Month: January 2010

Visceral Comfort

by digby

Sometimes, the Villagers’ little white slips show:

Oh, and by the way, if anyone’s wondering what the big money boyz are thinking about all this, I’m sure you will be shocked to hear that the new “populist” teabag Republican insurgency seems to please them very much for some reason:

U.S. stocks are likely to rally if Republicans pull off a victory in Massachusetts’ Senate election on Tuesday, on hopes that it would slow down President Obama’s sweeping reform program, especially with respect to healthcare.

The Democrats’ big majorities in Congress are considered key to passing President Obama’s reform agenda across numerous parts of the economy, including banking and healthcare…

Here are some possible scenarios of market reaction to election results.

* Republican candidate Brown wins, Democrat Coakley loses

Stocks would rise as the victory gives the Republicans 41 seats in the Senate, enough to filibuster President Obama’s reform bills, including healthcare. Democrats would lose their 60-vote Senate super-majority that now lets them clear Republican procedural hurdles and pass legislation or confirm presidential nominees without a single Republican vote.

“The hope is (for) a return of gridlock, traditionally very favorable for equity markets,” said Carmine Grigoli, chief U.S. investment strategist, equity division, at Mizuho Securities USA in New York.

If Democrats are stripped of such a majority, Obama would be forced to try to find common ground with Republicans, who have opposed most of his agenda, including the landmark bid to revamp the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system.

Goldman Sachs noted healthcare stocks are likely to rally, with managed-care stocks such as Humana Inc (HUM.N) expected to gain the most, followed by pharmaceuticals.

Humana rose 7.1 percent on Tuesday to close at $51.94.

Pharmaceutical companies’ shares also advanced, with Merck & Co (MRK.N) and Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) rising as the Dow’s top two percentage gainers.

In contrast, hospital stocks such as Community Health Systems Inc (CYH.N) and Tenet Healthcare Corp (THC.N) came under pressure, as they have been viewed as “net winners” under the reform.

The S&P Healthcare Index .GSPA ended up 2.04 percent as last-minute voters rushed to the polls to determine who will replace the late Edward Kennedy in a close race.

Financial stocks would also gain as a Republican victory could slam the brakes on Obama’s legislation to tighten regulations of the U.S. financial industry. In Massachusetts, Coakley has demonstrated a position of wanting to regulate the sector.

“Financials will have more resistance to regulations,” said Matt Havens, partner at Global Vision Advisors in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Update II: If you ever wonder what it is about the past that the wingnuts really miss, it’s this.

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Leaving The Bar Of Expectations On The Ground

by tristero

The Most Trusted Man In America makes the same point here that I tried to make in the past few days. Coakley may not be exactly the greatest campaigner (duh) but considering what’s at stake – and what the national party clearly knew was at stake – the fault that this is even close lies squarely with the shitty leadership at the top of the Dems. With a supermajority so fragile as the current one, you don’t take anything for granted.

(And let’s face it: Republicans were gunning for Kennedy’s seat for a very long time. What? You think the transgender Sarah Palin that is the GOP nominee for Mass Senate just dropped out of a clear blue sky? You think they weren’t paying attention and just got lucky? Puh-leeze!)

Some commenters noted that Dean wouldn’t have let this happen if he was still heading the Dems. Perhaps not, but regardless of the outcome today – and for God’s sake, if you live in Massachusetts, go out today and vote for Coakley! – if the same people are in charge tomorrow – that is, if there haven’t been major league high-level firings in the Dem party over the Mass mess – then you can expect similar disasters this fall.

What’s the solution? Donate directly to progressive candidates. Vote, if you can, for progressive Democrats via third party tickets (here in NY, we can do that via the Working Families Party). And, as Digby intimated recently, don’t give up.

This country’s politics are clearly in a state of rapid, dramatic transition. A transition to exactly what is far from clear. The way I see it, we may resume our rapid descent into the abyss of fascism so ruthlessly engineered by Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes.To be sure, that is a very likely future for America, post-Obama. However, instead, we may build upon and “professionalize” the liberal, widely popular movements that rallied behind Obama in ’08 and restore the messy, far from perfect, but nonetheless liberal democracy that was America before the modern rightwing proceeded to wreck the country and discard our values.

Really, we don’t have a choice. Many of us have already forgotten what it was like under Bush, when an American government hellbent on establishing fascism by any means necessary was in power. But I haven’t. Murders, torture, a country left permanently undefended from perils both manmade and natural, arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, stolen elections, joblessness, thievery, greed, hypocrisy and lawlessness enshrined as moral values, increased poverty and ill health.

