Month: March 2009

Keeping Up The Pressure

by digby

The deficit is a graver threat than a rogue nuclear bomb? That’s what the American people have been led to believe by wealthy con artists like Pete Peterson, who has now commissioned a poll (sadly, by a Democratic pollster) to validate his propaganda.

Peterson Foundation to Release National Survey Results Gauging

Americans’ Concerns about the Economy, Deficit and Debt

Strong Support for Bipartisan Task Force to Address U.S. Fiscal Challenges, Other Findings to Be Shared on Media Conference Call

NEW YORK (March 3, 2009) – Peter G. Peterson Foundation CEO and former US Comptroller General David M. Walker invites the media to join a conference call examining the results of the most comprehensive study of public attitudes toward America’s fiscal policies since the economic downturn.

Conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies, the survey shows that:

· Voters rank the need to address our budget challenges as a top priority for the Obama Administration, second only to the preeminent need to get the economy back on track and get Americans back to work.

· Americans see the threat to our future posed by our growing deficit and debt as more grave and significant than global warming, declines in education and manufacturing, and the prospect of a rogue nation developing a nuclear weapon.

· There is broad support for a bipartisan, beyond-the-Beltway approach to tackling these challenges in the form of a commission that would engage the public and make a series of recommendations on which Congress would be required to vote.

I’m not surprised. Wealthy oligarchs like Ross Perot and Pete Peterson have been haranguing the public for decades about the deficit. And yet, for some reason, when George W. Bush campaigned with the slogan “it’s your money” and vowed to give back the surplus (which a Democratic administration had been forced to create) to wealthy individuals, they were nowhere to be found. In fact, Alan Greenspan said that paying down the debt would be a danger to the economy!

The big story here is this desire to create a “beyond-the-beltway” commission, which is undemocratic and unnecessary. Despite their assertions that the American people are more afraid of deficits than terrorism and abject poverty, they know that if citizens knew what these people wanted to do they would object. This “plan” which huckleberry and Hoyer just love, must be rejected. It’s a very, very bad idea.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who lobbied for privatization of social security should be forced to march up and down Wall Street naked under sandwich boards that say “Don’t Listen To Me, I’ve Always Been Wrong About Everything.” And Pete Peterson should be at the head of the line.

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Poker

by digby

This is good:

President Obama’s budget director said the White House would consider using a Senate procedural tactic so that only 50 votes would be rquired to pass major healthcare and energy reforms.

Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the administration would prefer not to use the budget reconciliation process to push through its package. But he added: “We have to keep everything on the table. We want to get these…. important things done this year.” Orszag called healthcare in particular “the key to our fiscal future.”

Orszag made the comments on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Because they can not be filibustered, budget reconciliations only require 50 votes to pass the Senate. Democrats hold strong majorities in Congress, but still come up short of the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to end debate, which makes it easier for Republicans to block legislation. House rules in comparison make it harder for the minority party to stop bills.

Still, using budget reconciliation to pass policy proposals is controversial, even among some Democrats who believe doing so strains Senate rules and tradition.

The Obama blueprint calls for major changes in both energy and healthcare policies that is likely to engender significant opposition from Republicans and business lobbies. The reforms are expect to win widespread support from Democrats and more left-leaning constituencies.

It appears that the administration learned its lesson on the stimulus and won’t be going into the negotiations under the assumption that the other side wants comity and so will act as partners. They are prepared to drive a real bargain this time. I’m much relieved. They are far more likely to get something that actually works, which is the key to everything including the party’s political future, if they don’t assume the other side will act in good faith. They are far better off assuming it’s going to be a battle and going into it with no illusions. Who knows, a few Republicans might even see the light.

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Boulder Democrats

by digby

I’ve been hearing rumblings since the election that Democrats in congress were getting wobbly on the Employee Free Choice Act and that the administration was inclined to push it down the agenda. Presumably this is because the wingnuts are planning to stage a mass case of the maidenly vapors the minute they bring it. It’s one of those bizarre issues that animates the cretins, like tort reform, purely because of the slogan. I don’t think they have any idea what it means. In fact, I’m not sure they even know “they want to take away the secret ballot” has something to do with unions. But regardless, they’ve ben conditioned to completely lose their minds when the issue comes up, and I suspect that the Dems are getting gun shy.

