Month: May 2011

Stale and moldy even though it’s new

by digby

I had my problems with Frank Rich, but I really liked the idea behind his Saturday column. He would synthesize the week’s political intrigue and activity into a narrative — a kind of weekly recap of the zeitgeist. A lot of people seem to think that’s a worthless exercise, but I would imagine that for those who aren’t as in tune with the day to day and don’t have a handle on the bigger picture, it can be interesting.

However, I assumed that his successor Joe Nocera would not take that tack and would concentrate on the business beat, which was his area of expertise. And that is certainly a fertile subject. It’s also one which a lot of people probably don’t follow so it could have brought some analysis to the opinion pages that wasn’t being covered. Unfortunately, today’s piece indicates that he’s going to be another recycler of stale beltway CW instead.

I hadn’t realized until I met him on Tuesday that Paul Ryan had been a protégé of Jack Kemp. But the minute I heard him talking about his late mentor, everything suddenly made sense.[…]“Jack used to talk about the battle of ideas,” Ryan told me. In fact, he lived for those battles. Ryan clearly views himself as Kemp’s natural successor. At 41, he’s been in Congress most of his adult life, where he has pushed the boundaries of Republican economic orthodoxy, just as Kemp did. He has the same kind of “happy warrior” mentality. (“I’m a walking piñata,” he said with a smile.) And he’s finally latched onto a Big Idea that could reshape the country even more than the Kemp-Roth tax cuts did in 1981 — namely, the Republican budget he masterminded, particularly its radical vision for turning Medicare into, essentially, a do-it-yourself voucher program.

He goes on to talk about Ryan’s plans to cut Medicare and how they aren’t good plans but that Democrats shouldn’t be dismissive of him because it’s a Big Idea and he’s very bold and we have to do something about Medicare right now. In other words he says the same thing you could expect to hear out of the mouth of any nameless, faceless cable news host at 2 in the afternoon.
And just as with those callow cable hosts, there is no acknowledgement that the health care reforms (passed on a party line vote) were based upon the very ideas Nocera seems to think are Ryan’s novel contributions to the “necessary” debate — the fact that health care costs are eating us alive. Particularly galling is the fact that he doesn’t seem to know that the Republicans just rode to victory last November demagoguing that same health care plan, particularly the 500 million dollars in Medicare cuts.
No, instead he’s wringing his hands like Cokie Roberts about how irresponsible the Democrats are for failing to take the looming problems of health care costs seriously.
This is the new columnist for the NY Times, not some windbag blogger. And he’s spouting the most shallow analysis of the current Medicare debate possible. And, sadly, it’s probably going to have an influence on the way the Villagers see it. After all, he’s a crackerjack “business reporter.” He must know what he’s talking about, right?

Instead of reading that stale Village CW (Jack Kemp — idea man!) read this piece by Nocera’s Times colleague:

The Economy Is Wavering. Does Washington Notice?
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The latest economic numbers have not been good. Jobless claims rose last week, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Another report showed that economic growth at the start of the year was no faster than the Commerce Department initially reported — “a real surprise,” said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics.

Perhaps the most worrisome number was the one Macroeconomic Advisers released on Wednesday. That firm tries to estimate the growth rate of the current quarter in real time, and it now says annualized second-quarter growth is running at only 2.8 percent, up from 1.8 percent in the first quarter. Not so long ago, the firm’s economists thought second-quarter growth would be almost 4 percent.

An economy that is growing this slowly will not add jobs quickly. For the next couple of months, employment growth could slow from about 230,000 recently to something like 150,000 jobs a month, only slightly faster than normal population growth. That is certainly not fast enough to make a big dent in the still huge number of unemployed people.

Are any policy makers paying attention?

Now that would be worth a little analysis and punditry from the business point of view, don’t you think?

Update: oops. Nocera is replacing Bob Herbert not Rich.

