Month: September 2010

Constituent Service

by digby

“The people who own the country ought to govern it” John Jay

According to the polls, a majority of the American people are in favor of letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Obviously, the Republicans are not in favor of this. But Greg Sargent reports that increasing numbers of Democrats are coming out against it too.

I think that may be the saddest comment on Democratic Party failure yet, even including the advancement of the Cheney torture regime. Not because it’s worse morally, but because the opportunity to educate people and obtain their support for progressive economics was practically laid at their feet and they whiffed.

But then, big Democratic donors don’t want their taxes raised either, I suppose.

I’ll just quote this excellent post by Kevin Drum again (click the link for the data points that back up his conclusion) and move on:

If your income is low — and probably a fair number of the 56% who want Bush’s tax cuts for the rich repealed are low-income voters — politicians simply don’t care. If you’re middle class they care a little more. But if you’re rich, then they really, really care. And it’s safe to say that most high earners are opposed to repealing tax cuts on high earners. That goes for all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats too. So what seems like a no-brainer isn’t as simple as it looks. Economically it makes sense to repeal Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, and a majority of American citizens are in favor of it. Unfortunately for them, they belong to the wrong majority. They’re not rich themselves, and increasingly in America, that means their votes just don’t count.

Here, Wingnuts!

by digby

Dave Weigel says that Haley Barbour is a bad dogwhistler with this comment:

“I don’t know why people think what they think,” Barbour, the head of the Republican Governor’s Association, told USA Today. “This is a president we know less about than any other president. But I have no idea.”

Weigel claims this fails because he’s “tipping his hat to the popular narrative that the media ‘never vetted’ Obama and thus never discovered the Marxism right below the surface” and it doesn’t work.

I heard something completely different and I thought it was pretty sharp. He wasn’t trying to subtly draw attention to Obama’s college curriculum. He’s talking to the birthers. And I think they heard him loud and clear.

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Tough Love For Parasites

by digby

I get a fair amount of criticism for calling the Randian wingnuts things like “low wage conservatives” because it’s so hyperbolic and over the top and we really need to stop being so silly and all. But Meteor Blades caught this rather stark example of how literally true it is:

Kevin Hasset, AEI’s director of economic-policy studies, was an adviser to John McCain in his bid for the presidency. He writes, Your Fat Paycheck Keeps Your Neighbor Unemployed:

So here comes the leap into ice-cold water: The biggest problem with the labor market right now is that wages are too high. As Washington again turns to government spending as a cure for unemployment, some against-the-grain thinking is in order. Economics teaches that full employment would be reached if wages adjust downward, to a level that better reflects current circumstances. At lower wages, employers would desire more workers. Labor markets generate persistent unemployment only if wages are sticky, failing to fall as demand declines.

So why aren’t American workers eagerly joining this race to the bottom, according to Hasset? Because of the minimum wage. Because of the damned unions. Because of extended unemployment benefits. Because of an unwillingness to pull up stakes and move. And, besides not understanding Economics 101, all those silly people have psychological issues:

…the natural reluctance of workers to accept lower pay is amplified by how their wage helps define their identity. A $60,000-a-year office worker might have an extra-hard time coming to terms with becoming a $40,000-a-year worker.

That’s what Rand Paul calls “tough love.” Seriously.

But that’s not to say the Galtian supermen should join the sacrifice:

The nation’s biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today.

The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In “CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month’s worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the report said.

“These numbers all reflect a broader trend in Great Recession-era Corporate America: the relentless squeezing of worker jobs, pay and benefits to boost corporate earnings and maintain corporate executive paychecks at their recent bloated levels,” the authors wrote.

At least the producers are doing ok. We should all be grateful for that.

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Deficit Death Panel

by digby

I know the conservatives want to cut “entitlements” but literally killing off old people seems extreme even for them. But they seem to think that the elderly are being profligate spenders on health care and so they need to “take responsibility” and pay more so they won’t use as much. Anyone who’s been around old people and their plethora of health issues knows that’s tantamount to killing them.

Evidently, the right wing deficit commissars are very intrigued by the “savings” we could achieve if we didn’t have so many old people around. The Democrats are all tuckered out from health care and aren’t even engaging on the issue, leaving it to Paul Ryan and his merry band of Galtian supermen to come up with a clever plan all by themselves:

That leaves rigid conservatives like David Camp and Paul Ryan — the GOP’s top budget guy and author of a plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program — at the top of the rhetorical heap. As a result, according to the second source, the commission’s focus reflects their priorities much more than progressive ones.

