Month: July 2010

Taxes On The Rich Are Unamerican

by digby

C&L caught Matthews’ show this week-end featuring a panel with Clarence Page, Katty Kay, Trish Regan, Joe Klein talking about the economy:

Among other things, Matthews brought up what I expect is going to rise to the top of the issue agenda for the fall: the promise to let the Bush tax cuts sunset as planned. In this conversation they are talking about additional tax cuts, beyond those.

Matthews: Clarence, would Democratic progressives and middle of the road Democrats buy the idea that if the only way to stimulate the economy for 2012, let’s be honest, that’s what we’re working on right now…

Page: Right.

Matthews: …we have to have a tax cut of some kind.

Page: Well only if it hits those at the bottom. If you’d expand earned income tax credit or give some kind of a job incentive, but I disagree that he ought to call off the Bush tax cuts.

Matthews: You think he ought to go back to the higher rates.

Page: It’s not going to win Democrats.

Matthews: You say go back to the high rates, go back to…

Page: Absolutely.

Regan: Isn’t there something inherently Un-American about the more money you make, the more money we’re going to take from you.

Klein: No. No!

Regan: Even if they’re not making $250,000 a year as a couple, you may aspire to make that and the government’s going to take more. (crosstalk)

Klein: It’s called the progressive income tax for a reason. Now conservatives want to abolish the income tax. That is so radical.

Regan: But you’re discouraging productivity. (crosstalk) You’re discouraging work.

Klein: So you want to hurt the people who are already hurting.

Page: Right.

Regan: What I’m saying is you don’t necessarily want to discourage productivity. You want the country to grow.

It would seem that Regan is saying the economy is in the ditch because people who make more than $250,000 are refusing to work hard and be productive because their taxes are too high — and it’s un-American to ask anything more of them. Have I got that right? It’s an interesting point of view.

There is a lot of agitation about the expiration of the tax cuts, but it hasn’t bubbled up completely yet. I think we’re going to have a debate about it. And I have absolutely no sense if the Dems are going to fight for it.

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Reality Entertainer of The Year

by digby

Over the week-end, gasbags were all atwitter about whether Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC fundraising means she is running for president. And gosh, what on earth was that Mama Grizzly ad all about? Why it didn’t talk about any issues at all and just featured Palin and her fans! (Marc Ambinder presents the whole array of possibilities here.)

I find it very telling that the Villagers don’t get what’s going on here. She is not a serious politician. She is a political celebrity/entrepreneur, collecting money from her fans to fund herself and sell her brand. To the extent that she is working for anyone but herself, she’s working for The Republican Party, bringing together some of the disparate strands of the conservative movement, striking the pose of the “outsider.” But that is the extent of her serious commitment to politics.

Palin is a “reality” entertainer. Look on the covers of the celebrity magazines and you’ll see lots of them. There’s a lot of money to be made by someone like her in merchandising alone, much less personal appearances, books etc. I’m guessing she’ll find herself on the personal growth/religious circuit too, along with her reality show on TV.

She is a creature of the new political media, maybe the first pure version of her kind. As soon as people grok that, her fund raising and touring will begin to make more sense. But I would be shocked if she would ever feel the need to subject herself to parochial elective politics again. It’s not where her talents and ambitions lie.

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Voting Still Open

by digby

The Wall Street Journal is featuring a poll:

International Monetary Fund advised the Obama administration to consider raising taxes and reducing Social Security benefits as ways to contain the U.S. budget deficit and public debt.

What do you think? Are there other government spending programs which should be tapped first? Are there cuts within Social Security that need to be made? Should the administration focus instead on raising taxes or other deficit-reduction moves?

Last I saw, voting is still open if you’d care to participate.

Here’s an example of the comments:

The Obama Adminsitration shows its incompetence in so many ways and this is one of them. What we have now is “crony capitalism” and FASCISM on a grand scale. Obama’s political and economic views may be socialist in orientation, but his implementation ghas been fascist because he has left many of the companies in private hands, while controlling them centrally.

