Month: April 2011

Tea Reflux

by digby

Yesterday, Think Progress reported that Paul Ryan was confronted by a constituent who complained about his plan to destroy Medicare. Apparently, Ryan’s not the only one:

CHRISTMAN: Excuse me, I’d like to get something off my chest. And that is, you seem to think that because I’m not affected, I won’t care if my niece, my grandson, my child is affected. I do care. And what you’re doing with this Ryan budget is you’re taking Medicare and you’re changing it from a guaranteed health care system to one that is a voucher system where you throw seniors on the mercy of for-profit insurance companies. […]

BARLETTA: Well, I won’t destroy Medicare, Medicare is going to be destroyed by itself. You’re….

CHRISTMAN: I have a great way for you…

CROWD: Let him talk….Sit down!…Let him talk! SIT DOWN!

MAN: I agree with her. And you know what? Why don’t you tell me to sit down?!

CROWD: SIT DOWN!

MAN: She’s an American citizen. … Why don’t you show some manners and shut your mouth and let her talk. … Why don’t you grow up and stop acting like a bunch of little boys?

The most amazing thing about this — and as a member of the progressive movement it shames me to admit it — this stuff is not orchestrated by the Democrats or liberal interest groups. We are, quite simply, too lame and too unorganized to do it. (I know this because there is a huge amount of kvetching going on behind the scenes about why the left can’t get its act together on this.)

These are just plain old regular citizens going to the townhalls on their own and challenging the Roadmap to Hell. And they’re doing it in spite of the media rending their garments and speaking in tongues about how the deficit is going to kill us all in our beds.

These Republicans should be concerned about this, but I suppose they will enlist their Tea Partiers to shout these dissenters down, and keep a lid on the problem. The voting booth, however, is private. (So far anyway.)

Fine Centrist Whine

by digby

He’s “doing the best he can”:

Nick Clegg rounded on critics who “vilify” his party’s role in coalition, insisting he is doing the “best I can” to shape government policies around Liberal Democrat values.
[…]

Clegg said those who argue that AV would lead to more coalitions and “broken promises”, yet claim to want a “different kind of politics” where parties can work together in the national interest, “have to grow up a bit”. “Compromise is not a betrayal,” he said.

The Lib Dem leader, who has been lambasted for his party’s U-turn on tuition fees and its position on the pace and scale of public spending cuts, said “difficult compromises” had to be made because the party had only 57 MPs out of 650.

“If people want more Liberal Democrat policies, the way to get them is to elect a majority Liberal Democrat government. That didn’t happen,” he said.

“In the meantime, I will continue to make what are sometimes difficult compromises, but ones which are always shaped as best I can by the liberal values I hold dear.”

He criticised opponents on the left and right, saying: “You can’t claim to stand for a new kind of politics, for a new kind of pluralism, and then vilify those who try to practise it.”

Clegg described AV as a “simple update” to the electoral system, intended to give people more power and choice.

“It means all MPs will have to try to win the support of a majority of their constituents instead of relying on their core vote,” he added.

“It means they will have to engage with people who are not their core supporters, listening to a wider range of views and bringing more people into the democratic process. It will help to reduce the complacency of MPs with jobs for life in safe seats.
[…]
“We aren’t going to enter into a Maoist, perpetual revolution,” he said. “This is a once in a blue moon opportunity to change the electoral system.

“It’s completely wrong to somehow suggest this is a stepping stone for something else. This is the change and it should be considered only on those merits.”

Without getting into the merits of the UK’s AV vote (proportional representation) about which I don’t know enough to comment, I bring this up to illustrate the similarity of rhetoric we hear from the Unity Pony and “Post-partisan” people in the US. Essentially, what is happening in Britain is the same thing that happened here, it’s just that here we have two parties with three factions instead of three parties. But both countries have the left, the right and the centrists — who align with the right and then whine to the left about how much it hurts them more than it hurts us and how they can’t help it. Same old, same old.

I just bring this up as a bit of a cautionary tale to those who believe that our problems could be solved by a parliamentary system. Theoretically, it would be easier for the people to dissolve the government when they go too far. But as we’ve seen in Britain, it also makes it easier for them to go too far in the first place.

