Month: June 2009

Hastening The Demise

by digby

Michael Wolff has written an interesting analysis of the press corps’ relationship to the Obama White House. His first observation is that they have learned to manipulate the press without talking about it, which is a much more effective and sophisticated approach to governance than the constant process talk that characterized the Clinton years and much of the Bush administration as well. There is no need to tell the press how clever you are all the time. It really tends to hurt the cause. (This article comes on a day when somebody is gossiping in the NY Times about Larry Summers, so the idea that they have tamed the preening and the leaks may have been a simple facet of the honeymoon stage that’s now wearing off.)

Wolff then talks about Robert Gibbs’ almost dismissive attitude toward White House reporters, but reveals that he spends a lot of time fluffing the “dinosaurs” (aka the MSM.) He writes:

… they’re wooing The New York Times as assiduously as Pierre Salinger did on behalf of John Kennedy in 1962. And, perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times woos back—rewarding the president with a lavishness of coverage not seen since, well, J.F.K. in 1962. It’s an establishment lovefest.

It’s some perfect re-creation of a relationship between president and news media that has not been seen since the White House pressroom was a clubby place with reporters invited into the press secretary’s office for whiskey and cigars. It’s cozy. Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, who would have been, in previous administrations, the highest and most exclusive White House sources, have become almost casual quotes for the Times.

It is, curiously, a return to a time when the press was so much more dependent on the goodwill, and susceptible to the care and feeding, of the president. Indeed, The New York Times, and the rest of the established press, needs Barack Obama a lot more than he needs them.

Interesting, no?

This is good for the president, no doubt about it, but I’m not so sure it’s good for progressive politics. It’s certainly not good for journalism. Indeed, it’s just an escalation of the practices the Bush administration put in place and we all know where that led.

But Wolff’s most interesting observations are about the White House’s relationship with the new media:

Courting the dinosaurs, the Obama people feed the increasingly hungry new media the scraps—and manage, mostly, to have them thankful for them.

The Huffington Post has become an ideal back door for the most partisan stuff. It’s being used in a way that suddenly seems not all that dissimilar to how the Bush White House used Fox News. It’s as obvious and as unfiltered.

“The Times, it appears, gets soft, thoughtful, and complicated stuff. HuffPo gets the mean and simplistic,” says Michael Tomasky, The Guardian’s Washington-based American editor-at-large.

In other words, the Obama people have purchase on both established media and partisan media. If the Bush people ran a singular, blaring, drumbeating message, the Obama people are running a message across numerous spectra of purpose and subtlety and payoff. Indeed, while the Times seems reserved for the more weighty exegesis, and the HuffPo for its attacks, Politico, the politics-focused site that began during the last political campaign and is now trying to build an off-election-cycle business, has become the prime outlet for Obama White House gossip—the fuel of the day’s political kibitzing, the candy by which an odd intimacy is created with both the media and the political hard core. It’s politics as a short take—politics as an item. “They use it for the quick pops. They get the headline out there. They short-circuit analysis. They keep momentum going. All day, rat-a-tat-tat,” says one pressroom-watcher. “They essentially write it themselves.”

“That Whiteboard ain’t going to write itself,” Bill Burton reportedly observed about Politico’s Whiteboard, a moment-by-moment chronicle of White House activity.
[…]

Arguably, the celebrity press came into existence and has grown with such force as a reflection of America’s disenchantment with and lack of interest in politics and politicians. Civic life lost its connection to popular culture.

Until Obama. Now, in the hierarchy of celebrities, nobody ranks as high, or is as cover-worthy, as the president and his family.

[…]

Indeed, the efforts at control—negotiating all the nuances of celebrity coverage—by the White House press team are pretty much at the levels of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

‘Of course there are changes going on, but we’re message focused—we believe our message will find its audience,” says young Burton as the press clamors outside his small office.

It’s a cat-that’s-eaten-the-canary kind of thing.