I also have to wonder if the party poohbahs aren’t looking for some people who have not made any promises to help them table this one. Maybe that’s why this happened, from Todd Beeton at MYDD:

When asked, Sen. Michael Bennet either “doesn’t know” if he supports The Employee Free Choice Act or “hasn’t decided” yet. Truly amazing. Bennet, who, you’ll recall, was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Bill Ritter (D-CO) to replace Sen. Salazar, hasn’t had to be accountable to the people of Colorado so I guess doesn’t see any reason to ruffle any feathers by actually taking a stand on one of the most important pieces of legislation he’s likely to vote on in the coming year.

Go here to take action.

The Republicans are well aware that stopping unionization is an imperative. They are the party which represents the owners of America above all others. (So are Democrats, mind you, just to a lesser degree because their coalition is much broader, which may also be why they are suddenly having a hard time putting together enough votes for this legislation now that it could actually be signed.) They are readying a full court freak-out — if you think Rush’s caterwauling about socialism and Stalin is bad now, just wait.

Todd continues:

The thing is, this really shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. This is, as Darcy says, about the basic rights of workers to organize. EFCA is a bill that passed the House in 2005 and 2007 on a bi-partisan basis. While it came up short of a filibuster-proof super majority in the Senate in 2007, cloture garnered the votes of every single Democrat in the Senate (including Landrieu, Lincoln, Pryor and, yes, Salazar) plus both Independents and even Arlen Specter. Add to that the fact that during his run for the US Senate last year, freshman Colorado Sen. Mark Udall had been a co-sponsor of EFCA in the House, promised to support it as a Senator, and won by 11% despite the fact that EFCA foes ran ads targeting Udall as someone who would “take the secret ballot away.” Yet even knowing all of this, Bennet can’t quite bring himself to take a stand on EFCA and now even Udall is wavering.

The Republicans are always going to stage a hissy fit on this, no matter what, so there’s no point in trying to find “the right time.” They have signaled that they have no intention of cooperating on any legislation that doesn’t only benefit rich people it’s useless trying to bargain either. In for a penny and all that rot. Might as well do it while the doing is possible.

You can sign a petition here, asking the Colorado delegation to stop being foolish and support the legislation.
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Separated At Birth?

by digby

Oh my goodness. This Rush thing is really causing some dissonance in the GOP. I’ve been watching them dance on the head of a pin all day trying not to offend him while not endorsing his comments. It’s almost painful.

But he is, as some of us have been pointing for years, the true leader of the Republican Party. And we were told by all the serious people that he was a harmless, mainstream entertainer and that we should all just lighten up — even as luminaries of the Republican party and the luminaries of the conservative movement bowed and scraped like abused streetwalkers at the feet of their violent pimp. They defended his comments about Abu Ghraib, fergawdsake. He can literally do no wrong.

Sure enough, like clockwork, the head of the RNC just went crawling on his belly and begged for forgiveness for suggesting otherwise:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”

Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it’s ugly.”

Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman’s race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. “It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not.”

That’s just sad.

BTW: Am I the only one to see a bizarre and freakish resemblance between these two pimps?

*I thought of this when I read Tom Watson’s amusing take on Rush’s speech.

** In case you don’t have HBO, the other pimp is this guy.

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Unitary Executive Theory Makes A Comeback

by dday

Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald say basically all that needs to be said about the Obama Administration’s shameful efforts to block a ruling on warrantless wiretapping in the Al Haramain case. It’s not only that this White House is running interference for the last White House, it’s the basic copying of the same dangerous theories of unitary executive power that should have everyone worried.

The brief filed by Obama on Friday afternoon (.pdf) has to be read to believed. It is literally arguing that no court has the power to order that classified documents be used in a judicial proceeding; instead, it is the President — and the President alone — who possesses that decision-making power under Article II, and no court order is binding on the President to the extent it purports to direct that such information be made available for use in a judicial proceeding. From page 5 of the Obama Brief, filed after its loss on Friday:

“In addition, the relevant Executive Branch official must determine that plaintiffs’ counsel have a “need to know” the information. In this case, the relevant official, the Director of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), has determined that counsel do not have a need to know. This decision is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review. Moreover, the Court does not have independent power, either under its supervisory authority, or under authority analogous to that granted by the Classified Information Procedures Act (“CIPA”), 18 U.S.C. App. 3, to order the
Government to grant counsel access to classified information when the Executive Branch has denied them such access.”

