Month: June 2009

Going To Hell In A Local Rather Than An Express Handbasket

by dday

The unemployment figures for may show a loss of 345,000 jobs and a 9.4% unemployment rate. You can plot this on a graph and make it look preferable to the previous six months of extreme losses, and it is. But Felix Salmon notes:

Remember the stress tests? The baseline scenario had unemployment in 2009 at 8.4%, rising to 8.9% under the more adverse scenario. Well, we’re only up to May, and already it’s at 9.4%.

To be clear, the adverse scenario in the stress test was supposed to be the worst things could possibly get. If we’ve blown past that, the banks will face more losses and write-downs than suggested by the adverse scenario. More people out of work means more foreclosures, less consumer spending, higher deficits, etc. This is but one of the ways where the banksters are making themselves out to be healthier than they are.

The revival may be short-lived. Analysts who have examined the quarterly profits and government tests say that accounting rule changes and rosy assumptions are making the institutions look healthier than they are.

The government probably wants to win time for the banks, keeping them alive as they struggle to earn their way out of the mess, says economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University in New York. The danger is that weak banks will remain reluctant to lend, hobbling President Barack Obama’s efforts to pull the economy out of recession.

Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits were totally bogus,” says Weiss, whose 38-year-old firm rates financial companies. “The new accounting rules, the stress tests: They’re all part of a major effort to put lipstick on a pig.”

Remember, the banks haggled over the stress tests, and basically won that argument. They lobbied for mark-to-fantasy accounting rules, and got them. That’s because they still own the place.

The defeat of the bankruptcy proposal is a testament to the enduring influence of banks, even as the industry struggles financially and suffers from its role in the economic crisis.

It also shows that in the coming legislative battles that will shape the future of the economy, the financial industry — through a powerful and well-financed lobbying force — may have a far stronger hand to play than might seem evident.

Documents and interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists and administration officials show that the banks defeated the bankruptcy change — the industry picturesquely calls it the “cramdown” provision — by claiming that it would push up interest rates and slow the housing market’s recovery, even though academic studies have countered such claims.

The industry also steadfastly refused offers to negotiate over a weaker version. And it poured millions of dollars into lobbying: four of the industry’s top trade groups spent nearly as much on lobbying in the first three months of this year as they did in all of 2001.

But an industry strategy of dividing the Democrats had the most success.

Everything you need to know about the banksters’ power is contained in the header midway through the article: “Surprising Ease.”

As the article says, “Bankrupt homeowners do not have a political action committee or lobbyists.” But surely lawmakers have an instinct for self-preservation. Because what I’m reading here is that the banks are in as big or bigger trouble now than they were six months ago, and just as powerful in extracting explicit guarantees from Congress and the White House that they’ll be spared should they collapse. But as a result of that, we get a “recovery” that feels like a recession, a lost decade where we saunter along without economic growth. There will absolutely be a political price to pay for that. Obama and Democrats in Congress need an economic recovery. But covering for the banksters will delay one. There’s a difference between being owned in order to sustain your political career and being owned to destroy it.

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The Democratic Industrial Complex
by digbyChris Hayes has written a must read piece about the evolution of the K Street culture to adapt to the Democrats in power. Here’s an excerpt:

While the Republican Party shrinks, corporate interests are deftly molting their old K Street Project skin and crawling en masse inside the big tent being pitched by the Democratic Party. These same corporate interests have always had a purchase on Democrats, of course. But for much of the last decade, business interests had the luxury of spending most of their resources aiding their allies in the GOP. No more. Writing on The Atlantic‘s website, Scott Bland and Ronald Brownstein identify the emergence of what they dub “The Democratic Industrial Complex.” Energy and healthcare companies, automakers and banks all understand that the Democrats control much of their fate, so they’ve cast their lot with the majority party in a big way: John Kerry got less than 20 percent of the donations from electric utilities; Barack Obama got almost 60 percent. So far in this cycle, Democrats have captured two-thirds of the donations from the healthcare industry. If big business’s old legislative strategy was centered on relentless opposition to progressive initiatives–an approach that continues in areas like EFCA–the new strategy is to subvert legislation through co-optation, as in healthcare and cap and trade. By converting themselves, ostensibly, from opponents to “partners,” corporate lobbies are trying to have it both ways: to block reforms while changing overt power struggles over the future of the economy into seemingly cooperative negotiations. At these negotiations, to use the president’s favorite phrase, “everyone has a seat at the table”–except, the lobbyists get by far the best seats. (Alinsky didn’t have much patience for this approach. “This liberal cliché about reconciliation of opposing forces is a load of crap,” he once said. “When one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it.”) These efforts at co-optation are aided by our natural inclination toward narrative and fable. It is pretty irresistible to view politics through the lens of heroes and villains. Palin is a character; the ABA is just an acronym. But Goehl says the challenge for his organization and others (indeed, for members of the progressive media such as myself) is to make Ed Yingling and those of his ilk into household names. “We’re interested in, how do we lift up a few of these key actors and turn them into public names for what they’ve done to lead us down this road. I don’t think it’s going to be easy. But it’s happened a bit with the Bank of America guy.” “Ken Lewis?” I say. “Yeah,” Goehl replies, laughing. “I totally lost his name, and here I’m supposed to have a different orientation.”

This is hard for liberal activists to adjust to. We’re oriented to the democratic process which we see as a counter balance to the influence of wealth. But there has never been a time when it was more obvious than now that our two party political process mostly serves as a front for wealthy elites no matter who’s in power. This situation does require a reorientation, and a big one.In that regard I was somewhat surprised, and pleased, to hear a great deal of discussion among activists about this issue at the recently concluded AFN conference. Despite Dana Milbank’s typically snotty take (see Jane Hamsher’s excellent response) there actually was a realistic acknowledgment that the left’s influence is marginal and that the plutocracy has things well in command. I don’t think there’s much delusion about that.
The question is what to do about it. Theoretically, there should be power in numbers and the democratic process should at least water down the influence of the malefactors of wealth. But the power of the corporate media combined with the huge cost of campaigning (because of the corporate media) leaves little room for real grassroots influence. Despite all the hype about the Obama campaign’s tremendous online fundraising, the fact is that it also collected unprecedented massive amounts of corporate cash, as did all the campaigns. And that corporate cash is represented by lobbyists who are so much a part of the fabric of the political system that they function as staff members in the congress and kitchen cabinet in the administration. (Indeed, one of the most interesting tidbits of information I heard was that despite the fact that there are many progressive committee chairmen, they are almost all pretty conservative on the issues their committees oversee. Now why would that be do you suppose?)
We persist in believing that the system can be influenced by the democratic process and perhaps it can. Primary challenges are one way to do that. But in the final analysis, government sausage making is done by inside players who represent interests and the elected officials rather than being the people’s representatives are actually just vessels to be manipulated by various interests. Therefore, “the people” are seen as just another special interest group and not a very powerful or influential one at that. As a very smart and savvy friend pointed out to me, the simple problem is that the progressive movement doesn’t have a lobby. Update: This almost seems like it’s a joke. Sadly, it isn’t.

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Blue Dogs Try Desperately To Remain Relevant

by dday

Yesterday the Blue Dog Caucus sought headlines by trying to strangle the public option by putting enough conditions on it to render it useless.

Conservative House Democrats set strict conditions Thursday for any government-run insurance plan Congress creates as part of a health care overhaul, ruling out support for a plan that resembles Medicare — the option favored by many liberals.

The lines drawn by the Blue Dog Coalition, if adhered to by lawmakers crafting the health overhaul, would result in a government-run plan that works much like private insurance plans […]

Among their requirements: The public plan must negotiate payment rates with providers; participation in the plan must be voluntary for both providers and patients; premiums and copayments under the plan must pay for its operations; and the plan must follow the same actuarial standards and regulations required of private insurers.

Some conservative health policy experts have questioned whether it makes sense for the government to create a public plan that essentially replicates plans offered by private insurers. A public plan would draw most of its cost-cutting power from its ability to dictate prices, like Medicare, these experts argue; without that ability, it might save the government and consumers little or no money.