They have been handed a most remarkable historical moment—in which they get to remake the media in their own image. They have the power and they are the subject. These people in this White House are in greater control of the media than any administration before them.

Oh joy.

I’m as happy as anyone that our “team” is in power, but it is not good for democracy to have a shallow, tabloid, easily manipulated, corporate press no matter who is the subject. The country needs responsible, independent media that is dedicated to giving the people the information they need to participate in their civic life. I don’t find this reassuring at all.

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Secret Indemnity

by digby

Greenwald thoroughly deconstructs the DOJ emails that were published in the NY Times this week-end and shows that they actually say the opposite of what the NY Times characterized them as saying. Nothing new there, I’m sorry to say.

But there is as aspect of this story that continues to astonish me and which seems to be fully accepted by just about everyone except the DFHs. Greenwald writes:

Most revealingly, Comey described exactly what was happening with this process: that the White House was demanding and pressuring the issuance of these memos, but that once the torture regime became public — as Comey warned that it would — White House officials would defend themselves by heaping the blame on Gonzales and other DOJ lawyers, deceitfully pretending that they were merely following in good faith DOJ advice about what was and was not legal.

Alluding to the extreme pressure that had previously been exerted by the White House on then-AG John Aschroft to legally authorize the illegal NSA spying program (the Ashcroft Hospital Drama), Comey lamented that even the minimal willingness of Ashcroft to defy White House pressure was completely lacking in the Gonzales-led DOJ and OLC — meaning the White House was able to get legal authorization from the DOJ for whatever it wanted, regardless of whether it was actually legal:

Is it really the case that political hacks in the Department of Justice can indemnify the executive branch with a secret memo? It seems that it is. The Obama administration has already agreed that if members of the administration and the rest of the government acted in “good faith” on the basis of those memos then they would not be liable for violating crimes.

This has struck me from the beginning as a massive loophole. It means that the rule of law depends on the integrity of obscure lawyers buried in the Justice Department requiring them to stand up and tell the most powerful people in the world that they cannot do the things they want to do. If that’s the case then the Ashcroft Hospital drama is the official process on which we depend.

It may be that that will happen on occasion, but we know for a fact that in the torture cases it didn’t. Even though James Comey and others raised some objections around the edges and warned that history was not going to look kindly upon the decisions, the memos were written and signed and the White House used them as a fig leaf for their torture regime.

In what sense is the government bound by the rule of law if all it takes to indemnify any of them is a secret memo? It what sense is it even a modern democracy?

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85% and Bipartisan

by dday

This was the weekend when the make-or-break battle for health care reform that may define the fortunes of the Democratic Party for the next several decades began. The President signaled a willingness to get more involved. Citizen town hall meetings were held all across the country. More engagement from Obama is expected, with the public and inside the Capitol.

However, from the policy side, the more significant action came from the Progressive Caucus on Friday, when they mapped out their principles for a public option, and the bare minimum such an option must include to get their votes. Most importantly, they demanded that such an option not be conditioned to a “trigger”, and not enacted unless insurers don’t meet certain requirements.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus calls for a robust public option that must:

Enact concurrently with other significant expansions of coverage and must not be conditioned on private industry actions.
Consist of one entity, operated by the federal government, which sets policies and bears the risk for paying medical claims to keep administrative costs low and provide a higher standard of care.
Be available to all individuals and employers across the nation without limitation
Allow patients to have access to their choice of doctors and other providers that meet defined participation standards, similar to the traditional Medicare model, promote the medical home model, and eliminate lifetime caps on benefits.
Have the ability to structure the provider rates to promote quality care, primary care, prevention, chronic care management, and good public health.
Utilize the existing infrastructure of successful public programs like Medicare in order to maintain transparency and consumer protections for administering processes including payment systems, claims and appeals.
Establish or negotiate rates with pharmaceutical companies, durable medical equipment providers, and other providers to achieve the lowest prices for consumers.
Receive a level of subsidy and support that is no less than that received by private plans.
Ensure premiums must be priced at the lowest levels possible, not tied to the rates of private insurance plans. (emphasis mine)

That boldfaced bit means that the public plan could potentially use bargained rates to lower costs. This is all very, very good. And unlike the more fractured Blue Dog Caucus, the Progressives seem united around this. Max Baucus now expects a public option in the Senate Finance Committee version, likely to be the most skewed to the right of any of the plans. Considering that critics of the public option are using its selling points to criticize it, I’m reasonably certain that public opinion will also line up along with a popular President and the bulk of the Democratic caucus for a public option.

