Month: May 2010

Getting Better And Better

by digby

The Democrats must be doing something right:

“I’m very concerned about the direction of the bill … We should probably finish this bill at some point because it’s getting worse every day” Judd Gregg

I spoke with someone on the hill a couple of weeks ago and was told that they planned to improve the bill on the floor. I was extremely skeptical that they’d be able to get past a filibuster and the idea that the leadership even wanted to improve the bill, much less allow it to happen on the floor. But they have done it. The bill is already substantially improved, and as Gregg says, it just gets better and better.

There are still some things to be done, notably the Lincoln derivatives amendment (which won’t be dealt with untilo they see how the primary goes tomorrow) and the Merkely-Levin amendment to reinstate the Volcker rule:

It has to do with the Volcker rule, named after the former Federal Reserve Chairman, which would ban banks from engaging in proprietary trading (trading for their own benefit) with federally insured dollars. Right now, Dodd’s bill gives regulators some discretion in implementing the rule, but Levin-Merkley would tighten the language, allowing proprietary trading “only in limited circumstances and if [the banks] set aside additional capital to cover potential losses.” Dodd has given the Levin-Merkley amendment his support. Removing regulatory discretion when it comes to the Volcker rule is a good move. As Volcker himself said, “it’s very unlikely that the regulators and supervisors would evoke a strict prohibition until a crisis came and then it’s too late.” “Look, I’ve been a regulator for 20 years. So I know how they are,” he added. New data released this week shows just how much of a roaring comeback proprietary trading has made. Three banks — Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America — made money on trading every single day of the first quarter this year. Goldman made at least $25 million each day, and pulled in more than $100 million on 35 separate days. “It’s statistically improbable to have three firms batting 1,000 and also pitching a perfect game. You wonder why the rest of America has some suspicion about proprietary trading,” said Matthew McCormick, a banking analyst. At the same time, the latest report from the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) shows that big bank lending to small businesses fell by more than 9 percent from 2008 to 2009, even though overall bank lending only fell by 4 percent. The panel’s chair, Elizabeth Warren, called the data “infuriating.” Banks that benefit from a federal backstop should be engaged in core banking practices — taking deposits and lending — while those that want to trade for their own benefit should shed their federal protection. But right now we’re stuck with the worst of both worlds, where lending dries up but the government is backing the banks while they trade for no benefit but their own. Levin-Merkley would rightly force the banks to go one way or the other.

This one has the banks very, very upset and they are pulling out all the stops. It’s going to have to overcome a filibuster and there’s no guarantee that’s going to happen. Here’s where we are right now according to sources on the Hill. They expect to vote tomorrow:

Democratic No
Hagan
Warner

With two Democratic defections, we need 3 Republicans to reach
the 60 vote threshold.

One Republican defection has already been secured:

Republican Yes
Lugar

We need two out of the following:

Republican Undecided
Collins
Snowe
Voinovich
Grassley
McCain

Here’s another problem:

Democratic Leaning No
Klobuchar
Ben Nelson

Democratic Undecided
Lieberman
Gillibrand
Schumer
Carper
Byrd

Leaning yes
Brown
Byah

If any of those people are your senators, today might be a good day to give them a call.

Update: ferchristsake

Really? Is Blanche losing the Little Rock investment banking vote or something?

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Constitutional Exceptionalism

by digby

Marcy Wheeler does an interesting thought experiment substituting the word “terrorist” for “sexually dangerous person” in the Supreme Court arguments from the case decided today:

[L]et’s look how some passages from SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan’s successful argument in U.S. v. Comstock–in which SCOTUS just voted 7-2 to affirm the federal government’s authority to indefinitely detain sex offenders who are mentally ill–appear when we replace the term “sexually dangerous person” with “terrorist.” (See Adam B’s post on the decision for a good overview of the decision.) KAGAN: The Federal Government has mentally ill, sexually dangerous persons [terrorists] in its custody. It knows that those persons, if released, will commit serious sexual [terrorist] offenses; [snip] JUSTICE GINSBURG: But the likelihood is that the person will stay in Federal custody? GENERAL KAGAN: I think that that’s fair, that the likelihood is that the person will stay in Federal custody until such time as a court finds that the reasons for that custody have lapsed. [snip] CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: So you would say that the Federal Government has no such power independent of the criminal conviction [enemy combatant designation]? In other words, that Congress could not pass a law saying, just as this one says, we are going to commit people who are sexually dangerous [terrorists] until a determination that they are not or until the [another] State can take them? That power would not be in Article I? GENERAL KAGAN: Without the person having entered the criminal justice system [been designated an enemy combatant] in any way.

