Month: May 2011

Wish List

by digby

Looks like Boehner isn’t the only one with a few conditions:

The two sides of the debate over whether the tea party is at heart a socially conservative movement or a fiscally conservative one smashed together Monday morning at a press conference in Washington, where a tea party leader told reporters he’d be willing to accept a bump in the debt ceiling if Republicans promise to put an end to “military effeminzation.”

Speakers from the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell to a man dressed as George Washington to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — who sent a written statement that was read aloud — told a small crowd of reporters that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his GOP leadership team were ignoring their tea party mandate by supporting an increase in the federal debt limit. They called on Republicans in the House to attach strict spending riders onto any deal they make with an Obama administration desperate to avoid government default.

For Bachmann, no less than the “complete defunding of Obamacare” would do. For others, a total spending freeze and a small, short-term limit increase was acceptable, provided it came with guarantees of deep spending cuts. For Tea Party Founding Fathers chairman William Temple, a reinstatement of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and keeping women out of combat roles would also be acceptable.

And forced reading at gunpoint of David Barton’s Christian history of the United States, don’t forget that.

And why not? As long as the Democrats are pretending that they have to do whatever the Republicans want even though they have already agreed to raise the debt limit, I can’t see why they shouldn’t throw in the kitchen sink. This “deal” could conceivably include absolutely anything.

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Leverage

by digby

So Boehner laid down a “marker”:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Monday that Republicans wanted trillions in budget cuts in exchange for their vote to increase the nation’s borrowing limit and avoid default, adopting a hard line on the party’s position in a speech before major players on Wall Street.

Boehner told the Economic Club of New York that his party wanted specific spending cuts — not future targets that would trigger spending reductions or revenue increases, as President Obama has proposed.

Laying down a marker on the eve of new budget negotiations, the Ohio Republican also said he wanted the amount of the cuts to exceed any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit, a demand that probably would mean new spending reductions of $2 trillion or more — many times higher than the $38 billion in cuts approved last month in the 2011 budget.

January 2011

At the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, “Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered a stern message that the debt ceiling will eventually have to be raised to keep the government from defaulting. But he also promised that Republicans will ‘use the leverage’ they have to enact at least some of their spending-reduction goals. ‘It’s a leverage moment for Republicans,’ Cantor said in an interview Friday. ‘The president needs us. There are things we were elected to do. Let’s accomplish those if the president needs us to clean up the old mess.'”

All the furrowed browed gasbags are speaking in hushed tones, contemplating the scale of cuts necessary to meet Boehner’s “demands.” It’s fairly well acknowledged that he will probably not get everything he wants and that he might be talking about a longer time frame than just the next two years, but they are all pretty darned sure that he’s going to get quite a bit of what he wants — even as they also admit that the Republicans will definitely agree to raise the debt ceiling come what may. Nobody seems to see anything at all odd about any of this.

Picture this. The roles are reversed. The Democrats have the House and the Republicans have the Senate and the Presidency. The debt ceiling vote looms. And suppose the Democrats admitted publicly that they would, of course, agree to raise the debt ceiling but also insisted that the Republicans agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations by the same amount that would be borrowed. And under no circumstances would they agree to even a penny in spending cuts. And everyone in Washington and on Wall Street treats this absurd “marker” seriously.

I know. It’s unimaginable on every level.

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They Didn’t Know Nothin’ Bout Numbers

by digby

“It was never intended as a retirement program. It was set up in ‘37 and ‘38 to take care of people who were in distress — ditch diggers, wage earners — it was to give them 43 percent of the replacement rate of their wages. The [life expectancy] was 63. That’s why they set retirement age at 65” for Social Security, Alan Simpson

Uhm no. This life expectancy misinformation is so widespread, I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to set it stright. But I might have expected that one of President Obama’s Deficit commission appointees — the co-chairman no less — would not be among those who believe it. (Normally I would suggest that he was just a liar, but from this account it’s pretty clear to me that he really doesn’t understand it.)

This is a very important point and one that everyone needs to understand if they hope to beat back the social security assault:

HuffPost suggested to Simpson during a telephone interview that his claim about life expectancy was misleading because his data include people who died in childhood of diseases that are now largely preventable. Incorporating such early deaths skews the average life expectancy number downward, making it appear as if people live dramatically longer today than they did half a century ago. According to the Social Security Administration’s actuaries, women who lived to 65 in 1940 had a life expectancy of 79.7 years and men were expected to live 77.7 years.