Len Nichols, the director of health policy at the New America Foundation and the co-author of a proposal to level the field through governance and pricing regulations, said that state employee health plans are “proof of concept” that governments can maintain fair competition. “They do not unleash this impulse to take over the world,” Mr. Nichols said. “I don’t see this leviathan behavior.”

But critics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare’s, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.

Yeah, that would be HORRIBLE.

It’s brilliant politics to line up the argument as one between those who seek to lower premiums for Americans and those who think the current broken system is the best the world has ever known. I know who wins that politically. My fears, however, are over this fetish of bipartisanship that animates discussion of major issues from the Administration. I don’t understand this mentality:

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, recalled how Mr. Obama made a personal pledge of bipartisanship when he and Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the committee’s Democratic chairman, joined the president for a private lunch at the White House last month.

“I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a problem,’ ” Mr. Grassley said of the public plan, “and he said something along the lines of, ‘If I get 85 percent of what I want with a bipartisan vote, or 100 percent with 51 votes, all Democrat, I’d rather have it be bipartisan.’ ” […]

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is a longtime proponent of revamping health care, said Mr. Obama seemed to be wrestling with how far he could push Congress.

“The president is very much aware that to bring about enduring change — health care reform that lasts, gets implemented, wins the support of the American people and does not get repealed in a couple of years — you need bipartisan support,” said Mr. Wyden, who was among two dozen Senate Democrats who met with Mr. Obama about health care last week. “So he’s grappling with, how do you do that?”

I just don’t agree with that. Medicare was a bipartisan vote – and not even very bipartisan – in an ideologically jumbled and mixed-up time period. The ideological cleansing of the parties has basically been completed, and you’re simply not going to get more than a token couple Republicans to vote to reform health care in any meaningful way. The durability of the plan after passage relies on its effectiveness. If it drives down costs, if it increases access and quality of treatment, no politician in their right mind would vote it out of existence. And so Obama ought to craft the policy that affords the most chance at success. In 20 years, nobody will be able to name who voted for or against the plan. The cost curve bending or stiffening will not be dictated by the number of Republicans in support. The goal should be to get the best plan with the amount of votes needed for passage. Any extra really is gravy.

What’s more, does anyone really think Chuck Grassley, the mad Twitterer, is interested in being bipartisan?

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Let The Games Begin

by digby

As you all know, one of the purposes of the fiscal scold program is to break the generational compact on social security — basically to foment generational warfare. I had heard last week that as part of that plan, the Peterson Foundation had launched a promotional campaign with MTV to convince young people that the elderly were stealing them blind with social security. Evidently, they have devised a bunch of adorable games and clever PSAs designed to make young people in this tough, competitive environment angry at old people for bankrupting the country with their “entitlements.”

Here’s the latest in that effort, designed to get the young DC players involved:

Administration and Congressional Players “Get Fiscal” in

Budgetball Tournament on the National Mall on Sunday, June 14

Tournament Headlines Peterson Foundation First-Anniversary Activities

WASHINGTON, DC (June 8, 2009) – Fiscal policymakers representing the Treasury Department, other federal agencies, think tanks and Congress will face off against college students in the Budgetball Tournament on the National Mall this Sunday from 11:00am to 2:00pm ET. Budgetball is a team sport similar to Ultimate Frisbee and designed to build awareness, especially young people, about the nation’s growing financial challenges and the trade-offs involved in solving them. The tournament is being hosted by the National Academy of Public Administration, which helped design the game, and by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which supported the game’s development. National Journal Group is the media co-sponsor of the event.