The Plot Thickens

by digby

The birthers go into another dimension:

On Wednesday night, the conservative news outlet WorldNetDaily published a story in which prominent birther Jerome Corsi claimed that Donald Trump had told him that President Barack Obama’s recently released birth certificate was a fake. We asked Trump about that, and he told Mother Jones that he had done no such thing. After our story ran Thursday, WND editor Joseph Farah seemed shocked that Trump would try to put distance between himself and Corsi, author of the new book Where’s the Birth Certificate?. In a WND story, Farah casts doubt on the “leftist Mother Jones” story, puzzling why Trump would say, as he told Mother Jones, that he had not even read Corsi’s book. After all, Farah writes, Trump had asked for an advance copy. From WND:

Farah wonders aloud why Trump would ask for a copy of a book he had no intention of reading—even going to the extent of having his organization sign a non-disclosure agreement to get an early electronic copy. “If he wasn’t going to read the book, why go to the trouble of requesting a PDF copy and having your representative sign an NDA [non-disclosure agreement] for it?” asked Farah. “Was his intent all along to violate the NDA and give it to someone else? Was his intent other than what he represented to us—to go to school on the eligibility issue? Trump needs to explain himself to someone other than Mother Jones. That doesn’t sound like good faith to me.”

Farah and Corsi can’t understand why Trump might not want to continue the fight over Obama’s citizenship, so they seem to have cooked up yet another conspiracy theory: someone else put Trump up to it. Trump couldn’t have been persuaded by the long-form birth certificate that Obama released in April, or the mountains of other evidence that prove that the president was born in Hawaii. No, Farah writes, Trump must be in league with nefarious forces trying to undermine the birthers.

I’m guessing that Trump has been in on it since 1962 when Obama was born. Has anyone asked him where he was? After all, his father was wealthy and very well could have been involved in the conspiracy to implant the first Kenyan president of the United Stated in 2008. Prove me wrong.

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Medicare Folly

by digby

Ezra Klein systematically dismantles Paul Ryan’s phony arguments in defense of his health care plan. It’s an excellent post and one that shows just how dishonest the Republicans are. (There’s no point in excerpting it, just read it.)

I only wish that Ezra had been as clear on Hardball today when Michael Smerconish was going on and on about the need to cut Medicare and Ezra replied that because Mitch McConnell is insisting on cuts in order to raise the debt ceiling, it will be done. That’s probably technically true. But the fact is that the debt ceiling will be raised whether Mitch McConnell holds his breath and turns blue or not. He knows which side his campaign contributions are buttered on and so does everyone else. Medicare will only be cut because the Democrats allow it.

It’s hard for me imagine that any good policy can come of this nonsense, but I’ll leave it to the wonks to sort it our later. But on the politics it’s very foolish. Right now you have a nice clean contrast and muddying it destroys the Dem advantage. But Ezra seems to be in the know so I guess at this point the only question seems to be how it will be cut. If that’s the case, anyone want to bet on the return of the Obama Death Panel boogeyman in 2012?

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Keeping the brand healthy

by digby

Palin running? I’d be surprised, at least if “running” has the same meaning it has in the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if Palin proposes changing the rules to having people text in their votes like they did for Bristol when she was on Dancing With The Stars.

Will Bunch has it right IMO:

[D]oes this mean that Sarah Palin — who also just moved to Arizona, which is always a good move for White House hopefuls, as Presidents Goldwater and McCain showed us — is officially running for POTUS 45? Signs point to yes, although only in the bizarre way that Sarah Palin is re-inventing politics for our warped 21st Century. I think what happened is this: The Palin brand was on fire in 2010, but then it crashed and burned, in part because of overexposure and partly after the Tucson shootings. To save that personal brand — which made her a millionaire in a very short time — she needed three things to happen. 1) She needed to drop out of sight for six months and stay out of trouble. 2) She needed to hope (and this was outside her control, obviously) that the 2012 GOP field would be uninspiring and that no one united the Tea Party wing of the party, and having seen 1) and 2) now happen, it’s time for 3) She needed to make herself a political A-lister again, and the truth is she can only do that by running for president. She probably knows there’s no way she can win, but she’s also smart enough to realize that doesn’t matter, that the $100,000 speaking gigs to truck-stop operators and the big book advances would grind to a halt of she didn’t stay in the game.