Obama SQUANDERS money by the trillions, but now plans to CUT the benefits of millions of S-S recipients who paid into the systems for years while forcing millions of others to wait additional time to collect from an incredibly MEDIOCRE pension plan that they paid into. Gee, his magnanimity is amazing.

I resent and am angered by the loss of freedoms imposed by Obamacare and his other Marxist mandates.

I refuse to recognize any obligation to my fellow Americans but this one: “to respect their freedoms and leave them alone.” Likewise, I do not expect or hope that my fellow citizens and taxpayers will bail me out if and when I make a mistake, a bad investment or otherwise screw up.

Take responsibility for your actions, folks.

I realize that is hilariously incoherent (as are most of the other comments.) But it does point up the fact that Obama isn’t going to get any credit for cutting social security from anyone but the billionaires, even those who scream the loudest about “the deficit.” Somebody needs to tell David Axelrod.

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QOTD

by digby

Krugman:

Never forget that as far as the facts go, the Keynesians won this hands down.

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How Do We Think?

by digby

This article in the Globe over week-end is fascinating and you should read the whole thing. It contains info we’ve talked about before, but synthesizes it in a new way. I’ve excerpted some of what I thought were the more interesting passages for you to skim below.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

[…]This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

[…]New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

Here’s where the difference between conservatives and liberals come in. It’s not a huge difference, but it is significant:

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More Burrowers

by digby

… and not enough will to get them out.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health. And during his first weeks in the White House, President Obama ordered his advisors to develop rules to “guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch.”

Many government scientists hailed the president’s pronouncement. But a year and a half later, no such rules have been issued. Now scientists charge that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reverse a culture that they contend allowed officials to interfere with their work and limit their ability to speak out.

“We are getting complaints from government scientists now at the same rate we were during the Bush administration,” said Jeffrey Ruch, an activist lawyer who heads an organization representing scientific whistle-blowers.
[…]

Scientists and environmental groups have lauded Obama for appointing highly regarded scientists to top posts within the administration. But so far, critics said, those appointments have not eliminated the problems faced by lower-level government scientists…”Basically, science is still being scuttled,” Fite said. “We are heartbroken.”

Most critics said they were disappointed that protection of science and scientists did not become more of a priority after the election.

Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington attorney who has filed suit to block projects approved by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies, said he had expected the culture to change under Obama.

“The administration’s been in long enough that if that was going to happen, we should have seen it by now,” he said. “We simply haven’t.”

I don’t know if it’s a matter of poor management or philosophy or both, and perhaps a thorough housecleaning is underway. I certainly understanding that reforming bureaucracy is harder than moving a mountain. But there can be no doubt that this sort of thing should have been a top priority of the new reality based administration. Continuing the criminal neglect of science and reason in policy making is governing malpractice.

Post partisanship or “changing the culture of Washington” was always a facile pipe dream based upon the delusion that Obama’s personality was so intense that he could mesmerize Republicans into doing his bidding. But the one thing he does have the capacity to reform is the executive branch, which had been turned into a partisan patronage machine under Bush and still has people working in a political capacity. So far that doesn’t seem to have happened.

Read the whole article for the examples of scientific finding after scientific finding all over the federal bureaucracy being suppressed. It’s depressing.

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Building Bridges Back To Nowhere

by digby

I’ve been wondering about this ever since I saw Palin’s notorious “hand prompter” speech at the tea party convention, in which her discussion of the terrorist boogeyman was strangely out of place among the faithful. She is a hard core right winger who believes in unlimited military spending just as all hard core modern conservatives do. And yet the Tea Party is fairly dispassionate, so far, on the martial aspect of flag waving, so it seemed at least possible that they might go with the Ron Paul isolationist impulse.