That’s about as clear as it gets. There is only one branch with the power to decide if these documents can be used in this Article III court proceeding: The Executive. What the President decides is final. His decision is unreviewable. It’s beyond the reach of the law. No court has the authority to second-guess it or to direct the President to comply with a disclosure order. That’s the mentality — and even the language — drawn directly from the earliest Yoo Memorandum that created the theoretical foundation for what would be the omnipotent presidency.

Just for a little background on the Al Haramain case – the Islamic charity, in an accidental court filing from the Bush Justice Department, discovered they had been spied upon illegally by the government, without a warrant. Their certainty is due to the transcript of the eavesdropped conversation that the government gave them. Since that time, both the Obama and Bush Administrations have ordered that the document, and therefore the evidence for illegal conduct, is classified and cannot be admitted into court. Despite several rulings to the contrary, this President – like the one before him – is claiming that only the executive can decide what may be done with classified information, with the potential being that any President can just classify whatever compromising information exists about his or her activities and shield it from the view of the Congress, the courts, and the people. It is an expansive and un-American view of the Constitution, used in this case to service a massive cover-up.

And this effort to use the state secrets privilege to this degree has been thoroughly rejected in this case. But the government continues to appeal. Aside from admitting that Bush’s DoJ lied to the presiding judge in an earlier filing, there is nothing redeemable about Obama’s conduct.

There is simply so much that Obama’s team has had to overturn from the Bush regime, they’re probably getting heartburn from all of the decisions. Yet while, in isolated respects, they’ve done a decent job, it cannot excuse this conduct. I don’t know whether it’s foreknowledge of the extent of the lawbreaking, or pressure from the telecoms to save their immunity (which could absolutely be threatened by this ruling, as there’s a pending case with the same judge, Vaughn Walker) or what, but Washington is united in really, really not wanting the truth on warrantless wiretapping to come to light. It is despicable that this has become so vital that Obama, a constitutional law professor, would adopt the same unitary executive theory than he actually swore an oath to reject.

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Why Are We Listening To Them part XII

by digby

The Democratic corporatists seem to have regrouped and are going to make a stand with the Santelli teabaggers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but if you ever wondered if they were sincere in their devotion to the owners of America, you no longer have to. These people have every opportunity right now to tell their wealthy masters that they just can’t help them, that the political environment is too tough, that they have to try to save this economy. But they aren’t going to do that.

Indeed, the New Dems and the Blue Dogs are gearing up to fight the administration and the majority in the caucus.

Jane Hamsher writes:

On Saturday I wrote a post about the efforts of former Wall Street investment banker Ellen Tauscher to gut legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to write down mortgages, something that would stop 20% of foreclosures at no cost to the taxpayers. But banks and banking lobbyists are holding out hope that they can unload their bad loans on taxpayers, and are working through people like Tauscher to oppose the legislation so they never have to take responsibility for their mistakes.

[…]

We’re asking you to do two things: Write a letter to the editor of your local papers (just enter your zip code) saying you expect your Member of Congress to represent you, not the banks, and you’ll be watching to see if they oppose Tauscher and her bank lobbyist cronies. Sign a petition to Nancy Pelosi telling her not to “buckle” to pressure from bank lobbyists working through greedy corporatist Members of Congress, and to act swiftly to give judges the authority they need to write down mortgages. The banks must take responsibility for their own bad judgment; taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to pick up the tab. These same people killed efforts in 2007 to allow bankruptcy judges to write down mortgages at that time, which could have helped us from ever getting to this place. It’s time they stop pretending that they care about their constituents when they’re only being tools of the banking lobby.

Come on, this is ridiculous. Look at the papers. Look at the DOW fergawdsake — it is still crashing like a fucking avalanche. It was down 300 points. We don’t have time for this nonsense.
There is no protecting banks at this point. The broader economy is under severe stress and they have to do everything they can to relieve this problem for average Americans, many of whom are now caught in this vortex after having behaved prudently.As Atrios noted today:

Over the weekend Rep. Brad Miller discussed the cramdown legislation over at Blue NC. A key point is that people with vacation homes and investment properties, including flippers, can already go to bankruptcy court and have their loan terms modified. It’s just people with primary residences who can’t.

Considering this, we have to do what we can on the margins just to keep the wolf from the door for average people.:

The sickening feeling of drift — the sense that policymakers are refusing to face hard facts, and are dithering while the world economy burns — just keeps getting stronger.