“Budgetball is an innovative way to get Americans thinking strategically about the serious problem of our growing deficit and debt levels and how they can impact each and every one of us,” said Peterson Foundation President and CEO Dave Walker. “Participants come to understand how the decisions we make every day can help or hinder efforts to put our financial house in order.”

Eight teams will compete on the grounds of the Washington Monument this Sunday. Teams will represent the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch, and other VIPs in Washington. Among those who are expected to play: Treasury Department staff and budget experts including Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer and congressional budget committee staff. The winning teams from tournaments at Philander Smith College in Little Rock and the University of Miami also will compete for the championship. For more information on the tournament and participating teams, please visit:http://www.budgetball.org/washington/.

“Budgetball strips away the complicated jargon and confusing details of the federal budget by turning ‘fiscal’ into “physical,” said Jennifer Dorn, President and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration. “It is a catalyst for conversations about fiscal responsibility—both personal and national.”

Budgetball is a non-contact sport of quick passes, tough defense, and bold comebacks designed to increase awareness about the national debt and encourage discussion about America’s fiscal future. The game is punctuated by strategy sessions during which players can take immediate playing advantages that can be paid for by taking sacrifices later in the game, or they may take sacrifices early in order to pay for advantages in later play. The game was developed by the National Academy in collaboration with PETLAB at Parsons The New School for Design and professional game developer Area Code.

The Budgetball Tournament headlines a series of activities marking the Peterson Foundation’s first anniversary. Additional events include today’s publication of Foundation Chairman Pete Peterson memoir, “The Education of an American Dreamer,” by Hachette’s Twelve.

Since its July 2008 launch, the Foundation has continued to use creative means to focus attention on the nation’s growing fiscal challenges. Budgetball is one of two new games it has supported: “Debt Ski,” a viral video game developed in conjunction with MTV’s campus network mtvU, has been played nearly 350,000 times since its launch in late April. Other efforts have included the acquisition and promotion of “I.O.U.S.A.,” a nonpartisan documentary about America’s perilous fiscal status; online outreach that has engaged 160,000 supporters through e-mail; and a popular Twitter feed that tracks the national debt.

The only correct response to this nonsense is for AARP to launch a “We’re Moving In With You” campaign, designed to show young people what will happen if the Peterson Foundation succeeds in mucking around with social security.

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Most Frightening Blog Post, Ever

by tristero

After you read this, if you see this, you’ll actually calm down.

Geez, that’s scary.

h/t Ezra Klein via La Vida Locavore

Remarkable Creatures: A Remarkable Book

by tristero

I’m rather busy right now preparing for some recording sessions with Kitka. We’re going to record their contribution to The Origin next weekend for release as an EP, about which more in some later posts. But I did want to call your attention to a wonderful new book by Sean Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species which tells the story of the explorers, from Darwin to Neil Shubin (the discoverer of the amazing tiktaalik) and beyond, who scoured the earth for evidence of the evolution of life. The book is a page turner and will interest any science lover from 12 to 112. I think it’s a classic: It reminded me of the books I read when I was a kid that introduced me to the excitement of scientific discovery.

You couldn’t ask for a more enjoyable late spring/early summer read. By the way, if you want to some more detail about modern evolutionary theory, pick up Carroll’s earlier books, Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Making of the Fittest. They are both just as compelling reads as Remarkable Creatures but go into the actual science in more depth; I’d say all three are among the very finest, most informative, and most enjoyable lay-level books I’ve read on evolution.