I’ve been thinking for a long time that in light of Americans’ eagerness to set aside due process for terrorist suspects and sex offenders that the list of crimes with which the constitution is not considered adequate to deal will likely expand. It’s too illogical, even for us, to say that the failed Times Square bombing is more dangerous than a crime spree serial killer or a murderous drug gang.

It makes no sense that the constitution would give those individuals rights under the constitution but not give them to sex offenders and failed terrorists. Something will have to give. It seems almost inevitable in our current climate and with this current court that more crimes are going to be designated outside the normal constitutional order in order to justify the ones that already are.

*It should be noted that Marcy’s piece specifically links the torture caused mental illness of Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed al-Qahtani to this decision while my point is a more broad point about America’s new zeal for creating exceptions to established constitutional principles. And she’s probably right that these are the people who are most likely to be designated unfit for trial but unrealeasable —we drove them crazy and now we can’t try them or let them go. It’s the ultimate Kafka nightmare.

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Condescending To The Folks

by digby

Gabriel Winant at Salon discusses the ways in which both conservatives and liberals condescend to “middle America” by looking at this ad from an Alabama GOP candidate:

It’s really difficult to give the Peterson ad an honest viewing and come away thinking that this guy thinks highly of the people whose votes he’s after. Besides the arguments being total nonsense, the symbolism is just way too aggressive. Peterson tips his cards when he edges that gun into the frame, as if to say, “Yeah, those idiots will eat this up.”

But here’s the crucial thing about right-wing condescension and left-wing condescension: As you may notice, they’re not symmetrical. Conservatives aren’t condescending toward the liberal, urban base the way liberals are toward the conservative, rural base. (OK, yes they are, but it’s not necessarily their bread and butter.) In other words, both elitisms are targeted at the same people. Barone accuses liberals of writing off Middle America (itself a rather condescending generalization, but there we are) as an angry mob. Peterson consciously tries to appeal to — ugh — Middle America as an angry mob.

I suppose there are examples of Democratic candidates running ads that condescend to “Middle America” (which is assumed to be something other than liberal, natch) but I can’t think of any. However, I’ll assume for the sake of argument that they exist.

But I think Winant is dead wrong about this ad. It’s exactly the kind of thing that works on the GOP Real American constituency, not because its “angry” but because of all the Real American iconography. They could change this ad’s copy to be Morning in America and it would work just as well.

We used to talk about this a lot during the Bush presidency, deconstructing his drawl and all the images of him in cowboy costumes. I came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter that he was a blatant phony. What mattered was that he cared enough to present himself to his tribal brethren as one of them. His phoniness was a tribute to their culture and customs.

This Alabama candidate is also using tribal language, and some of it’s nearly incoherent. (Thugs and criminals are keeping the importance of the Agriculture commissioner position secret so they can steal the money?) But it conveys a macho, authoritarian attitude, which is a mainstay of the conservative appeal and he hits all the important cultural notes, even though most of them have absolutely nothing to do with agriculture commissioner business. But specifics are beside the point. It’s about conveying that he’s one of them — against all the other “them’s.” I doubt very seriously that his potential constituents find this condescending at all. Indeed, I’ll bet they very much appreciate this candidate’s respect for their shared symbols.

Liberals don’t do this as much because they just don’t have the well-defined tribal culture (the mythic America of the 50s — both the 1850s and the 1950s) that the right shares with one another. But Barack Obama came as close as anyone to hitting it. Unlike the right, the Democrats have to be careful because of the persistent Village obsession with the 60s but still, Obama was able to tap into shared identity symbolism and cultural commonality from the slogans to the posters to the music and the gestures. His whole persona was an image that appealed on a subliminal level to his political tribe.

It’s fashionable to think that this sort of thing is no longer relevant now that we have a grassroots uprising coming from all directions, alliances are being made across all lines and the world is being made anew and all, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m guessing these dividing lines aren’t really changing much. And since “condescension” has been something half the country has always accused the other half of feeling toward it, I’m guessing that’s not going to change either.

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Neocons Are Very Weird

by tristero

No wonder Americans distrust intellectuals when people like this are regularly labelled as such:

…this surprising frequency of Muslims winning beauty pageants makes me suspect an odd form of affirmative action.

There are some very strange people in the world…

h/t, TPM

Panic Artists

by digby

This is just strange: they still don’t know what caused the market plunge. Or they’re saying they don’t know what caused the market plunge.

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq denied that there was any technological glitch in their trading, meaning that the bizarre trades were due to forces outside their control. The exchanges could be telling the absolute truth, or they could be avoiding some embarrassing assumptions people might make in light of past, similar technological problems. (Both exchanges have histories of pricing glitches and blackouts.) Nonetheless, both exchanges unilaterally decided that they would cancel all trades in stock whose prices changed more than 60 percent — the largest single cancellation of stock trades in history.