The problem is bigger than the political system. It’s about the influence of Big Money and an economic belief system that serves them. And it’s global.

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Raising The Sunken Swiftboats

by digby

On the heels of the latest polling showing that a rather large majority of Republicans really want to believe that Barack Obama cannot possibly be a legitimate president, (vthis shouldn’t come as any surprise (via email):

Donald Trump has been churning up the 2012 presidential race with his many
questions about Barack Obama’s eligibility, and now a book, “Where’s the Birth
Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President,” by
two-time No. 1 New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi, is creating more
waves.

Today it was headlined on the Drudge Report, which declared, “The street date is
a LONG month away, and author Jerome Corsi, the man who torpedoed John Kerry’s
presidential dreams with SWIFT BOAT, has gone underground and is holding his new
findings thisclose.

“‘It’s utterly devastating,’ reveals a source close to the publisher. ‘Obama may
learn things he didn’t even know about himself!'” Drudge said.

Drudge wondered whether the president’s attorneys will “attempt to interfere
with the book’s distribution?” and whether the book will “finally – once and for
all – put an end to the growing controversy?”

The image of the book was seen on Rush Limbaugh’s personal computer today as he
broadcast his top-rated radio program from his Florida studio.

Jerome Corsi’s “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” book can be partially seen
featured on the Drudge Report on Rush Limbaugh’s computer as he broadcast his
radio show from South Florida Wednesday, April 20, 2011.

“The book results from three years of continuing research,” Corsi said today. “I
traveled to Kenya and to Hawaii – I have hired private investigators and had the
help of inside sources in Kenya, Indonesia and Hawaii. The book will contain
startling new information, and the release of the book will be orchestrated
through WND with documents the public has never seen before.”

Interest in the controversy has accelerated in recent months. There was Hawaii
Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s famous pledge to find Barack Obama’s birth certificate
and make it public to shut up the so-called “birthers.”

The governor’s quest raised national interest in the issue – especially when he
failed to produce the promised documentation. Members of Congress have raised
similar questions about Obama’s eligibility, and state lawmakers are considering
plans to require documentation from presidential candidates.

Then came Trump out of the blue, asking questions WND’s newsroom team has been
asking for the last two and a half years, raising the national debate to furious
new heights.

Now another shoe is ready to drop.

Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND and WND Books, the
publisher of the book, declared, “Potentially, I believe this book is the
political endgame for Barack Obama.”

“I don’t see how he can be re-elected with hard questions and new evidence of
his ineligibility raised by the book. It’s a game-changer – and the news media
blackout on this issue has now turned into a media feeding frenzy to cover their
negligent rear ends.”

I’m sure the book is complete nonsense. But I’m afraid that Cokie’s Law is in effect– “it’s out there.” And that means we are probably in for a very, very stupid summer.

I doubt this will still be prominently on the menu in the fall of 2012 (although they’ll certainly be serving it to those who want it.) But it’s yet another example of how the right wing noise machine can churn out a bucket of tabloid offal disguised as news and the mainstream media cannot stop themselves from digging in.

Update: Aaaand… Breitbart’s site goes all-in.

Update II: Oh fergawdsakes.

h/t to @tarkloon

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Reaching an accord

by digby

I’m sure this will come as a big surprise, but Tom Coburn says the Gang of 6 isn’t planning any major tax hikes:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a member of the Gang of Six group that is working on a plan to reduce the federal deficit, said that the group’s three GOP members wouldn’t sign on to an agreement that would raise taxes in a substantial way.

“There’s no plan to have a significant tax hike on anyone,” Coburn said on conservative talker Laura Ingraham’s radio show. “I don’t think there’s any of the three of us who will embrace tax hikes.”

Coburn has been working for months with Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) and Mike Crapo (Idaho) and Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.), Kent Conrad (N.D.) and Mark Warner (Va.) on a plan that’s considered one of the best hopes for reaching an accord on deficit and debt reduction.

The plan is due to be released sometime in early May, and Coburn emphasized Thursday that the Gang of Six hadn’t reached any agreement at this point.