They won’t if Palin has anything to do with it:

“Something has to be done urgently to stop the out-of-control Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine, and no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny,” she said. “We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military. If we lose wars, if we lose the ability to deter adversaries, if we lose the ability to provide security for ourselves and for our allies, we risk losing all that makes America great. That is a price we cannot afford to pay.” Palin also took on Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican, challenging his drive to rein in procurement spending and reevaluate the need for certain huge weapons systems. “Secretary Gates recently spoke about the future of the U.S. Navy. He said we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers. He went on to ask, ‘Do we really need . . . more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?’ ” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do, because we must.”

This ups the ante even more than usual. Mama Griz is saying she doesn’t care what the money’s spent on, we just need more and more of it. (It’s not as if she’s a military expert, after all, who’s making this statement on the basis of professional assessment of those programs.) This would seem to fly in the face of their small government message, but that’s never been a problem before, despite the fact that it’s always been contradictory. (Recall the three legged stool: small government, family values, national defense.)

One of her comments during the Q&A that got lost in all the hoopla about her crib notes was this:

The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible because this is the future of our country.

Obviously, the Tea Party is conservative Republican. We’ve known that from the beginning. But they have been waving the flag for the Revolutionary Army, not the current Military Industrial Complex. Somebody has to make sure these people do not go too far astray from true GOP priorities, which is funneling as much money as possible to the military while keeping taxes low on millionaires and choking off the safety net. They’re great on the last two, but Palin, being a woman and a leading tea partier, is a great choice to make the case for national defense and bring them fully on board. A Mama Grizzly is born.

I don’t doubt that they will be easily persuaded. They are, after all, in love with the romance of war and guns and all that revolutionary mythology just as much as they loathe the Kenyan usurper and the Unreal Americans who see patriotism somewhat differently. But isolationism is part of that revolutionary mythology too and the Big Boyz have to be careful that this doesn’t get out of hand. Sarah Palin is the perfect bridge.

Update: On the other hand you have Coulter offering a way out with her endorsement of the “Obama’s War” rationale, which allows the GOP a way out of their political box on Afghanistan. The Grizzly vs the Viper. Who will win?

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Start Clapping

by digby

Atrios and Krugman are both wondering about the emerging Democratic strategy for November. Atrios says:

So let’s say Obama’s people have correctly deduced that there’s no chance in hell of getting anything through Congress. They have two basic options. First, they could get on the teevee every day and say, “This is my plan to help. Republicans in Congress won’t pass it.” They could hold rallies in Maine. Allies could run ads. At least people would know who is for and who is against…and just what it was that people are for or against. Option two is back off proposals you’ve previously made and have Axelrod get on the teevee and say, “there is some argument for additional spending in the short-run to continue to generate economic activity.”

Krugman replies:

I have no idea what they’re thinking. It would be one thing if polls suggested a tolerable outcome in November, so that playing it safe could possibly make sense as a political strategy. But that’s not the way it is; and it’s hard to see what possible motivation there is for pulling punches. Going for your opponent’s capillaries when you yourself are bleeding heavily?

I’m guessing this is the return of the great Democratic strategy called “keeping your powder dry” — for 2012.

Indeed, I’m inclined to think the White House believes they’ve already lost the congress so they are cutting their losses and looking ahead two years. And that means they would very much like to take a sharp turn to the right, particularly with talk of deficits and spending, in anticipation of the predictable Village narrative that they lost because they were too liberal. (All modern Democratic presidents do this, by the way, regardless of whether or not they lost their majority in the midterms. “Center-right” nation dontcha know.)

However if they do pursue a rhetorical conservative political strategy, they will be stuck with failed conservative policies, which they know are not going to be popular with anyone but the wealthy. It’s a conundrum, at least when it comes to pesky voters (as opposed to pesky major donors.)

This is one of those gut check moments. The administration can make a real argument as Atrios suggests and do the right thing for themselves and the country or they can follow the demagogues, the Masters of the Universe and the Villagers and keep hoping that everything magically turns around so all those vaunted, precious Independents will come back in 2012 without them having to take any risks to Obama’s personal popularity. (The liberals are expected to fall in line in the face of the inevitable GOP freakshow.) If Axelrod is the spokesman for the political team in the White House, and I assume he is, it appears they’ve decided to take the second course.

