control of the salesmanship of his economic plan has been an impressive P.R. campaign. But it does raise this question: Would Republicans (beyond the triumvirate of Collins, Snowe, and Specter) have been more receptive to the plan had Obama started this intense pitch a week ago? It seems as if he’s making a pitch for something that’s, well, already sold.

I guess somebody forgot to tell Todd about the conference and the fact that Specter and Collins say that they won’t vote for the plan if it differs in any way from the Senate plan they knocked out. It ain’t over yet.

I also think Todd doesn’t realize that this has to be an ongoing effort because you have people like JimVandehei on television telling the country that the plan probably won’t work and so it’s politically risky for Obama blame Republicans for the mess he inherited:

Norah O’Donnell: Let’s talk aboutthe politics of all this because President Obama was pretty tough on the Republicans. He got just 3 in this vote today and last night he essentially said, “Listen, it’s hard for me to take a bunch of criticism from folks about this package when they’re the ones that presided over doubling the naitonal debt. I’m not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.” Does that kind of pointing the finger back at the Republicans work for him?

Vandehei: I don’t know if it works for him, but it’s certainly true. As you well know, under Bush Republicans spent a hell of a lot of money, especially in the defense area and cut a lot of taxes, leaving a big deficit for Obama. So when you talk about that it is all accurate and he did inherit this economic mess.

However, now putting together this stimulus bill and the bailout that was unveiled today, this is all Obama. he is taking ownership of a 1.3 billion dollar solution. because he can’t get any Republicans on board, he is going to have ownership of this for sometime. And I do think it’s risky politically because most economists, despite what Obama said last night when he dismissed whether Biden said there’s a thirty percent chance that this thing might not work, most economists will tell you that that is true, that here’s a high percentage chance that it won’t work.

Yeah. Obama’s going to have to be on the road during his entire term with that kind of commentary going out on television.

First of all, I questioned this emphasis on Obama inheriting a deficit. People are sympathetic, I’m sure, but if that’s the main problem then they expect him to fix it, not complain about it. By emphasizing the deficit and the national debt as being a huge problem, he is just setting the table for the fiscal scolds to seize the agenda — and that is the last thing we need.

The problem isn’t that Bush doubled the national debt, although nobody’s happy about it. It’s that he doubled the national debt by starting an unnecessaary war and refusing to tax his rich friends to pay for it. Government debt is morally neutral. It can happen out of necessity, as in an emergency or for long term investment, and it can happen out of profligacy and ineptitude as with the trillion dollar Iraq war. It’s important that Obama make distinctions between those things or he risks making the debt the reason for the meltdown, which it isn’t. In fact, raising the debt is the solution to the meltdown.

(If he wants to attack the Republicans for the meltdown, I’d go after their deregulation of the banking industry and their insistence on making this country a nation that depends upon finacial legerdemain for growth instead of actually making things people want to buy. But that’s just me.)

But Vandehei is also being incredibly misleading when he says that most economists say the stimulus plan won’t work and so Obama is taking a big political risk. It might be helpful to point out that the reason many economists are pessimistic is because the plan’s not big enough, not because it’s raising the debt — and the reason that Obama “can’t get any Republicans on board” is because a)they are political sociopaths and b) they are saying it is far too big and should be all tax cuts. The only economists who think that will work are unreconstructed wingnuts. That Vandehei thinks Republicans will benefit if the plan fails, even though their own plans are galactically wrongheaded, shows how the villagers help push the country right.

So that’s why Obama has to go directly to the people. Walter Shapiro and Bill O’Reilly may find his answers dull and longwinded, but I would guess that the average citizen wants to hear their president explain what’s going on in a thoughtful and rational manner. Perhaps if these beltway types weren’t so boored with all this icky talk of numbers, they could better explain it when they go on television than Vandehei does above.

If they did their jobs, Obama wouldn’t have to do it for them.

Update: Media Matters has a good rundown of the media helping the Republicans spin their victory.
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Geithner Backs The Elites

by dday

I’m hardly a Nobel-Prize winning economist, and so it disturbs me that even they are unclear just was Tim Geithner is trying to peddle with the new version of the banking industry bailout.

An old joke from my younger days: What do you get when you cross a Godfather with a deconstructionist? Someone who makes you an offer you can’t understand.