But Republicans in the gang are under tremendous pressure from conservative groups to produce a plan that doesn’t raise taxes, a policy maneuver that would be anathema to many on the right.

While Coburn said that the talks wouldn’t yield any significant tax hike, he also said that didn’t mean some Americans’ tax burdens wouldn’t rise.

The Oklahoma conservative suggested that the Gang of Six is examining a kind of tax reform similar to the type suggested by President Obama’s fiscal commission, in which marginal rates are lowered but many tax credits are eliminated from the code.

Right. I’m sure those tax credits will all be the ones that have lobbyists defending them. After all, the last thing politicians need in an election year is money.

But don’t worry, the president has promised to let the tax cuts expire on schedule right after the election, so it’s not like tax hikes are off the table.

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Lessons For Today

by digby

Here are two very important pieces of relevant information that are not well understood even by many liberals. The first is about the stale trope that the ratio of workers to retirees was once much much higher and has shrunk to an unforeseen, unsustainable level. The second is about the idea that patients are “consumers” who need to be making “smarter choices.”

Scott Hochberg:

On Face the Nation this Sunday, Sen. Mark Warner was asked by host Bob Schieffer why his ‘Gang of Six’ would take on Social Security reform in their forthcoming budget proposal. His response reflected a commonly-held myth about Social Security’s history that greatly exaggerates the changes in the worker-to-retiree ratio between 1950 and today. Warner gave as his rationale the popular refrain that “part of this is just math: 16 workers for every one retiree 50 years ago, three workers for every retiree now.”

Senator Warner is claiming that Social Security is less financially secure than in decades past because it no longer has a sustainable worker-to-retiree ratio. But this statement is highly misleading, and in fact it is a version of the same conservative spin that President Bush often used during his attempt to privatize the program.

In fact, the high ratio of workers to retirees in 1950 was an anomaly, which resulted from the larger number of workers that were incorporated into the program at the time, such as millions of farm workers and domestic workers. Furthermore, because the program was still relatively new, the first workers to contribute to the program had not yet started to collect benefits. To demonstrate how meaningless the 16:1 number it, consider this: Only five years later [in 1955], the worker-to-beneficiary ratio was halved to 8:1, and by 1975 it was down to what it is today. And just ten years earlier, in 1940, the ratio had been 149.5 workers for every one retiree!

The truth is that as the economy grows and technological innovation increases, fewer workers are needed to generate the same and higher levels of economic productivity. So long as the economy is growing, having even a 2:1 ratio of workers to retirees is sustainable. The worker-to-retiree ratio has been stable for almost forty years and has not failed to supply adequate levels of benefits.

It’s not a math problem it’s a politics problem.

Paul Krugman:

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

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Don’t Make Us Work Until We Die

by digby

I can’t help but be reminded of this post from a couple of years ago:

CNN’s week-end “money” show did a story on how the recession is affecting people in California. They interviewed an 84 year old waitress. That’s right, an 84 year old waitress:

Professor Michael Shires: Right now it comes down to fear…

Thelma Guttierez: Fear for people like Mildred Copeland, who’s 84 and still waiting tables after 34 years.

Shires: Unlike the recession in the early 90s that was driven by the collapse in aerospace, employees from all sectors of the economy feel like they’re at risk of losing their jobs.

Guttierez: Already tens of thousands have lost their jobs this year. In February, unemployment in California reached 10.5 percent and going up.

Shires: most of the projections get us up somehwere around 12 percent between now and this time next year.

Guttierez: That translates to loss of nearly a million jobs in the golden state, according to economic forecasts.

84 year old Mildred Copeland (video) : Would you like hash browns or home fries?

Guttierez: Bad news for Mildred. She’s eager to hold on to her job.

Mildred: You get to a time in your life where you say well, I can sit back and relax a little bit and not have to worry, but it’s not like that.

Read on for the rest of the story.