Fork In The Road

by digby

We don’t know what’s going to happen in Massachusetts today and I’m just going to wait until we see what it is. There are hundreds of gasbags all over TV telling you who is going to win, if you are interested in speculating about the returns.

But I do feel confident in speculating about the reaction, win or lose: a move to the right. (I wrote about my reasons for thinking this, here.) And even before the election results, the village media are already laying down the markers:

CQ TODAY PRINT EDITION – CONGRESSIONAL AFFAIRS
Jan. 18, 2010 – 8:04 p.m.

Midterm Election, Polarized Capital May Belie Latest Talk of Bipartisanship
By Edward Epstein, CQ Staff

President Obama plans to re-emphasize his interest in bipartisanship by addressing House Republicans this week, but whether that will produce an election-year truce is very much in question.

The president, who pledged during his 2008 campaign to change the capital’s rancorous partisanship, has resisted taking off the gloves in response to constant Republican criticism. But most of his legislative accomplishments in 2009 came on party-line votes.

[…]

Bipartisanship could become more important in the Senate if Republican state Sen. Scott Brown wins Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts, depriving Democrats of the 60-member caucus that now allows them to be relatively confident they can halt GOP filibusters.

President Bill Clinton infuriated House Democrats by making deals with opposition Republicans. That has not been a problem during the current Democratic administration.

[…]

House Republican leaders say they are pleased that Obama has accepted their invitation to travel to Baltimore at the end of this week to address their annual policy retreat. But they do not expect a bipartisan breakthrough.

“If he’s coming to talk to us, I hope that’s a sign we can actually accomplish things together,” Cantor said. But he added that during Obama’s first year in the White House, there was no substantive outreach to Republicans.

“To date, he has rejected or ignored every proposal we have put on the table,” added the minority whip, pointing to GOP proposals for the stimulus package (PL 111-5), the fiscal 2010 budget resolution (S Con Res 13) and what Cantor calls a “no-cost jobs bill.”

[…]

Although the Senate floor has been a partisan battleground during the first year of Obama’s presidency, bipartisan work is under way on some bills — some of it driven by retiring senators’ desire for parting legislative accomplishments.

Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., who earlier this month abandoned his re-election effort, is working with his panel’s top Republican, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, on a financial regulation overhaul measure.

At the Budget Committee, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who is retiring as the top-ranking GOP member, is joining Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., to promote a deficit-reduction commission.

Elsewhere in the chamber, Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have not given up their effort to write a bipartisan climate change bill.

But bipartisan efforts ended badly in 2009, especially on health care. Academic observers see little reason to believe bipartisanship will break out in 2010, which promises to be a hard-fought, base-driven election year. “Partisanship will probably only get worse this year,” said Congress watcher Julian Zelizer of Princeton University.

But Zelizer said public opinion polls showing voters’ desire for a less partisan atmosphere in Washington suggest that Obama could score political points by courting the GOP. “He can come across like the good guy and say that it’s the opposition that won’t do it.”

The Brookings Institution’s Stephen Hess, whose White House experience goes back to the Eisenhower administration, said the Republican strategy of all-out opposition to Obama “is not illogical.”

“It’s an even-numbered year, which traditionally is bad for the ‘in’ party,” meaning the Democrats, Hess said. “So the question for [Obama] is: Can he get more done if he can squeeze out just a few more Republicans votes?”

Obama may very well do some genuflecting to the Republicans, but I think it’s fairly clear that they are not going to play ball, even if he decides to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts and invade Finland. As much as the panicky Dems will have learned from this close race that they need to move right and stop “coddling” their base, the Republicans will have learned that the more intransigent and crazy they get, the better they do. I certainly hope that they understand this.

As far as I can tell there are two things we can take away from the race, no matter who wins it. The first is tha this economy is killing people — they are mad, they are scared and they want action. They don’t know what the answser to the problem is, but they want it addressed.

The other lesson is that you need your base with you in hard times. Despite what that article says, the Democrats have not been attentive. And since it’s clear that the president is going to be accused of catering to his liberal base anyway, he might want to start thinking about whether there’s actually a political downside to doing it.

Update: Fergawdsake. Steve Benen reports:

This notion, which I suspect we’re about to hear a whole lot of, strikes me as wildly misguided.

The narrower majority will force more White House engagement with Republicans, which could actually help restore a bit of the post-partisan image that was a fundamental ingredient of his appeal to voters.

“Now everything that gets done in the Senate will have the imprimatur of bipartisanship,” another administration official said. “The benefits of that will accrue to the president and the Democratic Senate. It adds to the pressure on Republicans to participate in the process in a meaningful way, which so far they have refused to do.”