“There have been some discussions about cost-sharing. There have been some discussions about Medi-gap policies,” the source says.

At a staff level, this source says, the feeling is that “there needs to be more skin in the game and people need to pay more…the whole argument that people don’t understand how much health care costs and are wasteful.”

“A lot of discussion on the commission has been that people need to get better price signals and be smarter shoppers,” the second source said.

Sure. 80 year olds need more “skin in the game.” The fact that they are dying shouldn’t be any excuse for them failing to be “smart shoppers.”

The issue isn’t that medicare costs aren’t a problem. It’s how to solve it. And since the Democrats are so tired of dealing with health care they appear to be allowing the Ryan Express to take the lead. And needless to say, they aren’t interested in dealing with the cost side at all:

“A lot of discussion on the commission has been that people need to get better price signals and be smarter shoppers,” the second source said. “And that is very, very worrisome.”

“The solutions that you come up with on health care are determined by what you identify as the problem,” the source said. “If you think the consumers are the problem, then you’re going to come up with a set of answers that include vouchers and higher cost sharing and that’s a problem. If you believe that the problem is the system, then you look at systemic issues…. If you believe that the only thing you really care about is federal spending, then come up with proposals that shift costs on to businesses and individuals and maybe local governments.”

I wonder if the Democrats might be planning to tell the seniors about this. Too shrill?

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Where At Least I Know I’m Free

by digby

Fees good!

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

By a 6-to-5 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer prisoners to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the case on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured in captivity — and that Jeppesen was complicit in that alleged abuse.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher described the case, which reversed an earlier decision, as presenting “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” But, he said, the majority had “reluctantly” concluded that the lawsuit represented “a rare case” in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have a day in court.

While the alleged abuses occurred during the Bush administration, the ruling added a chapter to the Obama administration’s aggressive national security policies…

Among other policies, the Obama national security team has also authorized the C.I.A. to try to kill a United States citizen suspected of terrorism ties, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the C.I.A.’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers — though the administration has forbidden torture and says it seeks assurances from other countries that detainees will not be mistreated.

Well at least nobody can call Obama a wimp going into the 2012 election. The right can’t possibly use national security against him since he’s been just as ruthless about maintaining Cheney’s torture regime as Cheney was, right? They wouldn’t do that. And as long as he does what the military and intelligence agencies want him to do, I’m sure he’ll have a free hand to do anything he chooses.

I suppose that’s being unfair. This probably isn’t just political. They may very well believe that they need to destroy the constitution in order to save it. After all, Obama sees himself as the heir to Abraham Lincoln and he suspended habeas corpus, so there’s that.

Did any of us think that we’d be reading this from the ACLU under the Obama administration?

This is a sad day not only for the torture victims whose attempt to seek justice has been extinguished, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation’s reputation in the world. To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court. If today’s decision is allowed to stand, the United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.

Think about that. The United States will have closed its courtroom doors to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers. Is this a great country or what?

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Virtually Speaking

by digby

This should be interesting:

MATT YGLESIAS @VIRTUALLY SPEAKING w/ JAY ACKROYD
Matt and Jay discuss the issues that are dividing the progressive wing of the Democratic party, in particular the pursuit of moderate policy objectives by President Obama and the Congressional leadership.

THURSDAY, Sept 9 *******6pm PDT/9pm EST*****

Simulcast on BlogTalkRadio
Studio Audience

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Round Two

by digby

From the “who could have ever predicted” file:

If you thought passing the health care overhaul was messy, wait until Republicans try to repeal it if they regain power this fall.

It could come down to who blinks first, with some Republicans raising the prospect of a government shutdown.

Even if Republicans succeed beyond any current predictions and capture both the Senate and the House, they wouldn’t have enough GOP votes to overcome President Barack Obama’s veto.

But Republicans could still fall back on the congressional power of the purse, denying the administration billions of dollars to carry out the most far-reaching social legislation since Medicare and Medicaid.

