Month: December 2010

Reparations For Morons

by digby

I’m just surprised he didn’t call him “boy”:

And it’s not like he muttered this swill in a drunken moment at a friends bar-b-que. He said this is a speech on the floor of the congress. Which, apparently, is fine.

For a serious discussion of one way this plays itself out in society, the New York Review of Books is featuring an essay by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who’s done a bit of work on this over the years. The NY Times describes it this way:

In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.

But the good news is that racism is dead in America so at least we don’t have to worry about that.

King, by the way, is a charter member of the new Tea Party Caucus.

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Parliamentary Mismatch

by digby

If you are wondering why the congress suddenly seems to have become a free fire zone and the Democrats seem not to have gotten the memo, please read this piece by Jack Balkin. One thing is clear, unless the Democrats recognize that things have changed, we might as well just order up some tri-corner hats and join the Tea party because they will be the only game in town:

Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System

Many commentators have noted and bemoaned the obstructionist tactics of the Republicans during Obama’s first two years in office, and the likely gridlock that will emerge once the Republican Party takes control of the House of Representatives. To be sure, in today’s Washington Post, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell state that they are ready and even eager to work with the Democrats. Despite these assertions of good fellowship, however, it seems clear by now that the Republicans are willing to work with the Democrats only if the Democrats put aside all of their preferred policy goals and more or less adopt the policy goals of the Republican Party. President Obama’s recent decision to unilaterally freeze the salaries of federal workers is unlikely to soften the hearts of the Republican faithful and get them to accept a second stimulus package or anything else on the Democrats’ wish list. Quite the contrary, this unbargained for concession is likely to make the Republican leadership increase the pressure on President Obama to negotiate with himself.
I want to put concerns about obstruction and gridlock in a larger perspective. What we are facing today is likely to be importantly different from previous periods of divided government before the George W. Bush Administration. The reason is that at the national level, contemporary American politics suffers from a pathological and debilitating condition: the emergence of parliamentary parties in a presidential system.

[…]One should not assume that Congressional Republicans are acting this way because of bad faith or some set of personal failings. Rather, given the evolution of the Republican Party into an ideologically coherent parliamentary-style party in a presidential system, the Republicans are acting rationally. The Democrats, conversely, need to understand that they must work hard to break the Republicans’ united front. They will not be able to do this simply by being nice to Republicans, or by attempting to meet the Republicans half-way, for if the Republicans are smart, they will not be assuaged by compromise. Their best strategy is to make Americans thoroughly disgusted with government in general, so that they will throw Barack Obama out of office in 2012. If the Democrats want to achieve anything legislatively in the next few years, they must create strategic problems for individual Republicans, causing them to break ranks despite the best efforts of the Republican leadership. The only way to ensure compromise when parties are polarized as they are is to make the failure to compromise politically costly to individual members of the minority party so.

The next time the Democrats become the minority party, they will have abundant incentives to do precisely what the Republicans are doing now, precisely because the Republicans have shown these strategies to be effective in a climate of ideological polarization. The Republicans fully developed many of their current tactics before the Democrats for three reasons. First, the failure of the Bush presidency and the tarnishing of the Republican brand made the development of these oppositional strategies more urgent for the Republicans following Obama’s 2008 victory, when the Democrats controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress. Second, the Republicans became a more ideologically coherent party more quickly than the Democrats did because they continue to be driven by a powerful conservative social movement. Third, the Republicans have learned how to use campaign finance to discipline their members more effectively than the Democrats have. (In fact, the Democrats, eager to regain power, had recruited a more ideologically diverse group of candidates in 2006 and 2008). But there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power.

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don’t want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing — the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate.

Read the whole piece, it’s not long and it explains how we got here and why it’s a problem for a presidential system. (For instance, you can’t call for elections when gridlock makes it impossible to govern.) And although he doesn’t mention it, it’s also why silly centrist notions like this are destined to do nothing but split the same party that’s already outmatched by the hardcore Republicans, thus ensuring that the lunatic fringe of the GOP will continue to have the upper hand.

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Bipartisan Cover-up

by digby

I know I’m supposed to be appalled that this came to light, but well .. I think the people of Spain — and America — have a right to know about it. Scott Horton in Harpers writes:

In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor, Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.