This is a great idea, isn’t it? All the White House and Democratic congressional leaders have to do is continue to work on their policy agenda, while reaching out in good faith to earn support from congressional Republicans. Bills will start passing with bipartisan support; the public will be impressed; David Broder will start dancing in front of the Washington Post building; a season of goodwill and comity will bloom on Capitol Hill; and Lucy really will let Charlie Brown kick the ball.

Or maybe not.

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Two Words

by digby

According to Chuck Todd, the trouble in Massachusetts comes down to two words: Health Care.

Andrea Mitchell say’s the two words are: Big Government

I say: Bad Economy (and Political Malpractice)

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Open Letter To Massachusetts

by tristero

Dear Friends in Massachusetts,

Go out today and vote for Martha Coakley. Don’t skip it. Do it. Why?

Scott Brown – a male Sarah Palin but lacking her extensive resume of major public service – is a modern Republican. Perhaps you have forgotten what Republicans did when they had power. I haven’t.

Murders; torture; pointless wars; a country repeatedly left permanently undefended from looming perils, both manmade and natural; arbitrary imprisonment; massive spying campaigns on innocent citizens; censorship; stolen elections; joblessness; thievery, greed, hypocrisy and lawlessness enshrined as moral values; increased poverty and ill health.

You are as appalled by all this as I am, but since I don’t live in Massachusetts, I can’t do anything about that today. You can.

Today, my focus, and yours, should be on trying to elect Martha Coakley. Whatever happens, tomorrow, we can, and will, focus on firing the incompetent fools in the Democratic party who so stupidly and completely misjudged the situation in Massachusetts and permitted this shameful debacle to occur.

Love,

tristero

In Case You Are Wondering

by digby

what the Village queen tabby has to say about the Massachusetts Senate race (and who isn’t?)

Yes, that’s the same woman who tried to drive a president from office for being sexually immoral.

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Housekeeping

by digby

I just want to let everyone know that I’m slowly but surely thanking people for their contributions, but it’s taking more time than usual because my email program (like the comment program) decided to change formats on me in the new year and lost all my emails in the process. So, I’m piecing the information together and it’s slow going. But know that I will get to all of you in due course. In the meantime, please be assured that I am very grateful and have not taken your kindness for granted.

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Smug But Right

by digby

Alan Wolfe reviewed the Halperin/Heileman gossip book this week-end in the Washington Post by framing it in terms of the blogospheric critique of the Village media. He thinks we’re smug and he wanted to believe that we are all jealous of the mainstream journalists’ greater abilities. But after reading the book he realized that we may be right.

I’m sure that doesn’t go down well among the Villagers (a term he uses throughout, by the way) but this book, and the media reaction, is such a perfect illustration of our complaints that it’s no longer possible to ignore them.

I’ll take that as a tiny victory. It doesn’t happen very often.

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Destructive Creativity

by digby

C&L caught this wonderful segment from yesterday’s Fareed Zakaria show on CNN, featuring David Frum,Naomi Klein and Elliot Spitzer.

This part is especially good:

FRUM: The fix is here. There’s a — let’s do — there are technical fixes, the kinds of things I’ve said about the way banks hold their securities.

And then, be careful about doing too much, because you can throttle something that I think is precious to everybody, which is the creativity of the system.

SPITZER: Well, let me respond. I got it. Not to make this partisan, but…

(LAUGHTER)

… statutes don’t work. Enforcement does.

We have had for 15 or 20 years an absence of enforcement, except with a few nodes of activism, which gets beaten down over time.

What we need is adherence to very simple principles of ethics and transparency in the marketplace. And then, it would work.

[…]

KLEIN: And this isn’t a free market system. That’s what’s been revealed in this crisis. It’s a classic, crony capitalist system, where favors are traded amongst the elites.

And, you know, I have to — this idea that we are going to squelch creativity, you know, I think there’s definitely been too much creativity in the realm of derivatives trading. I mean, we would all do with them being a little less creative, and maybe go into the arts, you know, take up creative writing.

(LAUGHTER)

This is not helping. But the idea…

ZAKARIA: Because the bonuses are huge in the arts.

(LAUGHTER)

KLEIN: But the idea that we suffer from an under-reaction…

SPITZER (?): If you (UNINTELLIGIBLE) long enough they are, if you have possession of the tapes (ph).

KLEIN: The idea that we suffer from an under-reaction to this crisis — an over-reaction to this crisis — to me is absurd. I mean, this has been the most incredible under-reaction, if we look at what we have some consensus about in terms of what caused the crisis.