“The endgame is a fight over funding,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

During the health care debate, raising this point was cause for major slap downs from the Very Serious People who repeatedly assured me that once the legislation was passed they would never even try to repeal it because people would be so upset. When it was pointed out that the benefits weren’t going to kick in for years, leaving a huge gap between expectations and reality for quite some time, I recall being told that the Democrats would be able to run on the achievement of passing it in the fall of 2010 and ever after and would protect its legacy.

I wrote this back in December when the battle was raging:

There has been no public education about responsibility to buy insurance in all this or any strategy to manage expectations of what people will get with Health Care Reform. And because of that the right is going to have a field day telling everyone that the nanny state liberals are forcing them to give to money to insurance companies and then spending their tax money on poor (brown/black) people. So, again, running around saying “Mission Accomplished” is bad politics.

As for the promise to fix all the problems once the bill is in place, I think people are vastly underestimating the forces that are going to be brought to bear to prevent that from happening. Republicans aren’t so disorganized that they forgot that they must stop Democrats from giving people reason to believe in government. In addition to deploying their formidable communications apparatus to present health care reform as a massive failure to the majority who are currently covered by employers and will only see the effects from afar, they are going to strangle improvements in the cradle by any means necessary including leveraging their most valuable new voting demographic in the age of Obama — the elderly. On top of that, we are entering an era of deficit fetishism and have an industry that has shown it will do everything in its power to protect its interests.

It’s not impossible, but watching the Democrats operate at the zenith of their institutional power over the past year does not give me any confidence that they want to, much less can, battle all that back.

They said that we just needed to pass this so we could get something better down the road. Perhaps that’s true. But for the foreseeable future it’s going to a fight just to keep the fairly crappy plan as it is, and I frankly have very little faith that’ they’ll be able to do it. I certainly hope they do.

I assume that President Obama will veto repeal measures, and I would certainly assume that there will be enough Democrats left in congress to prevent an override. Funding will be an ongoing problem because of the way the program is designed, so I don’t know if Obama can maintain the levels needed to gain support and if a Republican takes office with a GOP congress, we can forget that altogether. I still think, as I thought then, that this sanguine attitude about the future of this health care bill was extremely short sighted.

Just now I saw Jonathan Alter on Ed Shultz’s show impatiently defending Rahm Emmanuel from Adam Green’s criticism by saying he had pushed through “the most important social legislation in 30 years.” He explained that he’d told Alter that Democrats had tried it the “progressive” way for 50 years and failed and that you had to invite in all the special interests in order to get it done. (And apparently he was just spitting fire when Holy Joe backed out of the medicare expansion. Sure he was.)

I assume that he’s going to to be long out of the White House when the Republicans starve it of funding and repeal all the affordability measures. But don’t worry, they’ll keep in the provision that says insurers have to agree to provide policies for pre-existing conditions. It’s just that they’ll allow them to charge whatever they want for them. But the legislation did pass so it’s not like Rahm won’t always have his check mark in the “win” column. As far as the rest of us goes, the jury is still out.

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Burying Kumbaaya

by digby

I have never been one of those who was mesmerized by Barack Obama’s speeches. I don’t know why. It’s not that I disagreed with him particularly, but I just never felt the magic. But I think I liked today’s speech more than any I’ve ever heard him give in a long time.

I didn’t see it, I read it. And if he delivered it with any passion at all I’m hopeful that it signals that he’s “turned the page” on his quixotic crusade to bridge the unbridgeable bridge between red and blue, at least for the time being. This was a speech in which he formally threw in the towel on kumbaaya, which is not only the best politics for the moment, it’s long overdue.

I wish he’d left out so much about the deficit, but at least he acknowledged that the Democrats created a surplus that was frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthy. And while I understand the antipathy toward him using Republican heroes to demonstrate his own values it’s smart to do it because it puts the Republicans on defense. (You know how mad it makes Democrats to have wingnuts use JFK as their own, right?) I’m not sure about Reagan “saving social security” but he did sign a huge tax increase to stabilize it for decades, so that’s something I guess. Certainly, it’s something that will drive the neo-libertarian tea partiers nuts. I like that.

It’s a good speech, not much fatuous “Mission Accomplished”, more “Stay The Course.” But he puts the blame squarely on the Republicans for their obstruction, which regardless of the administration’s own misapprehensions about the nature of the opposition and what was needed to pull the nation out of this awful slump, is good politics. It’s too late to do fix the economy before the election, so playing the blame game is all they have. (It also has the benefit of being true.) Obama played it well today.