To traders, this makes no sense: If there were a provable glitch, the cancellations would be fine. But if there was no technical glitch and the system as a whole was just doing its job, then the exchanges interfered with bargain shopping.

Would they do that just to keep everyone from thinking the market is this nervous? I don’t know. But it makes as much sense as any of the other rumors that have been floating around.

I was watching that day and I can’t help point out once again that at the moment it happened the TV was filled with a bunch of Greeks with pitchforks and torches descending on the Greek banking system. (Actually they were armed with Molotov cocktails and they ended up killing three innocent bank employees.) Coincidence?

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More On Liberal Values And The Ruth Institute

by tristero

Following up on Digby’s post immediately below, I just wanted to add a few comments about Dante Atkins post.

To briefly recap, the Ruth Institute is a “project” of the far-right-pretending-they-are-reasonably-conservative National Organization for Marriage. Since NOM is a rightwing group, their name is, of course, sheer hypocrisy. They are anti-marriage activists and were, for example, a major force in pushing California’s odious Proposition Eight as well as many other initiatives that seek to restrict marriage to the Right Kinds of People.

And who are the Right Kinds of People? Well, in their own words, the Ruth Institute, according to a leaked internal memo

…aims to work hand-in-hand with other organizations in the marriage movement to:

Decrease the divorce rate
Increase the marriage rate
Decrease the cohabitation rate & increase the number of children who grow up with both married parents
Reduce the lag time between the age of sexual initiation and the age of first marriage
Maintain at least a replacement-level birth rate, so that the devastation of a European-style “demographic winter” is avoided [emphasis mine]

In other words, the Ruth Institute believes that whites are using so much contraception, they are gay-marrying, and they are aborting so many fetuses that non-whites are in danger of outbreeding them, leading to “the devastating prospect of a European-style ‘demographic winter’ ” – ie, a non-white majority in America.

“Fucking weird sexist, racist shit” is the first phrase that comes to mind upon encountering this. I could say more, but this is a family blog…

Anyway, after Dante exposed the Ruth Institute’s hidden agenda, the Head Ruther howled and howled, causing Dante to respond with his eloquent Round Two and Digby’s observation that:

[Dante] sets forth the fundamental liberal value — the freedom to choose your own destiny

which is rarely articulated as part of the public debate over abortion.

To that, I would like to add that the “freedom to choose your own destiny” has historically been an incredibly rare freedom, limited only to the wealthiest. The rich, for example, have always had, and will always have, full, unfettered access to safe abortion on demand, the middle class much less access, while the poor must resort to coathangers and lye. The struggle over abortion rights, in other words, is class warfare, pitting egalitarians against aristocrats. It is no wonder, therefore, that wealthy fiscal conservatives are such enthusiastic proponents of christianists and their efforts to coerce births – or are, at the very least, willing to find common cause with them. They have the same ultimate objectives: preserve and extend the privilege and wealth of upper class whites while limiting privilege and wealth – and freedom – for the rest of us.

I also noticed some interesting micro-rhetoric in The Ruth Institute’s rants (longtime readers know that micro-rhetoric is a hobby of mine). A fairly recent trend on the right has been a conscious effort to rebrand feminism and detach it from liberalism. I suppose their market research told them “feminism” has pretty robust positive connotations for most women. For example, notice the following usage in this rant from the Head Ruther :

And I am a sexist, according to Dante, because, “The real mission of the Ruth Institute is to erase the gains that women have made with regard to their social, economic and sexual liberation and ensure that they become baby factories.” Dante evidently has missed the fact that many, many women, are fed up with the sexual revolution, the divorce revolution and all the false promises of Leftist Feminism. The fact is that the trends toward increasing labor force participation for married women and increasing higher education for women were under way well before Betty Friedan ever showed up to steer the whole conversation in the destructive direction that Leftist feminism has taken.

You see? There’s now “feminism” and “Leftist Feminism.” That creepy accumulation of sibilants, so evocative of the hiss of snakes. And, of course, the SS. The term “Leftist feminism” is all of a piece with the efforts to rebrand the Great Alaskan Grifter (hereafter, GAG*) as some kind of female hero:

Sarah Palin, it is now clear, is a feminist first and a “tea partyer” second.

Using that logic, Dick Cheney is an environmentalist first, an advocate of torture second because he is, after all, deeply concerned about the environment. Concerned about having the “freedom” to rape and pillage the environment, that is.

But I digress. The right has a long history of this kind of co-option and rebranding. Up until about 1993, for instance, the likes of Pat Robertson were called “Fundamentalist Christians.” The adjective “Fundamentalist” takes note – perhaps slightly inaccurately – that their particular brand of Christianity was, in fact, a particular brand. But now, through the miracle of marketing, these religious nuts and cynical political opportunists are called simply “Christians,” as if Robertson and Dobson and the rest of their Whole Sick Crew were representative of all Christian denominations and beliefs.