These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations…

Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power

As well it should. One can only dream that this particular detail would concern the people of the United States as much. From David Corn at Mother Jones:

In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. An April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.

The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain’s National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.” The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation’s “universal jurisdiction” law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.

Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. On April 1, embassy officials spoke with chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who indicated that he was not pleased to have been handed this case, but he believed that the complaint appeared to be well-documented and he’d have to pursue it. Around that time, the acting deputy chief of the US embassy talked to the chief of staff for Spain’s foreign minister and a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Justice to convey, as the cable says, “that this was a very serious matter for the USG.” The two Spaniards “expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary.”

Then they brought in the heat.

You know, it’s one thing to not want to look in the rear view mirror. It’s quite another to veer into someone else’s lane and crash their car to keep them from looking into theirs.

Not that it’s a shock that this happened. At the time the story was in the papers I think most of us probably assumed that there was American pressure to shut it down. But I guess I’d hoped that it was unofficial rather than a secret, coordinated Democratic and Republican cover-up. (Who says bipartisanship is dead?)

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Compassionate Conservatism

by digby

You all recall that Ralph Reed was the head of the Christian Coalition for many years and is still considered a leader of the Christian Right, fully forgiven for all his sins.

And you’ll also recall that Elliot Spitzer is an immoral libertine who had to be run out of politics for sleeping with a prostitute.

Here’s how the Christian leader and the immoral libertine came down on the issue of unemployment:

SPITZER: … The pay freeze is a very small bore issue in the grand context of both the economy and the deficit. And I think that is why — when he’s willing to say, folks, who are earning above $1 million or some threshold, have to pay a bit more, so we can pay for unemployment insurance for people who desperately want to work but who can’t get a job in this economy.

That is both fair. It is good for the economy.

Would you support that sort of trade? Do you support even extending unemployment benefits to people who are desperately looking for jobs and can’t get them?

REED: I think we’re reaching a point of diminishing marginal returns on that where the evidence is the more we extend unemployment benefits beyond what used to be 26 weeks, it then turned into 52 weeks, we’re now past 96 weeks.

What we’re doing is we’re basically subsidizing unemployment at a certain point and not encouraging people to reenter the private sector. So I’m not philosophically oppose to extending unemployment benefits, but where do you draw the line? Is it going to be at 250 weeks?

I think at some point we’ve got to be about creating jobs and the eye ought to be on that.

SPITZER: Ralph —

REED: Not on how long you can pay people to be without work.

SPITZER: Nobody disagrees that the primary focus has go to be job creation. On the other hand, as a simple matter of compassion, humanitarian values, when about half of those who are unemployed, have been unemployed for over six months because there simply are no jobs.

REED: Right.

SPITZER: It’s impossible to get a job out there. You cannot say to those folks — we should not as a society say, we won’t give you enough money to put food on the table for your kids. And the threshold that you’re talking about, everybody agrees there should be a threshold. And you know what? We can set it when unemployment gets below 7 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent — pick a number that we can agree upon that makes sense but not when it’s 9.6 percent, or realistically, 16, 17, 18 percent.

This is simply not humane to say to people we won’t give you food — money for food and yet we’re giving a tax break to millionaires. That’s not the society I believe the United States represents.

REED: Well, that’s the problem with making fiscal policy based on the misplaced compassion that doesn’t work. The empirical evidence, Eliot, is very clear, which is that people are more likely to reenter the workforce and find a real job that carries with it dignity, self support and no longer being dependent upon the government when those unemployment benefits run out.

That’s the empirical evidence.

The empirical evidence that there are no jobs is simply not relevant to Reed, who evidently truly believes that the long term unemployed are all malingering cheats who need to be “motivated” and that government has no business being compassionate. It’s a perfect example of the moral depravity and selfishness of the Christian Right. Meanwhile, it’s the horrible (Jewish) commie libertine who’s arguing for compassion for his fellow Americans — as Jesus would surely do.

Can we see what’s wrong with this picture?

Update: I just watched a discussion between Chris Matthews, Mark McKinnon and Howard Fineman in which they all scratched their heads wondering why in the world the Republicans want to pass tax cuts for the rich when their own voters aren’t rich and why they refuse to help the unemployed when “everybody” knows how cruel it is and that it simply must be done.

