Month: June 2011

I think it’s terrific that PIMCO’s Bill Gross came across with a strongly worded message for congress to stop acting like assholes and deal with the economy like rational leaders. His statement was pitch perfect and hopefully will lead to some action.

But I have to say that he bears some responsiblity for deficit fever cranking up over the past few months. People listen to him so when he placed a big bet that treasuries were going to spike, it carried weight. Here’s Krugman from a couple of weeks ago:

Bill Gross is without doubt a great investor. I have often found the economic analyses coming out of Pimco deeply enlightening. And in 2009-2010 the firm won big by betting, correctly, on interest rates staying low.

For the past year or so, however, Pimco seems to me to have been making less and less sense. Gross bet big on the idea that rates would spike when quantitative easing ends; I guess he has three weeks to be vindicated, but it sure doesn’t look like it. And the economic logic was all wrong.

It was a big deal when he did that and however he meant it, it was taken as validation of the deficit hawks beliefs that the US was being so crushed by debt that we needed to immediately dismantle the country.

Luckily, he seems to have realized that he’s dealing with crazy people and feckless poltroons who would willingly take down the whole system if it meant getting Rush Limbaugh’s grudging approval and is now prescribing a real stimulus to boost demand (and fix our crumbling infrastructure in the bargain.)

Unfortunately, any stimulus seems to require that we give huge amounts of money to the wealthy in exchange. The latest brainstorm is a stimulus and “repatriation holiday” which allows corporations to “bring home” their profits from foreign countries without paying anything much in taxes on them and then passing them out as dividends to their shareholders.

Dday explains:

Inside the corrupt process

by digby

It looks like it won’t only be the Republicans who take “Obamacare” apart piece by piece. This article in the Washington Monthly gives us a glimpse behind the curtain of bipartisan corruption — and spells out why making “deals” with industry is no deal at all:

As it happened, the Republicans had been gunning for IPAB for quite some time. Legislation to kill the independent panel was put forward as early as July 2010 in the Senate, and this January, Tennessee Tea Partier Phil Roe introduced a bill to repeal it in the newly Republican House. Now, by emphasizing its importance, Obama had put IPAB back at the front of the conservative firing line.The fallout had all the markings of a straightforward partisan battle—a reflexive attack on faceless bureaucrats tailor-made for the Tea Party era. But then, just two days after Obama’s speech at George Washington, a little-known Democratic congresswoman named Allyson Schwartz signed on as a cosponsor of Roe’s bill. Her defection was enough of a partisan hiccup to earn some prominent ink in the Beltway press. An article that landed on the cover of the New York Times in mid-April suggested that conscientious opposition to IPAB was becoming an issue that crossed the political aisle.

What Schwartz’s defection really represented, however, was not the MacGuffin of earnest bipartisanship but a serious moment of escalation in a war that the medical industry is waging against the lynchpin of President Obama’s health care reforms. To understand why, it helps to know a little bit about Schwartz and who she represents. A former health care executive from a suburban district outside Philadelphia, she is the health policy brains of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of forty-two House members whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists has made them one of the most successful political money machines since the Republican K Street Project collapsed in 2007. In the past several years, they have played an instrumental role in helping the financial and health care industries limit and weaken proposed reforms; IPAB would appear to be their next target. And if the history of the group is any indication, where Schwartz goes, the votes of a substantial number of her New Democrat colleagues are liable to follow.

And guess who the DCCC has tapped to help with candidate recruitment?

Pennsylvania Rep. Allyson Schwartz is taking on an expanded leadership role at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Schwartz, a four-term suburban Philadelphia congresswoman who is already heading up recruitment for the committee, will oversee candidate services — a position left vacant after Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was tapped to chair the Democratic National Committee.

The DCCC, under Schwartz’s hand, has already achieved several recruiting successes this cycle. Former Arizona Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, Christie Vilsack and former Wisconsin state Sen. Pat Kreitlow have announced that they will run for Congress in 2012. Earlier this month, Schwartz joined House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DCCC Chairman Steve Israel in corralling recruits from 34 districts for a meet-and-greet event in Washington with top labor leaders.

You can see what kind of candidates she’s recruiting.