I’d also like to draw attention to the use of “Ruth” in the Ruth Institute name, which – biblical references to the side – is quite obviously a conscious attempt to create an oral pun with “truth.” What next, Swift Boat Veterans for Ruth? For those naifs amongst you who think that’s a bit of a rhetoric stretch, I’d like to remind you their extraordinary turn of phrase, “the devastation of a European-style ‘demographic winter.’ “Rarely have I encountered such a carefully honed and perverse euphemism for white supremacism, racist hate, and bigoted hatred.

Make no mistake: The Ruth Institute, like the mis-named National Organization for Marriage, is both ruthless and truthless in their pursuit of a racist, sexist agenda.

Making The Argument

by digby

Rick Perlstein alerted me to this fine post by Dante Atkins in which he gives a spirited and moving argument for liberal values. It’s particularly gratifying since he made the argument around the issue from which so many Democrats are running as fast as they can: abortion rights.

He is engaging in a sort of dialog with a retrograde, throwback outfit called “The Ruth Institute” which is apparently some sort of white supremacy group concerned that the birthrate of the right sort of people is going down because selfish and slutty white women are refusing to properly submit themselves to men and breed early and often.

It’s a fascinating back and forth, but as Perlstein noted what’s especially notable is the way Atkins makes the argument. Here’s an example:

See, in Dr. Morse’s opinion, it’s not sexist of her to advocate that women’s economic and social advances be rolled back. Why? Because many women actively want take on what one could call a traditional domestic role. That is definitely true: many women do actively seek that role, just as there are many men who actively desire the corresponding role of economic provider. What Dr. Morse seems to want, by contrast, is to force all women to reject the technological, medical and social advances that guaranteed their freedom to choose something else. And why? Because her main concern is, of course, birthing children ahead of the replacement rate of 2.1 per woman, and active Western wombs are apparently the only method for the purpose. After all, Dr. Morse doesn’t even consider immigration as a potential solution for the aging population and social services issues that she seems so concerned about.

[…]

The Ruth Institute wants to ban no-fault divorce. They want to ban same-sex marriage. They apparently want to ban the Pill. They want the government, in fact, to do all sorts of social engineering to make sure that women revert to being baby factories to generate Western babies at a replacement rate. And we fevered “leftists,” by contrast? All we want is to make sure that each individual has the freedom to choose his or her own destiny.

In Dr. Morse’s mind, that type of freedom is far too much for her fellow women to handle. But as a progressive man who loves strong, smart and capable women, I respectfully beg to differ.

He sets forth the fundamental liberal value — the freedom to choose your own destiny, a value which almost never seems to make it into the discussion of abortion anymore, as if bearing children, whether one then raises them or not, is a trifling matter that only the most depraved or selfish person would refuse to do. Parenthood is at once nothing and everything.

For an insight into how the allegedly anti-statist Ron and Rand Paul libertarian right are able to justify their intellectually incoherent anti-choice views, here’s a pretty good example of the argument. They’re all about individual freedom — for blastocysts. Women, on the other hand, are begging for “special rights” when they resist the idea of forced childbirth. No matter which way the right comes at the argument, the autonomy of the woman never rises to the surface of concern. She is a vessel of God or a vessel of nature, but never a human being with full dominion over her body or her future.

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Virtually Speaking Sunday

by digby

Today it’s Emptywheel and McJoan,one on one. You can listen here. 5pm pdt/8pm edt.

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“Shoot To Kill”

by digby

Here is perhaps the most bizarre commencement speech in history, courtesy C&L (click the link for the full write up)

Have you ever listened to those Jim Jones sermons down in Guyana just before he told them to drink the kool-aid? Just saying.

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Why Would That Be?

by digby

On the gasbag shows this morning the Republicans touted their civility and whined about how mean the Democrats are by comparison:

McConnell also said that “Republicans have treated Supreme Court nominees a lot better than the Democrats have.”

“I can’t think of a single Supreme Court nominee by a Democratic president who’s been treated the way Robert Bork was, the way Clarence Thomas was, the way Sam Alito was, who was filibustered by the president, the vice president, the Democratic leader and the … ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I’ve never filibustered a Supreme Court nomination,” he said.

Could this phenomenon possibly be related to the fact that the Republicans nominate radical wingnut freaks and Democrats nominate middle-of-the-road centrists with no discernible judicial philosophy? That one Party relishes a fight and the other runs from one?

Whatever it is, I think we can rule out that it’s because the Republicans are more cooperative.

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