I think this is the second fallback option for the forces seeking to destroy the public option. First they’ll attach an unrealizable trigger to it, keeping it from implementation unless certain impossible conditions are met. The Blue Dogs support that too, it’s at the bottom of their statement of principles. Failing that, they’ll boil down the public option until it basically becomes a non-profit health insurer with all the same restrictions as private insurers. The lack of profit motive, less overhead and administrative costs would probably save consumers a little money, but the real money comes from the monopsony bargaining power of using government rates. As Matt Yglesias points out, this doesn’t come close to being a fiscally conservative argument – a world where the public plan can use Medicare bargaining rates forces private insurers to compete on price and quality, lowering costs to the system, and therefore costs to the government. And the supposed fiscally conservative Blue Dogs are against that.

If all 51 Blue Dogs actually went to the mats over their twin concepts of strangling the public option, there would be concern. But as is common, their press release simply does not reflect the views of their members. Mike Michaud of Maine strongly supports a public insurance option and criticized the Blue Dog statement yesterday. Patrick Murphy of Pennsylvania said this:

Congressman Murphy stands with President Obama in supporting the inclusion of a public option in health care reform legislation. While the Congressman is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, he does not always agree with them on every issue. In this case, he does not believe that we should wait several years to see if our currently broken system gets worse before introducing a public option. Including a public plan as one of many choices in a health insurance exchange is a good way to introduce transparency and competition into the insurance market, curb sky-rocketing costs, and hold private insurance companies accountable so that we can finally accomplish comprehensive, genuine reform this year.

The Blue Dogs have a frayed coalition and very few options in the House of blocking strong reform. The action on this bill remains in the Senate, where 37 Senators are on the record in support of a public option, out of the 50 needed to pass it through budget reconciliation. So the Blue Dogs tossed some bait hoping to get media coverage, but in reality, they’ve got nothing.

If you have a Blue Dog for a representative, you should ask them outright, whether they support slow-walking a public health insurance option or attaching so many conditions to it that it doesn’t do much of anything, or whether they support the President and the majority of the American people who want a choice of a not-for-profit alternative. You might remind them that 62% of all US bankruptcies are due to medical bills, that 47 million Americans have no health insurance, that the CEOs of major insurers make millions and millions of dollars while denying care and coverage, and I’m sure you can find a few other data points from your own personal experiences.

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Roeder’s Ties To Operation Rescue

by tristero

There’s a phrase to describe the murder of Dr. Tiller: Organized terrorism. Domestic rightwing terrorism that the Bush administration ignored just as they ignored bin Laden’s. Maddow puts it together below:

Unbelievable

by digby

Raw Story reports:

A judge in Niagra County, New York, ruled Thursday that DNA evidence, obtained only after police applied a Taser to a suspect who refused to provide evidence against himself, may be used by the prosecution because the electric shock was not administered with malice. Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza, with this 17-page decision, becomes “the first judge in western civilization to say you can use a Taser to enforce a court order,” defense attorney Patrick Balkin said, according to The Niagara Gazette. “Note that if Smith is guilty, he’s a pretty bad guy,” interjected The Buffalo News. “He’s charged with shooting a man in the groin after invading his ex-girlfriend’s home, tying up her two children and forcing her to take her to the home of the man he shot. He’s also charged with the shotgun-point robbery of a Niagara Falls gas station. DNA was found at both crime scenes.” Smith, according to reports, had previously agreed to a court order for a DNA sample. But when authorities accidentally spoiled the sample, forcing them to return to the judge for a second order Sperrazza issued it without consulting the defense counsel, thinking the defendant would not mind. “Smith did object, reportedly telling officers, ‘I ain’t giving it up. You’re going to have to tase me,’” added Buffalo News. “Which they did, after consulting with a prosecutor, who either told them to use ‘the minimum force necessary’ (according to police testimony at last month’s court hearing) or ‘any means necessary’ (according to a police report written the day of the incident).” After tasing Smith, a DNA swab was taken without consent. “They have now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime they think it’s reasonable,” Smith’s attorney said, according to a separate report in The Buffalo News. “Her decision says you can enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.” In the decision’s text, Sperrazza cited a Wyoming case in which a judge ruled police acted legally when they tased a man in order to force him to open his hand relative to a search. “The Court is certainly concerned that the purpose of the Taser was to inflict pain, and has seriously considered the argument of the defendant that a line is crossed when such government action is sanctioned,” she wrote. “This Court would immediately condemn and sanction the actions of the police if there was any indication that the Taser was used maliciously, or to an excessive extent, or with resulting injury. The Court is convinced by the evidence presented that the exact opposite of those factors was present in this case. “The court would not advice the government to systematically utilize pain compliance as a standard tool in future similar circumstances, because of the intense scrutiny the use of such tactics would receive from this Court. However, this case is perhaps best described as the ‘perfect storm’ where the crimes being investigated were egregious, the evidence sought highly probative, the intrusion was minimal, and with a subject who steadfastly refused to comply with a lawful court Order. Further, the officers, armed with the Order issued, repeatedly sought the subject’s compliance, explored alternative methods of obtaining the sample, repeatedly warned the defendant of the consequences of his refusal and took steps to minimize the pain inflicted and the potential for injury. There was no malice or desire to injure the defendant.