The congressional Dems are on their own for this one. “The legacy” is on the line and as with all recent presidents, that takes precedence over anything else.

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Tasering A Man Holding A Gun To His Head

by digby

Another weird taser related death:

Investigations into the actions of Northumbria police in the hours before the death of Raoul Moat are concentrating on two Taser shots fired at the fugitive before he killed himself.The Independent Police Complaints Commission will ask if the 50,000-volt charges from the stun gun prompted the former bouncer to fire his shotgun on himself after a six-hour confrontation with police.The IPCC announced an official inquiry into the final moments of the standoff between armed officers and Britain’s most wanted man within hours of Moat’s death.[…]
As the inquiry got under way, Northumbria police’s acting chief constable Sue Sim admitted that a Taser stun gun was fired at the 37-year-old, but “did not prevent his death”. Later, the IPCC also said Taser stun guns were discharged during the police standoff.Although Tasers are designed to incapacitate criminals, medical experts say they can trigger involuntary muscle spasms in people. [No kidding??? ed]
Moat had spent most of the confrontation holding his sawn-off shot gun to his head and neck, before squeezing the trigger at 1.15am. This followed hours of gentle persuasion by police negotiators to give himself up in an attempt to bring to an end one of Britain’s most extraordinary manhunts.

I’m not even sure that this would be investigated in the US at this point.
There is something about the taser that makes police lose their common sense. They apparently come to see it as a magic weapon that simply makes people decide to comply rather than a torture device that causes their bodies to convulse in horrible pain and, if standing, lose muscle control and drop to the ground. Apparently, the authorities either don’t know that, or forget, and use it willy nilly on 87 year old ladies with Alzheimers and suicidal mental patients along with anyone else they perceive to be refusing to respond properly to their orders, regardless of the reasons.
There should be a place for the taser in the policeman’s arsenal. But they have shown that they cannot be trusted to use them. They make their lives easier so they have become a tool of torture and abuse — and death — upon the citizenry rather than a weapon used in place of a gun. It’s clear that this is an experiment that has failed.Update: This post is by digby — I had to use Dennis Hartley’s account for technical reasons.

Choose Lawsuit

by digby

Here’s a lovely story about Rick Scott the fascist corporation in a suit who’s running for Governor of Florida. It looks like the Schiavo circus is coming to town:

Rick Scott is reaching into his corporate past to woo a key electorate in the Republican primary for governor and bolster his claims as a “pro-life leader.””We lost a $43 million lawsuit because we saved the life of a child that the parents didn’t want us to,” the former Columbia/HCA health care CEO said on a recent Panhandle campaign swing. “Everything I’ve done in my career … I care about life.”As antiabortion issues begin to dominate Scott’s contest with Attorney General Bill McCollum, Scott’s lack of a voting record stands in contrast to McCollum’s lengthy history from two decades in Congress and repeated bids for elective office.But as he courts core conservative voters, Scott is thrusting a Texas family’s 20-year-old turmoil into an increasingly bitter dialogue on the topic of life.

And why not? It’s so easy to fool a bunch of pro-life zealots into believing that you actually care about their cause when what you really cared about was saving your corporation money.
You see, 20 years ago the family in question had a very premature child with many complications who they requested not be treated with extraordinary methods. The hospital instituted a policy of treatment of such infants regardless of the parents wishes and the parents later sued the hospital. It was only after that, that Rick Scott’s conglomerate bought the hospital. It obviously fought the lawsuit not because of any moral stand — it’s a corporation — but because it was financially advantageous to do so.
Not that it matters to the “pro-life” cultists. As long as someone is willing to police people’s most difficult and intimate personal and family decisions, they don’t care what the motivations are. They are perfectly happy to have a mendacious, corporate monster as Governor as long as he pays them lip service. They should probably be aware, however, that if it saved his corporation money to force all Christians to have abortions, he would back that too.
Update: This post is by digby — I had to use Dennis Hartley’s account for technical reasons.