He’s talking about Geithner and the boys, but Tauscher and her lobbyist cronies arealso living in a world which no longer exists. It’s triage now. There is no reason why people who are in danger of losing everything shouldn’t be able to renegotiate their mortgages. Many of them won’t be renegotiated — it all depends on individual circumstances, which is why you have a judge making the decision. But those that can should have the opportunity to do so under the bankruptcy laws. It’s always made good sense and never more so than now. The banks shouldn’t be able to hold citizens hostage so they can wait for a taxpayer bailout to write off loans that can be renegotiated and paid back in an environment like this.

Update: Check out Roubini. Oy.Update II: Oh, and as a reminder, Atrios has been pointing out for what seems like years that Big Shitpile isn’t just subprime mortgages:

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Exorcising The Phantom Filibuster

by tristero

Makes sense to me:

The phantom filibuster could be done away with overnight by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid. All he needs to do is call the minority’s bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin.

Some argue that this procedure would mire the Senate in one filibuster after another. But avoiding delay by not bringing measures to the floor makes no sense. For fear of not getting much done, almost nothing is done at all. And what does get done is so compromised and toothless to make it filibuster-proof that it fails to solve problems.

Better to risk a filibuster — an event that, because of the great effort involved, would actually be rare — than to save time and accomplish little or nothing.

It also happens to make a great deal of political sense for the Democrats to force the Republicans to take the Senate floor and show voters that they oppose Mr. Obama’s initiatives. If the Republicans want to publicly block a popular president who is trying to resolve major problems, let them do it. And if the Republicans feel that the basic principles they believe in are worth standing up for, let them exercise their minority rights with an actual filibuster.

It is up to Mr. Reid. He can do away with the supermajority requirement for virtually all significant measures and return majority rule to the Senate.

But he goes on:

This is not to say that the Democrats should ride roughshod over the Republicans. Republicans should be included at all stages of the legislative process.

Bullshit. :

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the only member of the senate to earn a perfect rating from the American Conservative Union, called President Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism” on Friday in describing his prime time speech earlier this week.

Until this kind of dangerously stupid nonsense stops, I think riding roughshod over Republicans sounds like a damn good idea.

Small Earthquakes

by digby

I looked at the front page of the paper this morning and wondered for a moment if I was looking at one of those historical documents about which scholars would wonder if those who read it in real time had a clue about the scale of what was happening:

There’s a run on the banks in Ukraine, the world’s biggest insurer suffered the highest quarterly losses in corporate history, Europe is starting to come apart — with Germany being the lead player. Major change seems to be rumbling in a bunch of different ways right now — with echoes of the past overlaid with things we’ve never seen before. Maybe it’s just a blip. But maybe not.

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Embedded Reporters In The Class War

by dday

In Gary Kamiya’s article on the death of newspapers that I cited the other day, he lamented that the “ideal of journalistic objectivity and fairness” would be a casualty of the decline of print journalism and news reporting.

I don’t know if I agree with that. First of all, the “ideal of objectivity” is a relatively recent phenomenon – newspapers were house organs for party politics, and then perhaps more ideologically rigid and powerful, right up through the Hearst era. And to this day, I’m not sure if this ideal is anything more than a facile hope than an actual practice. Human beings have feelings and beliefs and those show up in the context of what they write. They are shaped by their perspectives. And on the subject of economics, their perspective is from the perch of the upper class, particularly those media celebrities who pretend they are men and women of the people, but who aren’t good enough actors to hide that they don’t want to see their taxes go up under the Obama budget.

Barack Obama has proposed a budget that, among other things, would reduce taxes on over 90 percent of the population and increase taxes on around 2 percent of the population. Flipping through the Sunday talk shows, it’s striking to see how uniformly wealthy media celebrities think it makes sense to characterize this is a “tax increase” or “raising taxes” and to leap immediately to a discussion of what the impact of these “higher taxes” will be. I think that the majority of people whose taxes are set to go down might be more interested in learning about the impact of lower taxes.

We’ve seen this all weekend, both on the air and in print. The phrase “class warfare” is thrown around liberally. The perspective of the 2 percent who would see their taxes rise is given far more exposure than the perspective of the 90 percent who would see those taxes fall. Even while the LA Times article strives for balance and does give room to the economic argument that reducing inequality often leads to prosperity, the tone of the article is that class warfare is being waged and the burden of proof is on Obama to explain why the wealthy have to get gouged.

This is why I don’t really believe the argument that Rick Santelli’s rant was a pre-planned scam (though there’s certainly a lot of evidence and I wouldn’t be surprised) – or rather, the argument that it HAD to be, that there is no other explanation. Santelli and his ilk have a particular perspective – they are media stars with a stake in the outcome. I don’t see anyone saying that Chip Reid and his pals’ questioning of Robert Gibbs the other day was pre-planned. It’s just the way they think. They want to keep their money.