This is really starting to get scary. The argument is the same as the OLC used when it authorized torture of terrorist suspects. As long as the intent is to get information and not to injure the suspect or leave any lasting damage, then they could use pain to coerce the suspect into compliance. I’m beginning to think Cheney and the boys really missed the boat by not simply authorizing the use of electrical torture instead of all that complicated stuff with the waterboarding, sleep deprivation and stress position. They could just zap the prisoners repeatedly with 50,000 volts until they give over. (As long as it wasn’t done with malice, of course.) Nobody would have said a word.

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Making Their Mothers Proud

by digby

I just don’t know what to say about this except just … wow.

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Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner

by digby

Liz “Baby Dick” Cheney, (as Marcy Wheeler calls her) has been all over television today criticizing President Obama’s speech in Cairo.( In fact, I think she may have hit the trifecta, by being on all three cable networks in a neon lime suit.) Here’s an example of her contribution to the discussion:

“I think that if we lived in a world where terrorism, and the slaughter of innocents, and Iran’s hegemonic hopes for the Middle East could be met, could be defeated, could be dealt with by sort of hand-holding going forward, then we’d be in a much simpler environment. But these are very, very tough issues. And I was troubled by the extent to which I heard moral relativism.”

For a real sense of her entire message, check out this exchange with James Zogby on CNN.

There has been a lot of speculation about why Dick and Liz have been out there so vociferously criticizing Obama after his having been extremely quiet during the years he was pulling Bush’s strings. To me, it sounded like someone who was running for office. After today, I think maybe that’s true — except it looks like its Baby who’s running.

But here’s the really creepy part — the daughter of the man who goes on television and defends the torture of innocent people is calling out president Obama for being a moral relativist — which means that Baby would be running not only on Papa Dick’s legacy, but on Mama Dick’s too. That scares me more than the lime green pantsuit.

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Equal Justice

by dday

I’m getting to this late, but Jack Balkin (h/t Hilzoy) has some excellent questions about George Tiller’s alleged murderer Scott Roeder:

“(1) Should the United States be able to hold Roeder without trial in order to prevent him from returning to society to kill more abortion providers? If we believe that Roeder and other domestic terrorists will plan further attacks on abortion providers and abortion clinics if we let them free, can we subject them to indefinite detention?

(2) The Obama Administration is currently considering a national security court to make decisions about the detention of suspected terrorists, with the power to order continued preventive detention. Should this court be able to hear cases involving U.S. citizens, whether they are Muslim or Christian? (…)

(4) One of the most important reasons for detaining terrorists (suspected or otherwise) is to obtain information about future terrorist attacks that may save lives and prevent future bombings. To procure this information, can the government dispense with the usual constitutional and legal safeguards against coercive interrogation? Should it be able to subject Roeder to enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and other methods, to determine whether Roeder knows of any other persons who are likely to commit violence against abortion clinics or against abortion providers in the future? Would your answer change if you believed that an attack on an abortion provider or a bombing of an abortion clinic was imminent?

(5) Terrorists and terrorist organizations need money and resources to operate effectively. Often the only way to stop them is to dry up their sources of financial and logistical support. Can the U.S. government freeze the assets of pro-life organizations and make it illegal to contribute money to a pro-life charity that it believes might funnel money or provide material support to persons like Roeder or to organizations that practice violence against abortion providers? Can the government arrest, detain, and seize the property of anti-abortion activists who helped Roeder in any way in the months leading up to his crime, for example by giving him rides or allowing him to stay in their homes?”