The over-leveraging of the banks, the fact that derivatives are not regulated, the fact that the banks are too big to fail, the fact that they’ve become so intermingled — we have not dealt with a single one of them, a single one of them, a year-and-a-half later. We have not reacted.

And in the meantime, we’ve put around $14 trillion on the table and used none of the leverage. And the whole premise of banking is that, when you’re handing out money, you can put conditions on it. You can ask for all kinds of things. And it is just extraordinary that they blew that moment of leverage.

[…]

FRUM: The United States government doesn’t govern all that well. We’ll concede that. But the American private sector does deliver unbelievable things.

And we’re sitting here at the end of a period of extraordinary technical innovation. And not just — I mean, the Internet, we’re all familiar with. But all kinds of products, and products that people want.

The ability of people to tap the equity in their homes when they face a financial crisis, that is a good innovation. The availability of more than one — lots of kinds of mortgage to people in different kinds of circumstances.

There are a lot of reasons why a rational person might intelligently want an interest-only mortgage. That can be a useful instrument.

We have the ability to raise capital to finance development all over the planet. And the idea that…

(CROSSTALK)

… you say, well, let’s give it to the poets, I mean, I’m all for the poets. But what we — to be at the end of this period, it’s like being in one of the railway crises of the middle 19th century and saying, eh, nothing real was accomplished. Something real was accomplished over the past 20 years.

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) very effectively to then beat it down.

All of us here — I’ll talk for myself. I don’t want to speak for others. I am a devout capitalist. I believe in the creativity, the innovation, the conflict that emerges — let me finish. The reality is that we have an economy right now that has tremendous innovative capacity, but also, over a 10-year period, has not created any net jobs. And the distribution of those proceeds is getting less and less equal. And our position vis-a-vis the rest of the world in terms of debtor-creditor situation, our world power — 100 different metrics you could use — we’re on the losing end.

And therefore, we have to step back and say, how do we extend those benefits, and both continue them and make sure we create an environment where they can…

[…]

FRUM: I’m not going to dispute with you on that. And it’s true. I mean, not enough of this came through to the typical worker during the years from 2001 to 2007. That was a big problem.

And there a lot of things we can talk about to fix that, including getting control of health care costs, which has been the great burden on the incomes of middle income people.

But let us not crush the creativity. And let us not look for a financial solution to economic problems.

Poor From. I guess that’s the best he can do.

If the president and the Democrats had said what Krugman rightly points out they should have said from the beginning, it would be very, very clear why this economy is so awful and who’s responsible for making it that way. (And if they’d followed the policy prescription he and others proposed, it might not actually be as bad as it is.)

But Frum simply can’t come up with anything better than “yes all of our ideas failed and the wealthy took all the money for themselves, but we can’t regulate the financial markets because then we’ll stifle their creative ability to take an even bigger piece of the pie than they already have.”

That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. You’d think even the Democrats would be able to make something out of that.

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Moral Travesty

by digby

I have been reading a lot around the sphere about how the administration shouldn’t be criticized for not being able to get various things through congress because the congress is a dysfunctional institution, badly in need of reform and there’s not much you can do when you just don’t have the votes.

Ok fine. But there’s no excuse for not dealing with this. And I’m not making a political argument here. There’s simply no excuse for not dealing with it for any reason:

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Camp America to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

I wrote many posts during that period about Harris and his inane characterization of suicide as “asymmetric warfare.” It was ridiculous on its face. But I had no idea what the real story behind this was and it was far, far worse than I thought.

I realize that “looking in the rearview mirror” is frought with all kinds of complications and difficulties. But that doesn’t change anything. Running the most powerful country in the world is complicated and difficult but there is an obligation to ensure that no one anywhere believes that this egregious, illegal behavior is sanctioned by the people of this country.

We activists and gadflys spend a lot of energy talking about institutions being broken and corporate malfeasance and all the other failures of our system. And we strategize and theorize about how to change it. But this issue isn’t difficult and it’s the one issue on which there is simply no decent case to be made for “pragmatism.” Not that people don’t make it — but it is indecent to do it.

I have sympathy for the administration in dealing with all the problems it inherited, trying to outmaneuver an insane opposition and work with a political base that knows what it wants and demands action. It’s not easy. But this isn’t really about politics at all. It’s a very basic moral issue and one that, so far, the president has failed to address properly. And it colors his relationship to his country in ways that I don’t think are measurable. It may not poll well and people may not put it high on their list of priorities. But on some subliminal level most of them know this is terribly, terribly wrong. And they need someone to right it for all of us. Only the moral authority of the president himself can do it.

There are many problems right now that are impossible for the president to unilaterally fix. This isn’t one of them.

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