Trojans And Horses

by digby

I’ve been hearing a lot of rather unfortunate push back from some liberals to the idea that anyone would be upset by Obama’s appointment of the anti-choice Alexia Kelley to head the Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. (I think Sarah Posner, whose views about the Religion Industrial Complex’s phony infiltration of the Democratic Party is the same as mine, is correct here.) The argument goes that these are good allies in the newfound “common ground” abortion reduction movement, to which all liberals are assumed to have happily signed on. I’m not particularly interested in abortion reduction myself — I’m in the woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions and own her own body camp although unwanted pregnancy reduction is certainly something I’ve been for for as long as I can remember. And that’s where toe problem comes in. Alexia Kelley and the Catholic group she represents wants to ban abortion and birth control.

Here’s Francis Kiesling in Salon:

That’s right — Kelley’s group of self-described progressive Catholics takes a position held by only a small minority, that the Catholic church is right to prohibit birth control. Were there no qualified religious experts who hold more mainstream views on family planning and abortion, views that are consistent with those of President Obama?

The HHS budget for family-planning services grants to faith-based and community groups is more than $20 million. Can pro-family-planning religious groups expect a fair deal from a director who believes that birth control, even for married couples, is immoral? Will programs that provide contraception to adolescents get funded? Obama’s Feb. 5 Executive Order establishing a new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships gave the office and its 11 satellites in federal agencies a policy role on the issues that are at the core of HHS’s sexual and reproductive health work: addressing teen pregnancy and reducing the need for abortion. How can an opponent of the single most effective way to do both — contraception — lead that effort in HHS enthusiastically and effectively?

Through Catholics in Alliance, Kelley has sought to narrow the interpretation of common ground on abortion to efforts to reduce the number of abortions by providing women who are already pregnant with economic support for continuing the pregnancy and making adoption easier. While pro-choice advocates have been in the forefront of efforts to increase funding for women and children and for pre- and postnatal care, few researchers believe that if pregnant women get the level of support common grounders are talking about, they will jump at the chance to have babies. If one is really serious about making it possible for women to avoid abortion, contraception is the single most important component of any program.

Kelley and other moderately progressive Catholic and evangelical groups owe their pull in the Democratic Party to the disappointment of 2004. They seized on the Democratic defeat in the 2004 elections as a means to push the party to the right on sex and reproduction. Democrats, stung by their near miss in Ohio, desperate to attract swing voters, eager to prove that they were “sensitive” to religion, took the bait.

(Read on to see how our vaunted “common ground” allies are relying on the social conservatives’ favorite backstop: junk science.)

Now, some of this is being characterized as internecine arguing between Religious Left groups jockeying for power, and that’s probably true considering the factional arguing going on in the liberal Catholic community over this. But the fact remains that the RIC did, in fact, move quickly after the 2004 election to solidify its influence in the Democratic Party and mainstream its extremely tepid, if not outright hostile, to abortion rights. It serves as a pincer to squeeze women from bioth te left and the right.

I wrote about this back in 2006 when this strategy first became obvious:

If the Democrats need to sacrifice something on the alter of “bipartisanshipandcentrism” it’s looking like they are prepared to negotiate away ever more pieces of the right to choose.They have decided that being pro-choice, despite being a majority position and one based on fundamental principles, is not “mainstream.” It’s now a bipartisan poker chip and NARAL is apparently willing to ante up.

If you want to see what’s really up behind the scenes, check out the 95-10 plan which came out of the Third Way and Democrats for Life camp and is being endorsed by good guys like EJ Dionne. (This evangelical outreach plays into it too.)

The problem is that tucked in the details of their compromise plan that features all kinds of neat stuff about providing contraception for poor women and better sex education, there are a bunch of pernicious anti-choice and anti-science elements like federal money for ultrasounds in clinics and (incorrect) information about fetal pain among other things. (And you certainly see nothing about expanding beyond the 14% of American counties that now provide abortion services.)

There’s no free lunch, right? Acces to birth control and sex ed comes at a price and that price is the idea that women can make this decision without first being forced to sit through a bunch of propaganda designed to make her feel ashamed and then being “offered” an ultrasound that shows the adorabletinybaby inside her tummy begging for its little life, after which they will also “offer” her some anesthetic for the poor little tyke before they go ahead and kill it. (If she’s still selfish and cruel enough to go through with it, that is.)