“If that is the case — and I don’t think it is — then that means they put in peanuts,” said Simpson.

Simpson speculated that the data presented to him by HuffPost had been furnished by “the Catfood Commission people” — a reference to progressive critics of the deficit commission who gave president’s panel that label.

Told that the data came directly from the Social Security Administration, Simpson continued to insist it was inaccurate, while misstating the nature of a statistical average: “If you’re telling me that a guy who got to be 65 in 1940 — that all of them lived to be 77 — that is just not correct. Just because a guy gets to be 65, he’s gonna live to be 77? Hell, that’s my genre. That’s not true,” said Simpson, who will turn 80 in September.

This is the frustration with this argument. People just can’t seem to wrap their minds around this.

Understanding life expectancy rates at age 65 in 1940 is central to understanding Social Security itself. If the very nature of the population has changed dramatically since the program’s creation, it stands to reason that the program itself requires dramatic changes: Means testing, creating private accounts and further upping the retirement age for the program have all been proposed by its opponents.

But if the population is largely similar today, then only modest changes would be needed to maintain Social Security. Critics of the program therefore have an incentive to dramatize life-expectancy stats.

But those dramatic claims aren’t buttressed by the data: A man who turned 65 in 2010 has a life expectancy of 83.1 — barely five years more than he had in 1940. Women have increased their life expectancy at roughly the same rate. Since 1940, the retirement age for drawing Social Security benefits has been lifted from 65 to 67, meaning that people are receiving a net of only three extra years of benefits than they were 70 years ago.

The second prong of the Social Security critique relies on the coming wave of Baby Boomer retirements. This flood of retirees will tip the ratio of workers to pensioners out of whack, the argument goes.

“The statistics right now show a totally unsustainable program that cannot possibly function when 10,000 a day are coming into the Social Security system at 65,” Simpson explained to HuffPost. “Was that ever planned [for]? That 10,000 a day would suddenly coming into the system?”

In fact, it was planned for: The Social Security Administration tracks births every year and knew by 1947 that 1946 had been a boom year. When the system was reformed in 1983 by the Greenspan Commission, the Baby Boom was specifically taken into account.

“The fundamental ratio of beneficiaries to workers was fully taken into account in the 1983 financing provisions and, as a matter of fact, was known and taken into account well before that,” Social Security’s actuaries noted in 1994.

The explanation for the shortfall — the program will only be able to pay roughly four-fifths of scheduled benefits after 2037 — is much simpler: Social Security’s actuaries didn’t see the wild swing in income inequality that came about since 1983. Income has been largely flat for the middle class while rising for the wealthy. Social Security taxes apply only to the first $106,000, so increases for the rich don’t contribute to the trust fund. And compensation increases that come in the form of more expensive health care benefits are also not subject to Social Security taxes.

Simpson surely knows about the Greenspan Commission. He’s just lying about that (or he’s senile.) But what’s Erskine Bowles’ excuse? Or Dick Durbin or Saxby Chambliss or all the other politicians who parrot this misinformation all the time? Are they all senile too?

The people who designed the system understood very well that if “life expectancy” went up it would mean that there were also more younger workers who hadn’t died in childbirth paying into the system. And they understood the concept of productivity gains and knew that more people would be brought into the system — paying as well as receiving benefits — over time. They weren’t cave men. It was only 70 years ago. Simpson was a teen-ager at the time. What they may not have anticipated was just how badly the political system would be distorted by corporate propaganda that made people believe that black is white and up is down. It’s the real problem and solving social security’s minor shortfall in 2038 is a piece of cake compared to solving that one.

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The Villagers’ New Heartthrob

by digby

Ed Kilgore on the latest dreamy Village imaginary boyfriend, Mitch Daniels:

In a recent profile of the proto-candidacy of Mitch Daniels, I predicted that the Very Serious People in Washington would begin caterwauling for his entry into the race.

This does indeed seem to be happening, if the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is listening to the appropriate Republican Beltway poohbahs, which he is certainly well-positioned to do. Last week’s minor-candidate-dominated South Carolina debate seems to have been the tipping point for Very Serious People who want Mitch to get in to stop all the crazy social-issues pandering:

The GOP presidential race has been defined by relative chaos — and weakness — among the field.