None of them were willing to even entertain the idea that these right wing zealots simply don’t care about unemployed people because in the great scheme of things there aren’t enough of them to matter and that they find it more profitable to pit their haters against them by characterizing them as as lazy parasites. And the idea that they wouldn’t fight to extend the tax cuts no matter what is simply laughable. It’s their raison d’être. It was baked into the Bush tax cut cake that they would renew them — the only thing stopping it from happening automatically is the fact that they’ve also fetishized deficits to the point where even the weak Democrats should be able to make a argument for letting them expire. (Not to mention the fact that these same assholes say we can’t afford to to pay unemployment insurance with 10% official unemployment in the land.)

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Senator Friskies Spills The Beans

by digby

Via Atrios:

BLITZER: Well, why — why didn’t you insist? You’ve been working on this for a year — and I’ll let Senator Simpson respond. Why didn’t you insist that you were going to work until you could get 14 members on board and have that in the — in the bag?

SIMPSON: Wolf, I guess you don’t understand. We didn’t care if we got two votes.

Atrios quips: “I suppose this is the bluster of a failed fool, but the purpose of the commission, however misguided, wasn’t to release an unpopular report entitled “How Alan Simpson Wants to Destroy America,” it was to…come up with something that could attract broad support.”

That was the stated reason. But I think Simpson may just be blurting out his own distorted version of the truth. They may have cared about getting more than two votes, but it’s also true that the president and the other Grand Bargainers knew they couldn’t come up with something in one report that could pass the congress. They just wanted a vehicle with which to give some of their schemes a bipartisan sheen so they could put them on the agenda.

I’m guessing that “entitlement” cuts would be the top item they wanted, out of the deluded belief that Obama’s legacy would be that he saved Social Security. It’s not like they didn’t say it out loud. But who knows? Maybe the Republicans in American bizarroworld might even meet him halfway with some minor and negligible cuts to defense. (Not likely here, however.)

Anyway, the point was to prove that the Democrats are responsible economic stewards. Like Clinton did. Before the Republicans put his genitalia all over television, impeached him and stole the election from his successor.

It worked so well before, why not do it again?

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This is CNN

by digby

Here is what CNN told me this morning about the Deficit Commission report. I swear it is a true transcript. You can check it later when it goes up on their site:

Alan Simpson: The fact is that we all know the figures and we all know the math. This is it. No more fun and games, smoke and mirrors, alchemy, cunning, trickery, CYA demagoguery and making promises we can’t possibly keep.

CNN Celebrity Brooke Baldwin: I will spare you the figures and the math because it quite simply makes my eyes glaze over. But here’s the situation.

The government, like your household takes in money every months and spends in on necessities, luxuries, whatever. If the money runs out, the government and many households use credit to keep on spending. And that works for a while. But at some point, if nothing changes, every dollar that comes in goes into the payment of the debt. Every other expense, food shelter, cable is cut off or paid for with more debt.

In 15 years, if nothing changes, every dollar the federal government takes in will go for social security and Medicare, the so-called entitlements. And also for the interest on the debt. There will be NO Money for anything else.

Even before that happens, the panel warns that it will drive up the cost of borrowing shrinking the government’s options when it needs cash for emergencies and sending more and more of our tax dollars to other countries that hold America’s IOUs.

Already foreigners own more than half of all of our debt, with China — you probably guessed that — leading the pack.

Now we could spend hours going through the spending cuts the panel may recommend, but with all the fuss about extending the Bush era tax cuts you might wonder how high the rates might go for you if the debt commission gets its way. And again, that’s a long way off from actually happening. Bottom line, income tax rates would go down, maybe as low as 8% for the lowest earners, but exemptions, credits would go away or be sharply reduced. In fact, the federal gas tax would go quite up at 15 cents a gallon. Stay tuned for that.

Yeah, the math makes my eyes glaze over too. But that’s no reason to just babble nonsense and lies and call it news. Talk about smoke and mirrors and making promises you can’t keep …

I don’t even know where to start. But I’ll try.

1) The government is not like your household for a million reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the world over still considers the US Treasury bond, unlike your “promise” to pay your credit card bill, to be the safest financial instrument in the world. Perhaps you think the US really is on the verge of Armageddon, but if you do then we have bigger problems than debt and we might want to shift our focus a bit. And then there’s the taxing and money printing thing, which we won’t even go into.