Evidently, this is the new fate for many more of the elderly. Between raising the retirement age, skimping on the benefits, wage stagnation and economic wipe-outs like the Great Recession, young and old alike will be competing for all those low paying jobs. But since three and four generations will all have to live under the same roof, perhaps they can come up with some sort of job share concept so that they can work in shifts and someone will be at home to take care of the children. As long as it doesn’t inconvenience the employer, of course.

Click here to find out about the rallies all over the country on April 27th and 28th. If there isn’t one near you, join the Virtual Rally by taking a picture of yourself with your sign saying “Don’t Make Us Work Until We Die” and email it to: virtualrally@socialsecurity-works.org with your City & State in the subject line.

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Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone

by digby

Discussing the fact that the GOP is sending a couple of political hacks to Obama’s congressional deficit commission, Matt Yglesias makes a great observation:

You have a government set to steadily increase spending on autopilot as a result of demographic change and rising health care costs. And you have a Democratic President urging congress to enact spending cuts. But you have conservative politicians refusing to make a serious effort to reach an agreement out of some blend of taxophobia and fear of giving the President a win. The result, again, whether the right realizes it or not, is a gift to the wing of the Democratic Party that disagrees with Obama about the desirability of enacting spending cuts.

In my fantasies, not only would the Republicans block all these awful spending cuts, Obama would fix the medium term deficit entirely with one swipe of the pen in December of 2012 by vetoing the inevitable extension of all the Bush tax cuts and letting them expire. He would have already won his final election and could afford to take the heat.

Like I said, it’s a fantasy: liberal governance. Sort of like unicorns.

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The Ryan Express collides with common sense

by digby

Paul Ryan has been holding townhalls across his district. And guess what? His constituents aren’t all that impressed with his Randy conservatism:

CONSTITUENT: The middle class is disappearing right now. During this time of prosperity, the top 1 percent was taking about 10 percent of the total annual income, but yet today we are fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire? And we’re fighting to not raise the Social Security cap from $87,000? I think we’re wrong. RYAN: A couple things. I don’t disagree with the premise of what you’re saying. The question is what’s the best way to do this. Is it to redistribute… (Crosstalk) CONSTITUENT: You have to lower spending. But it’s a matter of there’s nothing wrong with taxing the top because it does not trickle down. RYAN: We do tax the top. (Audience boos). Let’s remember, most of our jobs come from successful small businesses. Two-thirds of our jobs do. You got to remember, businesses pay taxes individually. So when you raise their tax rates to 44.8 percent, which is what the president is proposing, I would just fundamentally disagree. That is going to hurt job creation.

The GOP could easily capitulate on this and the only actual votes they would lose would be the top 5%. And maybe not even that since the aristocrats would still have to vote for someone regardless. But they won’t. The anti-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftax movement is a cult and they are zombies in its thrall.

But it sounds as though the public isn’t buying it. It turns out that if you demand draconian spending cuts to cut the debt common sense says you should raise taxes on millionaires too. Go figure.

Update: if you’d like to help Ryan understand this, you can throw a couple of bucks this way.

A Matter of Interpretation

by digby

These new polls (via TPM) showing Obama’s approval rating slipping are probably irrelevant to anything concerning the 2012 race, but when you look at the numbers in the possible match-ups bewteen him and the motley GOP line-up, you have to feel a little bit of a chill. I doubt very seriously that he will have any real competition — even the best GOP case of T-Paw or Daniels has “Mondale redux” written all over it.

But that doesn’t mean these numbers are meaningless. The danger lies in how the Obama campaign and the Democrats interpret them (or use and an excuse to pass certain policies.) Do they see slippage as a sign that they haven’t been accommodating enough? That they need to find more ways to “compromise” to be seen as “getting things done”? Or do they look at these numbers as a sign that they need to fight the Republicans harder on their extremist agenda?

Let’s just say that the numbers probably indicate that they need to change something. The question is what they think they need to change.

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“It’s Scary!”

by digby

My latest in The Hill about why Democrats needn’t negotiate.

But hey, everybody loves a kabuki dance of spring. And it does, at least, have some bearing on the epic argument about the role of government that’s raging in this country. It would be nice, however, if the ones who are allegedly arguing for the activist government side actually seemed to believe it, but I guess you can’t have everything.

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