I’ve said this before, but I continue to be surprised that the administration is allowing so much play on the health care reforms. If that is his signature legacy you’d think he would exercise strong control over the Democrats on this one issue if nothing else. Certainly, the president is the head of the Democratic Party and could nix a big promotion of someone who is leading the charge to destroy the most important piece of the cost savings in the reforms if he wanted to. I don’t get why any of this is on the table. Particularly when the stakes are this high:

Likewise, to understand why so many forces are amassing against IPAB, it helps to know what it represents: namely, our best hope not only of reining in Medicare costs and hence future budget deficits, but also of reforming the exorbitant, entrenched, ineffective practice of American medicine itself.

.

Guess who’s getting his own show?

Michael Wolfe, the man who literally wrote the book on Rupert Murdoch on the eavesdropping scandal.From what he says it’s a much tighter case than I realized:

In sum: It is now well-documented that employees of Murdoch’s News of the World British tabloid eavesdropped on the voice mail messages of practically anybody who was anybody in Britain for the better part of the last 10 years—the most recent revelations put Kate Middleton and Tony Blair on this list—including, undoubtedly, some of the people who went to the News Corp. party. Although this might not have seemed like much of a crime while it was being committed by myriad News Corp. reporters, and sanctioned by their bosses—just hacks being hacks—it has since transmuted into a profound breach of the civil trust. And to date, each next domino in the inquest has fallen.The informed speculation in U.K. media and political circles is about which present and former members of the top circle of News Corp. management in London will next be frog marched in front of a tribunal. In addition to company chief Rebekah Wade Brooks (who herself appears to have been hacked by reporters) and her predecessor Les Hinton, who now runs The Wall Street Journal<, this might naturally include Rupert’s son, James, who approved the early settlements in the case—settlements so large they could only reasonably be hush-money payoffs.And yet the company’s largely American shareholder base remains somehow unaware or in denial about what’s happening. News Corp. faces its greatest peril since it almost went bankrupt in the early ’90s, and yet the share price holds.This is partly because of the Rupert effect. Shareholders invest in the company as a bet on Murdoch himself. He has been in many a tight squeeze before, and part of his value is that he gets out of them. And it is partly because the U.S. media is disinclined to pursue Murdoch or to spend much time on foreign business news (in the past, The Wall Street Journal was the one paper that might be counted on to cover such stories).

First, they did it. Boy, did they do it. And then they tried to cover it up. Oh, and it turns out they documented it, too. And then there is the hard-core, bedrock, long-oppressed, anti-Murdoch faction in the U.K., suddenly armed with a mighty weapon: a scandal, into its third year, that drips out week after week. There doesn’t seem like any going back to an invulnerable Rupert.

From his lips…

She Is?

by digby

Wow, I have to say that this actually stuns me a bit. Discussing Bachman’s rather clever new meme about Obama wanting to destroy Medicare, Ezra Klein explains that she’s right:

If Republicans can make their peace with the Affordable Care Act and help figure out how to make the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges work to control costs and improve quality, it’d be natural to eventually migrate Medicaid and Medicare into the system. Liberals would like that because it’d mean better care for Medicaid beneficiaries and less fragmentation in the health-care system. Conservatives would like it because it’d break the two largest single-payer health-care systems in America and turn their beneficiaries into consumers. But the implementation and success of the Affordable Care Act is a necessary precondition to any compromise of this sort. You can’t transform Medicaid and Medicare until you’ve proven that what you’re transforming them into is better. Only the Affordable Care Act has the potential to do that.

So Bachmann is perhaps right to say that the president is moving us towards a day when ObamaCare — or, to put it more neutrally, “premium support” — might come to Medicare. He’s seeing whether it works in the private health-care market first and, if it does, there’s little doubt that the political pressure to extend it to other groups will be intense. The question is why Bachmann and her party are doing so much to stand in his way? The corollary to Bachmann’s accusation that the president has a realistic plan to privatize Medicare is that the Republicans, for all their sound and fury over the Ryan budget, don’t.

Golly, it sounds like just everybody’s on the same page, it’s only a matter of working out some of the minor details. But put me down as one liberal who would not be happy about this because it would mean “better care for Medicaid recipients” (always the big gun to our empathetic little hearts) or that it would lead to less “fragmentation.” (You know what really would lead to less fragmentation? Medicare for all.)