2) But be that as it may, let’s stipulate that the government is incurring debt that it is going to have to pay back. Why are social security, medicare and interest the only things we’re allegedly “borrowing” for? If you’re going to say that “entitlements” are just a bunch of IOUs, then everything else is too — after all, the government is funding a bunch of wars and Homeland Security and food inspections and agriculture subsidies and a million other things and I don’t recall there being any rule that the first tax dollars go to paying for them and then once they’re gone we borrow for the “entitlements.”

And needless to say, the irony of this is so thick you need a hacksaw to get through it considering the fact that Social Security isn’t, in fact, counted in to the deficit figures at all, and it shouldn’t be because it has a separate revenue stream, which the government borrows from and issues those treasury bonds that all those foreign countries are lining up to buy. But hey, when you go this far down the rabbit hole what the hell’s the difference.

3) The gibberish about the government not being able to borrow cheaply for emergencies is just confidence fairy nonsense — interest rates could go up for any number of reasons, but so far, despite a global financial meltdown and this being the worst financial slump since the 1930s, they aren’t. So this is just shock doctrine BS designed to make people more afraid of what might happen than what’s already happening. (Meanwhile, you’ve got other people banging their drums against inflation, so let’s just say this whole line of thought has gotten very confused — on purpose, I might add.)

4) Then comes the nonsense about us “borrowing” from other countries. Yes the Chinese and others are buying US treasuries bonds, hence they are “lending” us money. But they aren’t doing it because the US is going to them hat in hand and begging for it or because they’ve hatched some nefarious scheme to steal your tax dollars. They are doing it because it’s a good financial deal for them. At this point, it would seem that the Chinese actually have greater faith in the US than Americans do.

5)Then there’s all that icky spending cut junk (like cutting benefits for old and sick people) that we don’t have hours to talk about. Whatevur. So let’s get to the really important stuff — taxes. And guess what? They’re going to go down for the lowest earners and a bunch of loopholes will be cut, isn’t that awesome? (Well, except for that gas tax, which she knows very well will be very, very unpopular, so it’s not like we won’t have anything to complain about.) No mention of the fact that for some odd reason, the commissioners also decided that it was important to cut the taxes of millionaires even more and agree to never let them get above an arbitrary figure. (What that has to do with deficit reduction is still unclear unless they have become supply-side clones, are under the illusion that this will please the confidence fairies or just want to give a little tribute to their rich friends.)But anyway, why should we care about that? Gas tax! Boogabooga!

This is what passes for mainstream journalism on this subject and it’s damned scary. But it is a good explanation as to why the country is contradictory and ignorant about the economy and the deficit. Remember, this isn’t FOX News, it’s CNN which is where the “independents” and many liberals get their news.

I remain convinced that one of the main causes of the systemic breakdown in our human organizing functions is the dumbing down of the media. When you listen to old broadcasts of journalists and politicians, they did not sound this stupid, not even the stupid ones.

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It’s His Turn

by digby

Well hell, nobody could have seen this coming:

Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said. Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.

I’m not even going to comment on this.

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Kicking The Catfood Can Down The Road

by digby

It appears today that the Catfood Commission is dead on arrival as expected. I’m not quite sure why people seem to think this is news — nobody expected that it would get the 14 votes necessary for it to be adopted. The idea was to establish a new bipartisan baseline from which to make certain “Grand Bargains.” It’s always been a goalpost moving exercise and a way to put social security on the menu. Social Security isn’t even part of the deficit, so the fact that they rather clumsily tacked it on anyway should be a tip off. They could have avoided that train wreck if they’d wanted to. We will be talking about the bipartisan agreement from the commission going forward as if it’s been decided that this is the Very Serious position and only the far right kooks and far left kooks disagree.

Speaking of which, I wanted to just point out that this otherwise excellent post by Kevin Drum about everyone fiddling while America burns, the push back against the first draft of the commission report was an unfortunately necessary overreaction. It’s of a different sort altogether than Mosque mania or pat-down fever. If there isn’t a strong reaction to something like this, there’s every reason to believe they may have been able to get the 14 votes in this environment.