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Swingers

by digby

It’s good to know that some voters are feeling buyer’s remorse over their votes for the nihilistic Republicans in the last election. Imagine if they weren’t:

Beneath the surface, these Republicans are losing ground with independents. Nationally in 2010, independents gave Republicans a +19 advantage. In the five states above for which we have exit poll data (FL, IA, OH, PA, WI), the Republican won among independents. Yet in six of these eight re-do polls, independents now say they would vote for the Democrat…No doubt Democrats will face some challenges next fall. But in just a few short months, Republicans have alienated the voters who just brought them sweeping victories. Once again, Republicans mistakenly believed they would be greeted with sweets and flowers. Instead of “yes we can” voters are saying “we did what?!”

Yes, the Republicans deserve what they get. But still, it’s not as if they lied to get into office. They said what they we going to do, it’s just that these voters weren’t listening.

Maybe they wanted to “send a message” to Washington that they were unhappy with the direction of the country. But what message were they sending? If it wasn’t that they agreed with the Tea Party Republicans that the Democrats were a bunch of godless socialists who were trying to destroy the country, voting for Tea Party Republicans who believe the Democrats are a bunch of godless socialists probably isn’t all that smart. The whole political system could very well get the wrong idea.

The political pendulum is swinging wildly right now and I would guess it’s a mistake to think that either Party has cracked the code. It’s gone back and forth four times since 2004. The problem is that the nation is polarized and so the “swing voters” —who are the least informed people in the country — are making the decisions, based on God knows what.

I’m reminded of this great article by Chris Hayes written in the wake of the 2004 election in which he recounts his work as a canvasser in Wisconsin. The whole article is worth reading seven years later because it’s just as relevant today as it was then. This excerpt in particular captures the problem:

Undecided voters don’t think in terms of issues. Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured–a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example–but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number. The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The “issue” is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always complain we don’t see enough coverage of. But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps–though I’ll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics–maybe, I thought, “issue” is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they’re being quizzed on a topic they haven’t studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: “Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?” These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief–not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December. To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman’s car after having worked a week straight. He didn’t think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. “There’s too many lawsuits these days,” he told me. I was set to have to rebut a “tort reform” argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn’t think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. “The last job was unionized,” he said. “They would have covered my expenses.” I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers’ rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn’t seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided. In this context, Bush’s victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed “values” as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn’t the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like “character” and “morals.” Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values–we all know what’s right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don’t even grasp what issues are? Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues–a familiarity that may not exist. As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon “issues” as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary–of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

I’m fairly sure that nobody in the Party has begun that hard work. But there does seem to be some movement on the left in general to push out real information about issues in ways people are beginning to understand. I could be wrong — whatever it is, it’s still vague and ephemeral. But hopes lives eternal.

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Ryan flying very close to the sun

by digby

I see the right wing’s Churchill fetish continues apace. You’ll recall that Junior Bush and his slavering sycophants had a thing for him. In fact Bush reportedly compared himself to Churchill and found Churchill wanting:

The president confided to (Andrew Roberts, author of “The Churchillians”) that he believes he has an advantage over Churchill, a reliable source with access to the conversation told me. He has faith in God, Bush explained, but Churchill, an agnostic, did not. Because he believes in God, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick to them than it was for Churchill. Bush said he doesn’t worry, or feel alone, or care if he is unpopular. He has God.God as BFF. how convenient.

Newtie has been famously compared (and compared himself) to him too. (In fact, his spokesman Tony Blankley compared him favorably to every great leader in history, including Gandhi.)