Vote Suppression: the long strategy

by digby

Mother Jones reports on the the Republican vote suppression efforts going on around the country. I’m glad that attention is being paid but I hope that people don’t get the impression that this is new. It’s a very, very long standing conservative strategy with a huge amount of institutional support. The reason they are going for it now is because the Supreme Court gave them cover with the Indiana ID law and they have recently taken over a bunch of state legislatures.

Just as they are going hard after the public employee unions and abortion rights, vote suppression is one of their long held agenda items that they are opportunistically trying to pass while they have the opening.

For a primer on just how long this has been going on,this post is a place to start. Or just google Operation Eagle Eye.

.

Breitbart on Blackmail

by digby

Here’s some deep civic concern for you:

“I tend to think all these guys that behave this way are putting themselves in positions to be blackmailed,” Breitbart said when asked about Vitter. “When you put yourself into an elected position and you’re going to, like, do the things that you don’t want the public to find out about, but then when you do it, you’re going to be exorted, you’re going to be blackmailed. It pisses me off.”

He ought to know. The primary blackmailer in American politics right now is none other than Andrew Breitbart. Recall:

“I’m doing this to save his family” Breitbart says about his decision not to post a photo that the BigGovernment.com site describes as “extremely graphic, and leaves nothing to the imagination.”

“I would like an apology from him… This was his political strategy — to accuse me of hacking,” Breitbart says.

“I’m trying to do the decent thing here and not release the photo.”

How about this one:

“I know how politics works,” Breitbart said. “I know how the politics of personal destruction works. I know how the private detectives work. Don’t go after Meagan (presumably Meagan Broussard, the woman interviewed by Hannity). Don’t go after the other girls and I’m paying attention. And that’s all I can say.”

Or this one:

“Are you saying, Andrew, that there are more tapes?” Hannity asked, playing straight man because he already knew there were more.

“Oh, my goodness, there are,” Breitbart said. “Not only are there more tapes, it’s not just ACORN. (Hannity could be heard delightedly saying “Wow!” in the background). And this message is to Attorney General Holder. I want you to know that we have more tapes. It’s not just ACORN and we’re gonna hold out until the next election cycle or else if you want to do a clean investigation, we will give you the rest of what we have. We will comply with you, we will give you the documentation we have from countless ACORN whistleblowers who want to come forward but are fearful of this organization and the retribution that they fear, that this is a dangerous organization. So if you get into an investigation, we will give you the tapes. If you don’t… we will revisit these tapes come election time.”

Let’s just say Breitbart knows what he’s talking about when it comes to political blackmail. Of course, he’s the one doing the blackmailing so it tends to be a little bit one-sided.

.

The ACORN Precedent

by digby

Here’s another example of what’s becoming increasingly clear is a systematic program to dismantle the institutional left:

Last month, scores of public officials across Los Angeles County opened their mail to find nearly identical requests for information: Members of the Los Angeles City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, the Community Redevelopment Agency and Community College District Board of Trustees, the city of Long Beach and untold others were asked to produce records relating to the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. It was the first blow, silently delivered, in what could be a nasty fight, of a sort that is becoming increasingly common in American and California politics.

LAANE, as it’s known, is an 18-year-old advocacy organization that seeks to fashion and influence public policy relating to jobs, the environment and community development. The group, widely perceived as having a strong liberal slant, has a staff of 45 people and an annual budget of $4 million, and it is headed by a shrewd executive director, Madeline Janis. Housed in a tiny suite of offices just west of downtown (LAANE rents the space from the union UNITE-HERE), its modest quarters give little evidence of its impact, which is profound. In project after project — from winning passage of the city’s Living Wage Ordinance to revamping the way the Los Angeles port handles truck traffic to reimagining the region’s approach to recycling — LAANE has shown itself to be one of Southern California’s most potent political organizations.

That has made it plenty of enemies, and one of them is now quietly but unmistakably striking back. The group that filed the requests for information under the California Public Records Act is called MB Public Affairs, a Sacramento-based operation that specializes in “opposition research,” the art of ferreting out dirt on one’s enemies. MB Public Affairs is headed by Mark Bogetich, a garrulous operative known to his friends as “Bogey,” who has helped a number of Republican candidates neutralize their opponents…

When MB Public Affairs filed more than 50 public records requests for information on LAANE, it was not a casual act. It was almost certainly intended to find something damaging, and it’s costing someone serious money. One operative who knows this business well estimated the price of such a digging campaign at roughly $50,000.