What we are seeing is a new pincer strategy, with a slow, relentless mainstreaming of the liberal pro-life(and cowardly politicians’) rhetoric which is intended to make abortion a source of shame and guilt so they can tut-tut about it in church — and the ongoing onslaught of the conservative anti-choice agenda which is intended to enshrine the fetus as a full human with rights that trump the irrelevant vessel it lives inside of. The woman with an unwanted pregnancy is getting squeezed by everybody now.

And I concluded then and now:

Abortion is a messy fight, nobody disputes that. I’m all for contraception and sex education and all the other things that these abortion “reducers” are pushing. But it appears to me as if that’s mainly a political ploy to appease the pro-choice crowd into believing that if they just give up a little here and there, the basic right will be preserved. It will not happen that way. With all this talk of “reducing,” and “rare” and fetal pain and snowflake babies and all the rest, they are helping the right prepare the ground for a full outlawing of abortion if Roe is overturned. They aren’t even trying to make the fundamental argument anymore.

I’m a good Democrat and I’m also someone who likes to think strategically. As I argued above, I think it’s a huge mistake for advocacy groups that represent fundamental rights to ever negotiate (leave that to the politicians.) But I could theoretically support any strategy that would ensure a woman’s right to choose. On the substance, however, this is no more subject to compromise to me than habeas corpus or torture or slavery. It defines what it is to be an autonomous human being. If every woman in this country doesn’t own her own body then she is not free.

I know that principles are “out” these days and pragmatism is all the rage. And when it comes to horse trading on government projects that’s just the way it’s done. But for some time it’s been clear to me that this “common ground” strategy signaled that the Democratic Party had decided that abortion rights are a second tier issue, subject to negotiation and compromise for political purposes, and that just isn’t acceptable. Appointing someone who is anti-choice and anti-birth control to head an office that will dispense millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS and family planning reinforces that view. The Religious Industrial Complex is a Trojan horse and it’s inside the gates.

h/t to KG

Newsmakers 1972

by dday

Fox News Sunday opened today with the question “Are we saving the economy or heading toward socialism,” (By the way, we’re not) featuring such pearls as Richard Shelby blaming the Obama Administration for legislation passed in the fall of 2008, during, um, the Bush Administration. But I was more interested in one member of the panel, Fred Malek, listed as the head of “Thayer Capital Partners.” I knew I’d heard that name before, and David Corn jogged my memory.

It’s one of the more gothic stories about Nixon related in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days. As they tell it, late in 1971–the same year, coincidentally, that the Washington Senators moved to Texas and changed their name to the Rangers–Nixon summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The “cabal,” Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau’s methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

In 1988, when George Bush pere installed Malek as deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee, Woodward dusted off his notes and, with the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, further revealed that two months after Malek filed a memo on the matter–he’d counted 13 Jews, though his methodology was shaky–a couple of them were demoted. (Malek denied any role and said Nixon’s notions of a “Jewish cabal” were “ridiculous” and “nonsense.”) The 1988 story raised a predictable ruckus, and Malek beat a hasty retreat from the RNC. As exiles go, Malek’s was pretty painless. He still got to run the 1988 Republican Convention (and in 1992 he would be Bush pere’s campaign manager). He joined George W. Bush’s syndicate to purchase the Rangers, he went on the board of the American-Israel Friendship Society, he took over Northwest Airlines, and he started an investment firm, Thayer Capital Partners.

“Nixon’s Jew counter” for some reason never came up on Malek’s chyron today.

Malek’s just one of those upwards-falling Republicans in Washington. Actually I found the Corn piece because he was discussing Malek’s hiring as finance co-chair for the McCain campaign. The DC establishment finds keeping one of these guys going through the revolving doors of power perfectly normal.