That was reinforced at last week’s first presidential debate of the season, which, aside from former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, featured a handful of long shots and no-shots debating such topics as the legalization of marijuana — and even heroin.

Daniels is regarded (and regards himself) as a candidate of considerable gravity, willing to focus on making tough choices about the nation’s financial future even if that conversation is politically unpopular. (At a February speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, he said that “purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers.”)

A Daniels candidacy probably would be taken as a sign that the games are over for the Republican Party, that it is time to buckle down and organize to beat President Obama.

“He will turn a race that is about less serious politics into a race about more serious policy,” argued Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who is not aligned with any candidate heading into 2012. “Daniels is the adult in the room saying the party is over, it’s time to clean house. That contrast in maturity is how a Republican beats Obama.”

Now if I were a social conservative activist, I’d be pretty annoyed with all the veiled suggestions from Washington that my set of issues was for children, while fiscal stuff was for adults. This is why Daniels’ repeated call for a “truce” on cultural issues drives people who get up in the morning to fight abortion or gay marriage absolutely nuts.

That’s exactly why the Village loves him. It’s come to their attention recently that some of their fellow Real Americans are as stubborn about certain icky topics as are the dirty hippies. It obviously came as quite a surprise. So they are looking for yet another Daddy figure to knock some heads together and get down to the serious business of demanding sacrifice from everyone who isn’t independently wealthy.

Except, as Kilgore points out, that agenda isn’t exactly a winner either:

But totally aside from the intra-Republican factional implications of the lobbying for Daniels, you have to question the planted axiom that Very Serious Talk about debts and deficits is the obvious way to beat Barack Obama. Daniels is hard to distinguish from Paul Ryan in terms of his thinking about how to deal with what he calls the “red menace” of debt, particularly in his enthusiasm for a massive restructuring of Medicare. This is not popular, and is likely to become much less popular as people begin to understand that “premium support” in the context of Medicare would mean a fixed and limited federal contribution to help pay for ever-more-expensive and hard-to-get private health insurance policies.

Daniels also has some baggage I don’t think the Villagers realize is poison among just about everyone — he was a member of George W. Bush’s economic team.Now, Republicans don’t really care about that but they have gone to a great deal of trouble to distance themselves from Bush’s epic failure by robotically claiming that they didn’t support Bush’s spending either. Daniels is going to have a bit of trouble making that argument and you can bet his primary rivals will hang Bush’s effigy around his neck and set it afire.

The mere idea that a Bush economic advisor has “gravitas” would be astonishing if we weren’t living in bizarroworld.

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Booing the kabuki

by digby

We all know that “the consensus” is that we must immediately start slashing government spending or the deficit will come and kill us in our beds, but there is another view. And not the view of silly old DFHs like me, but smart people.

This is very bad and it unfortunately has the imprimatur of one of President Obama’s staunchest supporters from 2008, his designated Hillary killer Claire McCaskill. Since it looks as though both parties have decided to pretend that they are having a battle over the debt ceiling in order to enact brutal spending cuts, this could be a big problem:

Republicans want to kill Medicare. And until recently, they weren’t
shy about it—235 House Republicans voted to eliminate Medicare
outright.

But after facing heated criticism at town halls, they’re changing
their tactics. Now, instead of attacking Medicare head-on, they’re
using more reasonable-sounding proposals to disguise their plan to
eliminate Medicare—basically a hidden Medicare kill switch.

And unfortunately, some Democrats are helping them.

Democratic Sens. McCaskill, Manchin, and Mark Udall have all
endorsed spending caps that would actually trigger massive cuts to
Medicare within a few years—that’s the Medicare kill switch.6
Republicans are going to try to force a Medicare kill switch into the
upcoming, must-pass bill to keep the U.S. from defaulting on its
debts, and bipartisan cover from Democrats helps them do that.

Can you call Sen. Durbin right now and tell him you’re counting on him
to oppose spending caps that contain a Medicare kill switch?
Senator Dick Durbin
Phone: 202-224-2152

“Government spending cap” sounds much more reasonable than
“eliminating Medicare,” which is why Republicans want to use the cap
to disguise the Medicare kill switch.