The politics of personal destruction have turned into the politics of institutional destruction. No evidence is needed since the real intent is to smear through innuendo and intimidate public figures through guilt by association.

The left could make them pay a price for this by similarly going after the massive rightwing infrastructure and wingnut welfare, but it wouldn’t be polite.

.

Blaming the Tea Party

by digby

Interesting:

South Florida Tea Party Chairman Everett Wilkinson thinks the GOP budget — and in particular its call to phase out Medicare and replace it with a marketplace for private insurance — is a total disaster. He’s saying that Republicans, including members in his sphere of influence like Rep. Allen West (R-FL), should back away from it.

In an email to fellow Tea Partiers last week, obtained by The Palm Beach Post, Wilkinson called the GOP plan a “public policy nightmare” that could trigger “huge Democratic wins in 2012,” and prompt Republicans to blame the Tea Party for their losses.

“Republicans will lose if they support the Ryan Medicare plan. Americans do not support the [Paul] Ryan plan,” he wrote. “Expect the GOP to then blame the Tea Party for losses.”

That would certainly be a blessing. It wouldn’t solve all of our problems — some of the worst of them have to do with elite failure. But it would push the Republicans back from the edge and force them reevaluate their extremism. They got a big, unfortunate boost in 2010 when they should have been retrenching but if they can be strongly repudiated in 2012, the party will be likely to do some introspection and recalibrate.

As I said, it won’t solve the central problem, but it will take one of the major dangerous consequences of them off the table for a while which might give us some breathing room.

.

“Onanistic, pathetically immature”

by digby

Hendrik Hertzberg has written a great piece on the Weiner scandal that you must read in its entirety. He talks about why it was different and why it created such a stir despite the fact that Weiner’s main sin was in the documentation not the (fairly banal) acts themselves. Very interesting stuff.

But I’d like to comment on this specific observation:

Weiner’s sins, being wholly online, basically onanistic, pathetically “immature,” and totally without direct fleshly carnality, are literally ridiculous. They lack the swaggering macho that pushes more traditional, arguably crueler male transgressions – having affairs, whoring, fathering children out of wedlock – into the comparatively (though only comparatively) safer territory of “boys will be boys” and “men are like that.”

One more factor that comes to mind: the particular media addictions of the political class. I suspect that, unlike normal people, a preponderance of that class – commentators, political reporters and editors, operatives, “strategists,” aides, news producers, etc. – spends several hours of every day watching cable-news television (or having it drone and flicker in the background), reading political blogs, sending and receiving e-mails about the latest political uproar, and talking about same to other members of the same class, on the phone or face to face. Actual office-holding politicians don’t necessarily have the time for all that, but they live inside the bubble it creates. The ambient atmosphere is one of constant overexcitement, hysteria, and sometimes unbearable tension, all focussed on the story of the day. That may be a reason why the protagonists of political scandals are dispatched more quickly and more mercilessly than in the past.

I think there’s something to that. I live in the same atmosphere to a certain extent and I know that it craves excitement and stimulation. But the Weiner scandal exposes the real essence of the problem with beltway sex scandals and it’s more than that. Indeed the words Herzberg uses to describe Weiner are the exact words I’d use to describe the press when one of these silly tabloid scandals erupt: “onanistic, pathetically immature.” The juvenile glee with which they pore over the most salacious details is best described as Beavis and Butthead go to Washington

It must also be noted that the reason they seem to do this much more toward Democratic politicians is because they eagerly gobble the nasty little tid-bits they are fed by the likes of Andrew Breitbart or Drudge and his minions. (A notable exception was Mark Foley whose scandal was broken by gay activists who weren’t afraid to pull that string.)That right wing noise machine (which also takes infantile delight in “dirty” behavior) is what propels these scandals into obsessions and feeds that tabloid cable energy.

It is no surprise to me that the nepotistic tribute hire, Luke Russert, seems to have made his bones (no pun intended) on this story. Weiner’s sin, with all its trendy Facebookie-twittergasm was a virtual scandal fed by online vandal Andrew Breitbart. Russert’s vacuous smirk was the perfect representation of the modern, virtual kewl kid ouvre.

.