There are just certain conservatives who feel so great about themselves that they can’t help but publicly wank on about their historical place in histgory and compare themselves to greatest Generals and Leaders. Guess who the latest one is:

The House Budget Committee chairman finds himself at the center of a national debate over Medicare and, clearly reveling the fight, is using British metaphors to explain his desire for a top-to-bottom debate over his budget blueprint and the massive restructuring of Medicare it envisions for every American 55 and younger.

“This is a Churchillian-type of moment in history,” Ryan told National Journal. “The polls are predictable. They are regrettable. But this is a unique time in our history. We can’t go wobbly.”

That piece is written by Major Garrett who spent years inside the Fox bubble. He helpfully explains the Churchill syndrome:

Winston Churchill carries a dual metaphorical meaning for conservatives. They invoke him as someone who was politically scorned and isolated for warning of a foreseeable but underappreciated danger–Adolf Hitler. They also see Churchill as indefatigable and heroic in summoning British grit, perseverance, and tenacity in the face of the Nazi blitz.

Many Americans revere Churchill for these same qualities, and the adoration is by no means uniquely Republican. But Republicans claim Churchill more frequently than Democrats. Ryan’s reference to “wobbly” is straight from the Iron Lady–former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher–who famously told President George H.W. Bush after the United Nations approved a resolution enforcing an embargo on Iraq that “this was no time to go wobbly … and we must not let the faint hearts grow in strength.”

Ryan, in essence, intends to be Churchill and Thatcher as the debate over Medicare’s future intensifies. And Ryan thinks this is his moment.

“I was made and wired for this type of thing,” he said in an interview from his Capitol office late Thursday. “We are on the right side of history. We are ready. I talked to at least 100 Republican members in the last two days. They all told me, ‘We gotta go, we’ve got to defend this.’ They are not queasy. They are all saying, ‘Put me in coach.’ Our members are comfortable.”

For some reason I’m not reminded of Churchill so much as Napoleon. (Or maybe Icarus.)

Ryan is drunk on Republican kool-aid — the poison kind that makes you sick with conservative hubris. It will kill him politically. It always does. The question is how much damage he does in the meantime — to his party and to the country.

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The Happy Warrior

by digby

Perlstein has a great pieces in today’s NY Times on the occasion of Hubert Humphrey’s 100th birthday. They don’t make liberals like him any more.

I would just quibble with one small piece in which Rick approvingly notes:

And at a time when other liberals were besotted with affirmative action as a strategy to undo the cruel injustices of American history, Humphrey pointed out that race-based remedies could only prove divisive when good jobs were disappearing for everyone. Liberal policy, he said, must stress “common denominators — mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears.”

It’s pretty to think so. But my recollection of the time was that much of the white working class would have rather chewed off their own arms than admit that they had anything in common with black folks. Liberals may have been besotted with affirmative action but they really had no choice. White workers just weren’t interested in that kind of solidarity. It would take years of forced integration in schools, work places and academia and a least two generations for many whites to come to see that they were in the same leaky boat.

Of course, it’s also not necessarily true that liberals had to throw the baby out with the bath water and consciously alienate the traditional white working class (and I was there — they did) but I’m fairly sure Humphrey’s way wouldn’t have worked any better. It was always going to take decades to change what segregation had wrought and until it did, this tension was going to exist on the left as long as the left was committed to racial equality.

The question is whether or not things have changed enough to finally make Humphrey’s vision possible.

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No More Unions

by digby

Here’s yet more evidence of liberalism’s rousing success rate in the age of the conservative movement. Harold Meyerson writes:

Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement.

“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.

They’re now trying to form a bloc of voters to pressure congress rather than organizing into a union which just seems so … well:

The SEIU’s program — like its semi-counterpart in the AFL-CIO’s Working America program, a door-to-door canvass in white working-class neighbohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifrhoods — will surely help Democratic candidates, despite the frustrations that nearly all labor leaders feel toward the party. But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.

I suppose that might work in the shadow of Citizens United but it seems like a long shot.It does explain why the Republicans are going even more nuts than usual to enact vote suppression laws though.