But the CAP Act, which Sen. McCaskill is co-sponsoring with Republican
Sen. Bob Corker, has been called “the second worst idea in
Washington.”7 And an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities found that it would “inevitably force enormous cuts in
Medicare, Medicaid, and possibly Social Security.”8

Sen. Udall’s plan is no better. And any Democrat who signs on to a
plan containing a Medicare kill switch is just giving Republicans the
bipartisan cover they need. Can you call Sen. Durbin right now and
tell him not to fall for the Republican tricks? We need him to oppose
any plan containing a Medicare kill switch.

Senator Dick Durbin
Phone: 202-224-2152

Thanks for all you do.
–Daniel, Amy, Michael, Eli, and the rest of the team

I’m not sure that it’s entirely correct to say that it’s the GOP’s dastardly plan. After all, both parties are playing along with this. But there is only one party that has a base which can mobilize against this spending jihad, so calling Durbin may make a difference.

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Tortured Debate

by digby

Word:

“I never thought I’d live in a country where we would debate whether we should endorse torture as an official policy. Was some information obtained through torture? Probably yeah. Could it have been obtained through more professional methods the intelligence professionals recommended? Almost certainly yes. We could have gotten it sooner and better.”

That’s Thomas Ricks in response to the ever more unhinged torture advocate Liz Cheney.

Steve Benen has the rundown of her chilling appearance on yesterday’s This Week including her dark, portentous claim that Obama’s abandonment of the torture regime means it’s now impossible to gather intelligence about terrorism anymore.

It still jars me to hear people dryly debating this on television. I know that torture have always happened at the American government’s hand and I’m not naive enough to think that we’ve suddenly become more primitive and violent. The history of the United States on that count is not exactly hearts and flowers. But I do not believe that this issue was considered publicly open for debate in recent times until the Cheney regime made it so. Now, there is still some genuflecting to normal morality in that even Liz Cheney still claims that the medieval waterboarding or more recent uses of psychological and pharmacological treatments are not really torture. But it’s a throwaway line delivered perfunctorily as if it’s one of those disclaimers at the end of the Viagra commercials.

That she is still given the platform to insist that torture is necessary keeps the debate alive and I would expect that all presidents reserve the right to employ it if they feel its necessary and will have no trouble making that argument if they have to. It’s no longer taboo. It’s mainstream. After all, President Obama himself used the strange wording “the United States doesn’t torture” instead of “the United States doesn’t torture anymore.”

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Money Talks, Liberals Walk

by digby

It looks like the Chamber of Commerce has become a fierce advocate of free speech — for corporations. They are very worried about thuggish customers despicably refusing to buy products if they find out that the corporation that sells them are supporting politicians they don’t approve of. I can’t imagine what could be more un-American than that. Surely, the constitution protects them:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made a controversial campaign contribution in last year’s Minnesota governor’s race a centerpiece in a fight against tougher federal disclosure rules for government contractors.

Target Corp.’s donation of $150,000 to a group backing Republican candidate Tom Emmer led to a store boycott organized by people opposed to Emmer’s stand against gay rights. The Chamber cited the Target case as a prime example of how government contractors could have their right to free speech stifled if President Obama issues an executive order forcing them to reveal their political donations.

“Mandatory disclosure laws, like breaches in privacy laws, can squelch speech,” Chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff said. “The only reason proponents of these so-called disclosure provisions want to pursue this is because they want to single out organizations like Target, as they did. So what we’re seeing here is the left spending potentially millions of dollars a year harassing the business community.”

The humanity.

Since money equals speech any coordinated attempt by a group of individuals to influence a corporation is a violation of their corporate personhood’s free speech rights. Yet a group of owners (or an individual owner) can coordinate to buy up all the TV and radio time to promote their message over the message of their adversaries and it is also free speech. Interesting. Money really does talk.

It will be interesting to see what the administration decides to do here.I’m guessing that billion dollar campaign might be distorting the decision making just a little, don’t you? And some of the Democratic party’s traditional allies have just about had enough. Here’s Greg Sargent:

It didn’t get the attention it deserved, but one key development from last Friday was that AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, in an interview with Salon, essentially declared independence from the Democratic Party. Trumka vowed that unions would be putting more of their money into their own organizing and less into defending Obama and Congressional Dems in 2012.

That echoed an earlier vow by the chief of the International Association of Fire Fighters to shift union cash from federal to local contests.

Commentators and political reporters will roll their eyes at these threats. They will point out that such tough talk rarely produces any real break with the Democratic Party; labor’s threat to primary Congressional Dems who bucked Obama on health reform, for instance, largely fizzled.