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Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

by digby

Talk about blaming the victim:

Right, if only he said “this is a lie” the whole thing would go away. The problem is not that they are lying about him, it’s that he hasn’t been effective at stopping them from lying about him.

I’m glad Kurtz said it’s an “established fact in his mind” that Obama isn’t a Muslim. That’s a good step, considering that he isn’t a Muslim! But to simultaneously toss aside what Obama said about … well, basically, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is just malpractice.

There are reasons why all these millions of people believe that Obama is a Muslim and one of the big ones is the right wing media. Since Kurtz is supposed to be a media critic you’d think he would have followed that line instead of questioning what Obama’s doing or not doing to refute what he himself acknowledges is a lie.

Here’s another example from just a few minutes ago on CNN. Rick Sanchez was talking with Deborah Feyerick about the so-called Ground Zero mosque controversy and she explained that the problem was that the builders of the community center didn’t reach out to other Muslim leaders in the nation before planning the project. She said:

They’re dealing with the blowback that they had no idea … they didn’t do the kind of due diligence that or opposition research if you’re going to go with this kind of an issue.

More Church of the Savvy dogma. Do you want to know the due diligence and oppo research they did? How about this:

On December 21, 2009, Laura Ingraham hosted Daisy Khan, a co-founder of Park 51 and the wife of its Imam, Abdul Rauf.

INGRAHAM: I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it. [Mayor] Bloomberg is for it. Rabbis are saying they don’t have a problem with it. […] I like what you’re trying to do and Ms. Khan we appreciate it and come on my radio show some time.

KHAN: Yeah, we need the support of people like you seriously.

INGRAHAM: Alright, you take care.

Up until the time a bunch of shrieking Islamophobes realized that hey could leverage wingnut bigotry and and at Barack Hussein Obama into a sideshow over this project, nobody gave a damn if they were building it. Why would they reach out to national Muslim leaders when there was no controversy and it was supported by religious and secular leaders in the city in which it was being built?

Now all these lemmings in the press are blaming the mosque for not being savvy enough to have seen this onslaught coming, as if there’s been an anti-Muslim crusade going on since 9/11. Except, there hasn’t been had there. Even when the pain was fresh and people were angry and afraid and Bush was leading the cheers from atop the rubble, they weren’t doing this stuff. This “problem” didn’t appear until we elected a new president who these people don’t like.

And that’s his fault too. If he were a more savvy politician his political enemies wouldn’t think he was a black Muslim foreigner and they wouldn’t think the country was being taken over by terrorists. He has only himself to blame for this.

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Tolerance

by digby

It’s not even noon yet and my brain is already fried trying to untwist GOP logic.

Here’s the orange House minority leader this morning:

“To Pastor Jones and those who want to build the [so-called Ground Zero] Mosque,” Boehner said (drawing an equivalence between Koran burning and the Cordoba House Project in lower Manhattan) “Just because you have a right to do something in America, does not mean it’s the right thing to do. We’re a nation of religious freedom — we’re also a nation of tolerance. I think in the name of tolerance, people ought to really think about the kind of actions they’re taking.”

Needless to say, I would never be so unforgivably hyperbolic as to draw such comparisons, but if one were to do it one could only logically draw it between the Muslims who are inflamed by an American Christian preacher defiling the Koran and the American Christians and Jews who are inflamed by Muslims defiling the “hallowed ground” of 9/11 by building a religious center in the vicinity. Indeed, their arguments are the same.

Boehner basically defines religious tolerance as not inflaming passions on both sides. What that means in practice is that Christians shouldn’t burn Korans and Muslims shouldn’t build mosques. Can we see what’s wrong with that picture?

As I wrote earlier, I’m not big on the loose lips sink ship concept when it comes to domestic political issues. Once you go down that road, there’s no end to it. They can always find a way to justify suppressing free speech in the name of “keeping people safe.” I’m obviously horrified by the idea that American soldiers are in danger from this kind of demonstration, but one of the values they are allegedly fighting for is the American value of free speech, which means that idiots have a right to burn Korans. Obviously, that also means that we have an equal right to condemn it, which I do.

But then I also condemn the Islamophobic freakout over the Cordoba House and the mosque protests around the country. John Boehner is having a little trouble with that sort of consistency because he knows that many of his followers are bigots and he doesn’t want to offend them. That’s the kind of tolerance we don’t need.

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