When all is said and done this whole thing may just end up being a fight for basic democracy. Can you have worker’s rights without it?

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Oh, so maybe we really do have to talk about jobs

by digby

Looks like that bill that would have http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifreneged on the Unemployment extension deal in the lame duck session isn’t going to make it out of committee

House Republicans yanked a bill to tweak unemployment insurance after Republican lawmakers raised concerns that the legislation was too confusing and would be dead in the Senate.

The GOP planned to vote after Memorial Day on Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) JOBS Act, a bill which sought to give states flexibility in spending federal unemployment funds.

Camp came to Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) weekly meeting with freshmen Wednesday to talk about the bill, and later briefed a broader swath of the conference where the concerns were amplified.

Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said there was an “education” issue with the bill. The House Rules Committee postponed setting the bill’s parameters for debate late Wednesday evening.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Yeah sure.

The truth is that the Republicans have belatedly recognized that they made a huge mistake in abandoning their so-called “jobs agenda” in favor of the Ryan Trainwreck Express. Cutting unemployment probably wouldn’t be the best way to show that they really, really care about unemployed Americans.

Ezra Klein took a look at the newly released GOP “Jobs Plan” (which was apparently published in comic book form) and found that lo and behold — it is a plan to enact all the GOP wish list, including drill,baby,drill and yes, more tax cuts. (You just can’t have enough of those.) Nothing new at all in fact except a couple of obscure items about visas and patent reform and none of it would affect the current downturn.

That’s okay, because the document doesn’t believe in cyclical downturns. It only believes in deviations from the Republican agenda. The first page sets out the GOP’s narrative of the country’s current unemployment crisis. See if you recognize what’s missing here: “For the past four years, Democrats in Washington have enacted policies that undermine these basic concepts which have historically placed America at the forefront of the global marketplace. As a result, most Americans know someone who has recently lost a job, and small businesses and entrepreneurs lack the confidence needed to invest in our economy. Not since the Great Depression has our nation’s unemployment rate been this high this long.”

Four years ago, of course, George W. Bush was president. And he was, as you might remember, a Republican, not a Democrat. As for Wall Street, well, Wall Street who?

But it’s not just that you could read this jobs plan without knowing the financial crisis ever happened. You could read it without knowing the past decade ever happened. As Mishel says, “if lower taxes and less regulation was such good policy, then George W. Bush’s economy would have been a lot better. But under Bush, Republicans cut taxes on business and on investors and high-income people and they didn’t add many regulations and that business cycle was the first one in the post-war period where the income for a typical working class family was lower at the end than at the beginning.”

Oh yes, let’s have some more of that please!

The economy is looking a bit shaky and there is no guarantee that the Morning In America strategy for 2012 is going to work. But unless the Republicans come up with something more than their stale old bromides about tax cuts I don’t think they can take advantage of it. You can only cry “tax cuts for everything” for so long before average people begin to notice that it isn’t working for them.

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Speaking of meltdowns

by digby

Nothing to see here either:

It’s official: All of Fukushima’s working reactors saw drops in their water levels sufficient to melt their radioactive cores. (Experts have been telling us this for months, but Japanese power company TEPCO wouldn’t acknowledge it.) The only way the self-immolation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex could get any worse would be a large scale release of radioactive material into the environment, which probably won’t happen. The meltdown means that each reactor has a pool of highly radioactive water in its base, possibly a cracked reactor casing, and worse. One reactor may even have a heap of cooled lava-like radioactive junk in the concrete pool beneath its radioactive core. Now that authorities at TEPCO have admitted that they more or less dropped the world’s largest dirty bomb on their homeland, the cost and difficulty of cleaning it up are probably going to increase. Not only must they continue to cool the reactors, they’re also going to have to dispose of even more radioactive water than they anticipated.

The good news is that Americans are far more responsible and incorruptible than the Japanese so we don’t have to worry our pretty little heads about such things.

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