In fact, if you want to talk about ticking time bomb scenarios, Roeder would certainly be a subject for interrogation. He has been involved in pro-life movements for many years; he was arrested and convicted in 1996 for attempting to bomb an abortion clinic; he attempted to break and enter into Tiller’s clinic in the weeks leading up to the murder (a federal crime under the FACE Act), and his name and license plate number were sent to the FBI; he had the phone number for Operation Rescue in his car, and Operation Rescue provided information about Tiller to Roeder before the shooting. In the wake of Tiller’s murder, a pro-life activist published photos and personal information of other doctors who perform late-term abortions.

So on those grounds, considering there may be other individuals seeking to kill American doctors, considering that Roeder has multiple ties to the movement that would carry out those killings, it would only make sense to use the interrorgation techniques on Roeder that would help protect Americans. Right? Furthermore, everyone associated with these movements, all of the dangerous suspected domestic terrorists or those with ties to them, including the commentators who fanned the flames of hate, ought to be locked up without charges so that they don’t hurt Americans. Right? Right?

Well, I don’t believe the answer is yes. But apparently, on a bipartisan basis, our political leadership does believe that some individuals should be subject to indefinite detention in case they commit a crime in the future, and that the legal system is not equipped to handle them. And the overwhelming majority of at least one major political party believes that torture is justified if it saves American lives. As Hilzoy says:

Obviously, though, these tactics were never meant to be used against people like us. It’s only other people — scary, presumptively guilty other people — whom we get to detain without trial, based on evidence that would not win a conviction in a normal court of law. Not people like us.

Personally, I think this would be a bad idea. But a lot of people seem to disagree. They seem to think it’s fine to toss aside centuries of legal tradition, not to mention our civil liberties. What’s really strange is that they claim that they are doing this because they love freedom.

Well said.

Maybe someone in the media could ask any member of either party about this.

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Bias

by digby

So the problem with female judges is that their different experience in life leads them to be biased:

But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so. Judge Judith S. Kaye, who was the chief judge of New York State for 16 years until her recent retirement, said she had long avoided engaging others on the question. “I struggled with it for the 25 years I served as a judge,” Judge Kaye said.But she said she had ultimately come to terms with defending the idea that women judges will, at times, see things differently. “To defend the idea that women come out different on some cases, I just feel it,” Judge Kaye said. “I feel it to the depths of my soul,” she added, because a woman’s experiences are “just different.”Lawrence Robbins, a veteran litigator in Washington, disagreed, saying, “Any person in the real world should be highly reluctant to make these broad generalizations.” While Mr. Robbins said it was indisputable that people brought different experiences to the bench, “the role of a judge requires that the person who holds that position recognizes those dispositions that come from personal experience and tries to surmount them.” “Giving vent to the bias of one’s own experiences would lead to a wrong result, not a proper one,” Mr. Robbins said.

Again, what’s interesting here is the notion that the way men see things is “normal” and that the way women see things is biased.
There’s a perfect example later in the article:

Justice Steven G. Breyer was one of several on the court who suggested during oral argument that he was untroubled by the search. Justice Breyer said that when he was that age, boys stripped down to their underwear in the locker room and “people did stick things in my underwear,” a comment that produced hearty laughter from Justice Thomas. Justice Ginsburg seemed annoyed, saying that “it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear,” explaining that Ms. Redding was made to stretch out her bra and underpants for two female school officials to look inside.

In terms of the commentary that came afterward, when Breyer noted that it wasn’t any big deal to be strip searched because of the usual boys locker room experience, it wasn’t worth noting, while Ginsberg’s is seen as biased with hers. They both referenced their experiences, but Breyer’s view, because he is in the majority, is the controlling view. And yet, in real life, over half of the population is actually represented by Ginsberg’s view.

Now, it’s true that the court has no obligation to defer to the majority. Indeed, in many cases they are compelled to vote against it becaue the constitution protects the rights of the minority — which makes this case all the more perverse. The large majority of males on the court look to their own (minority) experience as the experience of the majority to inform them of how this government intrusion is experienced. That’s because the default experience is considered to be the male experience.