But while there’s something to that analysis, it overlooks the degree to which the events in Wisconsin have altered the calculus for labor. The surprising organizing success labor and state-level Dems have had there, combined with the fact that Republicans and conservatives are increasingly committed to pursuing anti-union initiatives in multiple states, may produce a real shift in labor’s strategy, in which resources really do get redirected to local organizing and state-level battles.

There’s a lot of talk about various progressive factions retreating to local politics in the face of their disappointment about the Party’s collusion with big money. Labor, of course, is the Big Kahuna. And it’s the single most important Democratic party ground organizing group in the country. Maybe the campaign is counting on their local and state efforts spilling over to the presidential ticket.

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Undeclared GOP candidates debate

by digby

In case you missed it …

Wife Abuse

by digby

The NY Times reports:

Thomas E. Donilon, the White House national security adviser, called Sunday for Pakistan to grant the United States access to Osama bin Laden’s three widows, who are in Pakistani custody following the secret American raid that killed the Qaeda leader last week. In addition to possibly learning more about Al Qaeda, American officials hope the women could help answer whether any Pakistani government or security officials were complicit in hiding Bin Laden.

Howie tweeted a question earlier wondering why nobody asked Cheney this morning whether he would recommend waterboarding them. I would guess not. This is a question I’m not really sure anyone really wants answered. (Or maybe needs answered.)

I think the better question is what happens if it comes out that they did know. (Or even more sticky, that the US knew too.) No, I don’t think Dick Cheney really wants anyone to delve too deeply into this one. Lot’s of skeletons are probably lying around in that closet.

But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be for waterboarding them anyway. You know — just for fun.

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Making martyrs

by digby

This isn’t the first time the analogy between Che Guevara and bin Laden has come up, obviously, but it’s interesting in light of the “burial at sea” issue:

It took twenty-eight years for the truth to come out. In 1995, during my research for a biography I was writing about Che, a retired Bolivian army general broke the silence and told me about the secret burial in the airstrip. Che’s body was eventually found, exhumed, and repatriated to Cuba, where it was reburied with full state honors in 1997, provoking a great deal of acrimony among Cuban exiles, who saw it as a propaganda coup for the Castro regime—which it was. Every year, tens of thousands of Cubans and foreign tourists visit the Che mausoleum in Cuba, just as others visit the schoolhouse in Bolivia where he was killed, which has become a museum-shrine. Meanwhile, in spite of published DNA evidence and the testimony of forensic experts who examined Che’s remains, there are those who persist, vainly, in denying that it was really Che’s body that was found—as if that alone would somehow diminish the power of his legacy, which remains, for all the silly T-shirts, uniquely potent.

With their “sea burial” of Osama bin Laden, the United States has presumably sought to forestall a similarly long, drawn-out “where is he buried?” saga. As for the possibility that the place where he was killed might become a shrine, that is not in American hands, of course, but in the Pakistani military’s. They may find it awkward if their exclusive Abbottabad enclave—populated, as it is said to be, by senior Pakistani military officers and their families—becomes a pilgrimage site for bin Laden’s extremist followers. Presumably, Pakistan will destroy the house he lived in, but what will they do about the ground it stood on? Like the Bolivians, they can always resort to military secrecy and build a wall, but this one will have to be physical as well as figurative. This, too, will be awkward, because the walled vacant lot will be a permanent reminder that Osama bin Laden lived out his days in their midst. But maybe not. Who’s talking?

I’m fairly sure that if someone wants to build a “shrine” they will find a way to do it. I had not recalled the exhumation of Che’s remains and repatriation to Cuba back in the 90s but I can imagine that there are those who did think of it and wanted to ensure that there was nothing left to repatriate down the road so they could build the shrine in Pakistan. But as the author says, regardless of what they do his “compound” will likely be a little bit of a problem for Pakistan (at least until it is taken over completely by the fundamentalists) because it’s so conspicuously obvious.

But seriously, none of that makes any difference. If bin Laden achieves martyr status there will be “shrines” with or without his body. It’s not like Che was forgotten until they brought his bones back. The reason these guys become martyrs is that they are iconic leaders who were assassinated by their enemies — enemies who go to great lengths to take credit for having assassinated them. Bones or no bones, if there’s an appetite for his martyrdom it will happen one way or the other.

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