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Make It Stop

by digby

I forced myself to listen to a replay of Rush Limbaugh from last week (don’t ask) and I feel sick. This always helps:

Airbrushing The Southern Strategy

by digby

The latest hissy fit over Sotomayor is even stupider than others. Evidently, she’s considered to be a radical leftist freak for writing back in 1981 that “capital punishment is associated with evident racism in our society.” And what’s most incredible about this is that the argument seems to revolve around the fact that she said there was racism in our society as much as the fact that she said capital punishment was associated with it. Right wing political correctness now not only requires that we deny that tracism exists today, but that we must deny it ever existed (except to the extent that white males are being discriminated against as a result of affirmative action.)

In 1981, racial issues were boiling. The entire Reagan campaign was a reaction to (as Obama unfortunately put it) “the excesses” of the 1960s and 70s, a large part of which was letting the “welfare queens” get all out of hand. Here’s Paul Krugman writing a couple of years ago about the 1980 Reagan campaign and the Republican Southern Strategy:

The G.O.P.’s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. “Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.And Ronald Reagan was among the “some” who tried to benefit from racial polarization.True, he never used explicit racial rhetoric. Neither did Richard Nixon. As Thomas and Mary Edsall put it in their classic 1991 book, “Chain Reaction: The impact of race, rights and taxes on American politics,” “Reagan paralleled Nixon’s success in constructing a politics and a strategy of governing that attacked policies targeted toward blacks and other minorities without reference to race — a conservative politics that had the effect of polarizing the electorate along racial lines.”Thus, Reagan repeatedly told the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. He never mentioned the woman’s race, but he didn’t have to.There are many other examples of Reagan’s tacit race-baiting in the historical record. My colleague Bob Herbert described some of these examples in a recent column. Here’s one he didn’t mention: During the 1976 campaign Reagan often talked about how upset workers must be to see an able-bodied man using food stamps at the grocery store. In the South — but not in the North — the food-stamp user became a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks.Now, about the Philadelphia story: in December 1979 the Republican national committeeman from Mississippi wrote a letter urging that the party’s nominee speak at the Neshoba Country Fair, just outside the town where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. It would, he wrote, help win over “George Wallace inclined voters.” Sure enough, Reagan appeared, and declared his support for states’ rights — which everyone took to be a coded declaration of support for segregationist sentiments.

Many of those who were termed Reagan Democrats were simply racists who finally abandoned the Democratic Party completely over racial issues. (And it wasn’t just in the south.)

The idea that Sotomayor was saying something out of turn by noting in 1981 that racism existed is part of the latest attempt by the Republicans to airbrush their own ugly past now that it’s out of fashion.

And as for the substance of her critique, it’s simply a fact that our capital punishment system is racist:

Questions of whether or not the death penalty was applied fairly along racial lines surfaced in McCleskey v. Kemp. McCleskey argued that there was racial discrimination in the application of Georgia’s death penalty. As evidence for this claim, McCleskey presented the results of an extensive statistical study by Professor David Baldus of the University of Iowa Law School and his colleagues. Baldus’ study collected information about all the capital defendants in Georgia—whether or not they were sentenced to death. This information allowed the researchers to control for hundreds of variables about the offender, victim and crime—thereby permitting a statistical comparison of cases in order to see what factors influenced whether a person was sentenced to death. Professor Baldus found, among other things, that:

• Fewer than 40% of Georgia homicide cases involve white victims, but in 87% of the cases in which a death sentence is imposed the victim is white. White-victim cases are roughly eleven times more likely than black-victim cases to result in a sentence of death.
• When the race of the defendant is added to the analysis, the following pattern appears: 22% of black defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 8% of white defendants who kill white victims are sentenced to death; 1% of black defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death; and 3% of white defendants who kill black victims are sentenced to death. (Only 64 of the approximately 2500 homicide cases studied involved killings of blacks by whites, so the 3% figure in this category represents a total of two death sentences over a six-year period. Thus, the reason why a bias against black defendants is not even more apparent is that most black defendants have killed black victims; almost no cases are found of white defendants who have killed black victims; and virtually no defendant convicted of killing a black victim gets the death penalty.)
• No factor other than race explains these racial patterns. The multiple-regression analysis with the greatest explanatory power shows that after controlling for non-racial factors, murderers of white victims receive a death sentence 4.3 times more frequently than murderers of black victims. The race of the victim proves to be as good a predictor of a capital sentence as the aggravating circumstances spelled out in the Georgia statute, such as whether the defendant has a prior murder conviction or was the primary actor in the present murder.
• Only 5% of Georgia killings result in a death sentence; yet, when more than 230 non-racial variables are controlled for, the death-sentencing rate is 6% higher in white-victim cases than in black-victim cases. A murderer therefore incurs less risk of death by committing the murder in the first place than by selecting a white victim instead of a black one.
• The effects of race are not uniform across the spectrum of homicide cases. In the least aggravated cases, almost no defendants are sentenced to death; in the most aggravated cases, a high percentage of defendants are sentenced to death regardless of their race or their victim’s; it is in the mid-range of cases which, as it happens, includes cases like McCleskey’s that race has its greatest influence. In these mid-range cases, death sentences are imposed on 34% of the killers of white victims and 14% of the killers of black victims. In other words, twenty out of every thirty-four defendants sentenced to die for killing a white victim would not have received a death sentence if their victims had been black.

The Supreme Court held, however, that a death-sentenced defendant cannot challenge his sentence as a violation of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the laws” by showing that it is consistent with a system-wide pattern of racial disparity in capital sentencing. To make out an equal-protection violation, a defendant is required to prove that some specific actor or actors in his or her individual case–the prosecutor or the judge or the jurors, for example, intentionally discriminated against the defendant on the ground of race in making a decision that resulted in the death sentence.

Ways in Which Race Can Impact Capital Sentencing

Race of the Victim

Nationally, nearly 80% of murder victims in cases resulting in an execution have been white, even though nationally only 50% of murder victims generally are white. A 1990 examination of death penalty sentencing conducted by the United States General Accounting Office noted that, “In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks.” Individual state studies have found similar disparities. In fact, race of victim disparities have been found in most death penalty states.

Race of the Defendant

Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 45% white, 42% black, and 10% Latino/ Latina. Of states with more than 10 people on death row, Texas (70%) and Pennsylvania (69%) have the largest percentage of minorities on death row. Year 2000 census data revealed that the racial composition of the United States was 75.1% white, 12.3% black and 12.5% Latino/Latina. While these statistics might suggest that minorities are overrepresented on death row, the same statistical studies that have found evidence of race of victim effects in capital sentencing have not conclusively found evidence of similar race of defendant effects. In fact, while some studies show that the race of the defendant is correlated with death sentences, no researcher has made definitive findings that the death sentence is being imposed on defendants on account of their race, per se, independently of other variables (such as type of crime) which are correlated with defendants’ race.

Race of the Jurors

In capital cases, one juror can represent the difference between life and death. A belief that members of one race, gender, or religion might generally be less inclined to impose a death sentence can lead the prosecutor to allow as few of such jurors as possible. For example, a Dallas Morning News review of trials in that jurisdiction found systematic exclusion of blacks from juries. In a two-year study of over 100 felony cases in Dallas County, the prosecutors dismissed blacks from jury service twice as often as whites. Even when the newspaper compared similar jurors who had expressed opinions about the criminal justice system (a reason that prosecutors had given for the elimination of jurors, claiming that race was not a factor), black jurors were excused at a much higher rate than whites. Of jurors who said that either they or someone close to them had had a bad experience with the police or the courts, prosecutors struck 100% of the blacks, but only 39% of the whites.

I think she was being very cautious and conservative by only saying that capital punishment is “associated with evident racism.” Our use of capital punishment is flat out racist, although I guess in this new world of right wing political correctness we can’t point that out for fear of offending the racists. That would be a sign of our intemperate natures (or that we are having a bout of PMS.)

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