This isn’t new. Even medical science used to only study men to determine how diseases worked, despite the fact that women’s bodies were quite obviously made differently. Greater funding was once always put into uniquely male diseases as opposed to uniquely female diseases and it took major lobbying and outside pressure to change that. Indeed, we still see this in the disparate insurance coverages for things like Viagra as opposed to female birth control. It’s just that one would have thought that the courts would be a place where such biases would have been contemplated and dealt with before now.

I realize that this is obvious stuff and is old news to most of you. But the article I cited above was in the New York Times this morning. And it’s entire theme is that it’s a problem that many women judges might rule differently than a man. Never once is it questioned whether it might be a problem that so many male judges might rule differently than a woman — the assumption is that the male point of view is the impartial view, while the female view is biased. Why should it not be equally true that the female point of view is impartial while the male point of view is biased?

Indeed, Sotomayor’s whole point in the “wise Latina” speech may have been that the experience of a woman living in a society which presumes this male privilege by default might actually be less biased than those who never question it. And after all the commentary this past week in which this privilege and experience is completely taken for granted as the standard to which she must be compared, I think I agree with that. Clearly, most people (perhaps most women too) don’t question the absurd notion that eight men on the Supreme Court ruling from their experience is a sign of their impartiality but that a woman ruling from hers isn’t. If a judge has knowledge of that inherent, social bias it actually would make her see things in a fairer light than someone who doesn’t.

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Wired For Conservatism

by dday

E.J. Dionne is one of the first traditional media journalists, to my knowledge, to openly state that the media tilts to the right, in the context of how the chattering class leaps at any utterance from the Newt Gingrichs and Rush Limbaughs and Dick Cheneys of the world, and he explains how this distorts the debate in Washington and what people pick up in the cultural milieu.

If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He’s the guy who nominates a “racist” to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America’s defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama’s economic policies to those of Juan Peron’s Argentina […]

This was brought home at this week’s annual conference of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health-care reform.

In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.

Dionne goes on to describe a panel he witnessed Tuesday with Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva – three of the most progressive members of Congress, but three whose names aren’t in the Village Rolodex, and whose views have almost no impact on the way the debates in Washington are presented to the public. That doesn’t mean they don’t have power and importance – their decision along with the Progressive Caucus to pool their power and force the public option into the health care debate was masterful – but it confuses the way Obama is presented, and the space to criticize him from the left. Edwards explained this very specifically:

Polis, Edwards and Grijalva also noted that proposals for a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system, which they support, have fallen off the political radar. Polis urged his activist audience to accept that reality for now and focus its energy on making sure that a government insurance option, known in policy circles as the “public plan,” is part of the menu of choices offered by a reformed health-care system.

But Edwards noted that if the public plan, already a compromise from single-payer, is defined as the left’s position in the health-care debate, the entire discussion gets skewed to the right. This makes it far more likely that any public option included in a final bill will be a pale version of the original idea.

Her point has broader application. For all the talk of a media love affair with Obama, there is a deep and largely unconscious conservative bias in the media’s discussion of policy. The range of acceptable opinion runs from the moderate left to the far right and cuts off more vigorous progressive perspectives.

And actually, this SUITS Obama. If he wanted to pick his enemies, he’s much rather have Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney than Jared Polis, Donna Edwards and Raul Grijalva. For one, the public has a fairly definitive opinion of those conservatives, at least relative to Obama, and the President wins those debates without saying a word. For another, Obama has no need to move from the moderate center if the Beltway criticism doesn’t approach him from that perspective. His choice of advisers and policy options clearly put him in that moderate mainstream of the Democratic Party, and it’s where he feels – has always felt – the most comfortable.

The media has an interest in defining the terms of the debate, indeed a self-interest, given the conglomerates that they are. When ABC News gives the same amount of space to Sean Hannity as they do to the Secretary of State, implicit in that editorial decision is the fact that Hannity has spent many years as part of the ABC Radio Network. When business stories betray a perspective more sympathetic to corporate America than the working class, the very fact of the corporate behemoths that populate modern media bear a lot on that decision. But these decisions also enable Obama to operate without equal pressure from all sides of the policy argument, essentially a free hand. This may keep conservatism alive, but it also co-opts the Democratic Administration by giving them the only pressure they consider important – pressure from the right.

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