Reid: On jobs, which is the big complaint up on Capitol Hill right now from Republicans, that this plan is a job-killer. I mean, the $787 billion plan was all about jobs, more than anything else. And now you have a plan in place that — how can you possibly tax people making people over $250,000 something like $667 billion over the next ten years and not have a downward effect on jobs?

Gibbs: Well, Chip, how did it work in 1994 and 1995 and 1996 and 1997?

Reid: Well, I guess the argument would be, imagine if they didn’t have those taxes… how much better it would have been.

Gibbs: Well, isn’t it interesting that there’s always some little slip? … There isn’t a member of Congress, if they were to file a single-taxpayer form, who makes above $200,000 a year.

Jake Tapper: There are a lot of millionaires up there.

Gibbs: Well, that’s true, but not on their income. I mean, I think it’s interesting as people listen to those complaining about some aspects of the budget, I think it’s just interesting to note. I think the President was pretty clear on Tuesday. We are talking about people who earn in excess of a quarter of a million dollars a year.

Reid: And a huge percentage of those people are small business owners.

Gibbs: Some of them are, sure. Some of them are big business owners. Some of them are home run hitters in Major League Baseball. Some of them run kickoffs back for a living. Some of them are the President of the United States.

Q (off mike): — create jobs?

Gibbs: Certainly some of them, that’s what their job is. But I would reject this overall premise that when we’re asking for tax fairness from the American people, that this is going to kill jobs. I guess if I follow the logic of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, how do you explain last month’s unemployment figures? (Pause.) Under current tax rates? 550,000 jobs.

Reid: (Long pause) It’s a unique moment.

Gibbs: (Laughs heartily) Apparently, it always is…. The president ran specifically on the promises that are contained in what he believes is a blueprint and a vision for our future. And that’s what the the American people, that’s the result they rendered in November […]

Question: Critics of the budget blueprint that has been put out today charge that this is a form of wealth redistribution. Even the New York Times in its front page story, fourth paragraph, talks about the idea of wealth redistribution. How do you respond to that?

Gibbs: The same way I did to the other questions: that the president campaigned on explicitly promising that he would cut taxes for 95% of working Americans if he was elected president. We did that in the reinvestment and recovery plan, and those tax cuts are also contained within this budget. The president also said that for families that make more than a quarter of a million dollars, $250,000, are likely to see their tax rates revert back to the way they were for most of the 90s. That’s also in this budget. The President believes we have a plan that will lead to long term economic growth, sustained long term economic growth, while making those important investments. That’s what this budget blueprint does, that’s what he campaigned on, instituting fairness — more fairness in our system, and that’s what he’s done.

As Sean Quinn noted one reporter saying after the briefing, “Did you notice all the questions about taxes came from reporters making over $250,000 a year, especially the TV guys?”

Jamison Foser tackled this today, especially the way in which the media acted like this was a brand new idea and not a central part of the President’s campaign platform:

What sparked this sudden concern about “class warfare”? President Obama indicated that in order to fund things like health care, the very wealthiest Americans (individuals who make more than $200,000 and families making more than $250,000) might have to pay slightly more in taxes, via the expiration of President Bush’s tax cuts for those earners. Under this plan, the wealthiest Americans (again, those making more than $200,000) would be subject to the same income tax rate they paid in the 1990s — when, it should be remembered, the rich got richer and the economy did quite well.

If this plan — raising taxes slightly on people who make more than $200,000 a year in order to pay for things like health care for people who don’t — sounds familiar, it’s because Obama campaigned on it for roughly two years. Conservatives, amplified by the news media, ridiculed it with labels like “socialism” and “class warfare” and used all kinds of scary rhetoric. And the American people voted for it anyway.

So it’s a bit odd to see all this media angst over the idea that Barack Obama’s plans to do something he said he would do — and something the American public supported.

The class war has always been one-sided – there are those with enough money and power to have a voice in the debate, and those who don’t. And the media’s position in this debate is squarely on the side of the rich, because it’s not only the sole perspective they hear, it’s the sole perspective they have.

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Modern Conservatives Are Wrong About Everything

by tristero

Paul Krugman notes there is an “almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today.”

“Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another. All three nations are in deep crisis now.”

To repeat:

Modern conservatives are wrong about everything.