I found myself remembering that joke when trying to make sense of the Geithner financial rescue plan. It’s really not clear what the plan means; there’s an interpretation that makes it not too bad, but it’s not clear if that’s the right interpretation.

He’s not the only one. Most are calling the plan vague and unclear, and the fact sheet doesn’t help. There’s a lot of use of Federal Reserve money to grease lending. There’s this public-private partnership to buy the crap assets, which assumes that anyone would want to purchase them at all, even if seeded by Treasury funny money. And there’s this “stress test” applied to banks to test their solvency, without any explanation of what happens if banks fail the test. Thus Geithner achieved the WORST of all possible worlds – a plan that looked close to a bailout of the banks and protection of the shareholders, without being clear enough for anyone to tell definitively. Thus, both public confidence and Wall Street confidence were not restored even a little, and the Dow responded accordingly.

Justin Fox’ take is perhaps the best:

There are two cures for financial panic: dramatic action and the passage of time. Geithner seems to be of the opinion that, with the panic substantially abated since last fall but a lot of expensive problems remaining, the moment for dramatic action has passed. He reportedly fought off efforts by others in the Administration to come up with something more crowd-pleasing today. A long slog it is, then.

What we do know is that Geithner is a smooth inside operator, and he shot down practically every one of the more reasonable ideas coming out of the Administration, ideas they’ll probably have to turn to after this money is potentially thrown away without an appreciable increase in lending. (UPDATE: Axelrod denies this, so it could be a Dems in disarray narrative) That Geithner is the chief policy adviser on this issue and people like David Axelrod are political figures can be spun as positive (no Rovian putting of politics above policy), except when you realize that all the policy advisers are moderate neoliberals pushing ideas that won’t match the problem.

In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.

In other words, he prevailed over those who had the interests of people, and so the interests of executives on Wall Street will be in the foreground. Taxpayers will take all the downside risk and get none of the upside profits.

I agree that nobody knows what the banks are worth, and a “stress test” to see how they’ll perform might be a good idea, but only if followed by wiping out those banks that have no chance of making it. But that’s not what’s happening. Geithner is keeping his friends whole while the rest of the nation starves. And there’s not much rhyme or reason to it, either.

I am so disgusted with this entire proceeding that I am going to dispatch it quickly.

Let’s start with the basics. The US banking system is insolvent. Got that? Insolvent. That does not mean every bank in the US is toast, in fact quite a few are probably just fine, and another large group is no doubt hurting and undercapitalized, but a couple of years of not shooting themselves in the foot again would enable therm (via earnings) to rebuild their equity bases sufficiently to proceed more or less as normal.

The history of major banking crises unambiguously shows that insolvent financial institutions need to be resolved. There are variations on the theme: the government can take them over and recapitalize them, clean them up and re-sell them, a la Sweden; you can wipe out equity investors and bondholders; you can try new twists, like various good bank proposals that have surfaced lately (making new entities out of the deposits and good assets and leaving the dreck with the existing bond and shareholders). While there would be many important details to be sorted out, this is not path breaking, except in the scale at which it needs to occur. And now, having had four actute phases of a credit crunch, the Fed and other central banks have plenty of liquidity facilites ready to deal with any initial overreaction. Rest assured, although radical measures would not be pleasant or easy, there are plenty of models and precedents.

But…here we have another scowling Treasury secretary, with a bit more hair than his predecessor, serving up the same fatally flawed approach as before: let’s just throw money at the banks and hope they get better. This is tantamount to using antibiotics to treat gangrene. You waste good medicine and the progression of the rot threatens to kill the patient.

He won’t break the backs of the elites, who still control this area of policy. And it’s deliberately sketchy, with no numbers nailed down, so that they can respond to criticism with an answer like “we are still reviewing the options.”

But there are no more options. The banks are insolvent and need to be nationalized, and probably will be, once we burn through hundreds of billions more because the Treasury Secretary is afraid of saying the word. When investment analysts are calling for a takeover, it’s really not a wild or out-of-the-mainstream policy. The only thing standing in the way are elites.

Terrible, terrible, and at this point, not even the stimulus is going to make up for this massive loss of capital. We’ll be back here talking about a new plan in six months.

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