There are many progressive initiatives that liberal interest groups could be spending their time and money working on rather than defending the social safety net from people who would destroy it. It’s a sad comment indeed that it was necessary to mobilize like this under a Democratic president and congressional majority.

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At Long Last Sir …

by digby

have you no … oh forget it. Of course he doesn’t have any:

Beck’s been using the movie [It’s a Wonderful Life] to promote a visit he’s making to the economically hard-hit town of Wilmington, Ohio. He has said, inaccurately, that the town has taken no government money and that its residents’ economic plan is based on praying to God to provide. In that sense, he argues, Wilmington is trying to mimic Bedford Falls, the fictional town where It’s a Wonderful Life is set, as opposed to the movie’s fictional slum of Pottersville. Although the film is not devoid of religious and political themes, it has long been regarded as a classic treatment of small-town life and the power of the little guy to overcome the perfidy of greedy bigwigs. But truthfully, the movie’s broader universal themes are ones that transcend politics and religion. It’s a message that in the end, we are all our brothers’ keepers. (I hope the biblical reference doesn’t sound too socialist for Beck.) But Beck, in his zeal to appropriate the film for his own politically divisive purposes, claims that it demonstrates the evils of government intervention in business. Despite Beck’s apparent belief to the contrary, however, the villain in the movie wasn’t the government, but the corrupt banker Mr. Potter, played by Lionel Barrymore. In his radio broadcast last Wednesday, Beck read my post and dismissed the idea that there were progressive themes in the movie. (Either he or his show’s producer also called me “screwy” while doing a pretty darn good Jimmy Stewart impression.)

Who saved the Building & Loan in Bedford Falls? The people did. George did, with his own private funds. The government didn’t bail him out, and that’s the deal. You remember the bank was bailing everyone out … along with the government closing down the banks. The banks and the government were in collusion. … The local banks were the ones that didn’t have a problem. It’s the gigantic banks run by people like [Mr.] Potter that were just trying to get rich and didn’t care about people. The local banks are the George Baileys. That’s not progressive. Progressive is about going past the Constitution and having people at a government level babysit people because they’re all too stupid.

What Beck is saying, I believe—although it’s difficult to know for sure, because his logic is so hard to follow—is that the government was in bed with the big, evil banks, and that the good-guy local banks were successful because they were free from government regulation. This depiction matches his thesis about today’s economic problems: that too much government intervention in the form of bank bailouts is the inherent evil—as opposed to the absence of regulation that led to the banks’ implosion at the hands of, well, you know, greedy bigwigs. To Beck, the bank bailouts are evidence of socialism—the government controlling business—as opposed to the reality that the big banks got a free regulatory ride for so long, and that their political power is so vast, that the government had to bail them out to save the world economy from collapse, leaving the consumers ripped off and taxpayers footing the bill. Similarly, Beck asserts that Mr. Potter was evil, not because he was a greedy bigwig, but because he was in collusion with the government. Like his portrayal of our current economic woes, this is just more Beck demagoguery. What he conveniently dissmisses is that Pottersville, as depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life, was solely the making of the unregulated free market—the impact of Mr. Potter’s iron-fisted monopoly on the town. He also neglects to mention that Bedford Falls’ survival was due to competition from the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan, a communally owned organization.

For a man who called the first black president a racist and compares himself to Martin Luther King, this bizarroworld interpretation of an iconic American story shouldn’t be too shocking. But somehow, I’m shocked. Defiling It’s A Wonderful Life in service of his distorted and delusional worldview seems like sacrilege on a whole other level to me.

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Quote Of The Day

by digby

Here’s a servant of power who knows his job and does it well. David Gergen on CNN:

I think the bigger issue we’re going to fave in this internet world, is that there are huge international organizations in every sphere, and if you have an alienated employee, and there are lot of people in every organization who can tear the place apart, and they put out these kinds of documents. I think it’s going to be extremely hard to lead and to manage international organizations. The security of the United States rests on that but so does the whole corporate world. You talked about the trust deficit earlier in politics. You begin to have that trust deficit spreading to every other organization and you really could damage the workings of the international economy.

And that will put a lot of people out of work.

I don’t think he was talking about crooked bankers and greedy hedge fund managers, but in that regard, he might be right. If we’re lucky.

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