Month: July 2011

Yes, they really want to do this

by digby

I don’t think anyone considers Ezra Klein unconnected or hostile to the White House. So when he writes something like this, I assume they want it out there:

In my Bloomberg column today, I argue that the Obama administration is much more intent on reaching a deficit deal, and much less intent on making revenues a major part of it, than is commonly assumed. That’s led them to offer Republicans a deal that is not only much farther to the right than anyone had predicted, but also much farther to the right than most realize. In addition to the rise in the Medicare eligibility age and the cuts to Social Security and the minimal amount of revenues, it’d cut discretionary spending by $1.2 trillion, which is an absolutely massive attack on that category of spending.

This deal isn’t just a last-ditch effort to save the economy from the damage of a federal default. The White House would far prefer this deal to the McConnell plan, which would lift the debt ceiling without making any cuts at all. So why are administration officials so committed to striking a deal composed of policies they’ve mostly opposed? Here’s their thinking:

He goes on to say that they feel that if they can only get deficits “off the table” in a big way they will have the room to do other Big Things, that the only stimulus they can get is something small like extended unemployment insurance which is “better than nothing”, we should want to have the Democratic President timing the massive cuts in this deal rather than grumpy Republicans in 2012 appropriations, it’s good policy on the merits (really!) and finally, it will help Obama get re-elected, which is important because Mitt will make even deeper cuts.

To put all this slightly differently, White House officials believe a big deficit reduction deal would do them enough good, both politically and economically, that it’s worth making very significant compromises on the details of that deal. If you thought getting to $4 trillion in deficit reduction was a Republican goal, you’re wrong. It’s the White House’s goal, and the only reason it might not happen is Republicans won’t let them do it.

So it is as it appears to be. And not one element of it is even remotely compelling.

I still have a sneaking suspicion that the Republicans understand better than Obama that “the deficit” isn’t what people care about and that hugely cutting spending won’t help him be re-elected in 2012. (If they really believed that they would have done it themselves when they held the White House and the congress.) I think they’ll sign on to a deal that massively cuts government spending and which only required concessions are something like Unemployment Insurance. Seriously, think about it.

Maybe they won’t sign on out of sheer contrariness. In which case hurrah for them.

And they are threading a very fine needle on the electoral calculation. John Sides at the Monkey Cage games out the three scenarios:

Scenario #1: There is no deal.

Assume there is no deal and then assume, as Geithner and others have warned, that there are serious consequences for the economy when the debt ceiling isn’t raised. This will hurt Obama. And it will hurt him more than it will hurt the Republican Party. Presidents suffer the consequences of a bad economy. Divided government does not change this. Beware pundits who see silver linings for Obama in this scenario.

Scenario #2: There is a deal, but it hurts the economy.

Assume the Keynesians are right and the GOP and, for that matter, Obama are wrong. If so, fiscal austerity is only going to make the economy worse. Maybe not as bad as it would be if the debt ceiling weren’t raised, but still: worse. If so, Obama will suffer. End of story. It does not matter that the deficit will (in theory) go down. Election-year changes in the size of the national debt do not affect election outcomes. And it does not matter that a deal could make Obama appear “bipartisan.” Independent voters do not put political process ahead of the most tangible outcome: the economy. See also Matt Yglesias.

Scenario #3: A deal, with no effect on the economy.

Assume that there is some sort of deal, which in all likelihood will not be the grand bargain Ambinder mentions but some smaller deal built around the Biden talks. I will ignore for the moment what must then be negotiated in 2012. Assume that neither a 2011 deal nor any future deals affect the economy between now and November 2012. Then what? Let’s subdivide.

Scenario 3a: The economy is still weak throughout 2012, as some forecasts suggest. Obama will suffer. See Scenario #2. He may win, depending on the GOP nominee and the campaign itself, but it will not be easy. All the GOP has to do is hammer him on jobs, jobs, jobs and no one will remember his masterful bargaining over the debt ceiling, or what the debt ceiling is in the first place.

Scenario 3b: The economy does improve—somehow, someway. Now Obama has the edge, and the economy is what he should campaign on. Maybe it’s not morning in America, but election-year economic growth is a powerful elixir to myopic voters.

At this point, there is finally an advantage for Obama to a budget deal. The GOP nominee will need an issue to emphasize other than the economy. As Lynn Vavreck argues in The Message Matters, that issue must be one on which (1) the GOP nominee’s stance is closer to voters’ than is Obama’s and (2) Obama can’t easily weasel out of his position. By passing a budget deal, Obama will have made it harder for the GOP to use the budget and deficit as that issue. They may still try, but now Obama can take credit for cutting spending and the debt, all the while noting that many in the GOP sided with him.

That’s a lot of hope there. And a lot of pain for real people on the off chance that the GOP attacks will be blunted.

So basically they really are still counting on Morning in America to magically appear in time and think that massively cutting government will ruin the Republicans’ plans to complain.(Maybe that explains the Reagan comment yesterday.) The fact that they will also be selling deficit reduction as an economic elixir doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I guess.

And Republicans have been running against Big Gummint/taxnspend liberals for as long as I can remember. A Democrat slashing spending won’t stop them. And I know this because Bill Clinton declared that the era of Big Government was over and they impeached him for his trouble. The idea of Obama’s campaign being based upon bragging that he has proved how much pain he can cause is rather nauseating.

My personal feeling is that it takes about 18 months for voters to feel the effects of a recovering economy and that window is rapidly closing. I think if they were less rigid about their re-election plan and able to adjust to current realities they might do things differently. But it’s pretty clear that they’ve been counting on the Reagan Replay from the very beginning and changing circumstances just aren’t going to sway them.

I can’t cheer this even if the economy turns around and unemployment is way down by the time of the election. The level and type of spending cuts that the White House has already proposed is a betrayal of liberal ideology and economic reality to such a degree that I’m rooting for the McConnell proposal, which is just bizarre. But it’s the most sane plan on the table.

(See this to understand just how deeply he is proposing to cut into vital services. This rationale just doesn’t measure up in any way to the pain that this will cause and the danger we will all be living with in our daily lives as a result.)

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DeCanting the whine

by digby

So you’ve probably heard that Eric Cantor came running out of the White House debt meeting today screaming “the bad man tried to touch me!” (or something to that effect.)Evidently, they are attempting to position the President as being a very, very angry you-know-what who can’t be reasoned with. Whatever. It’s ridiculous.

More interesting is what the Democrats are saying. This is Jessica Yellin on CNN just now:

At the very end of the meeting after hearing Republicans endorsing a short term deal, the very kind of deal President Obama has said he will not accept, the kind of deal he has said he would veto, he gave a speech.

Democratic officials said that he told the group that this is the kind of political posturing that Americans have a great distaste for, it’s the kind of thing they always expect from Washington where politicians take political positions and cater to their bases rather than take hard stands on tough issues. And that is when the meeting broke up…

Republicans are now agreeing openly, at least House Republicans, that they do like this idea of a short term debt extension, which would require multiple votes before now and next year’s election which makes it a political issue and changes the entire dynamic of these negotiations. And Tom, I’ll tell you that the president again today repeated that he would veto any kind of short term deal which means if that’s what House Republicans are pushing for, there is no deal.

When asked about the alleged blow up with Cantor, Yellin explained:

This is where the President said to the group “this confirms the worst suspicion everyone has of Washington.” The President was frustrated that Eric Cantor had now endorsed this short term deal idea and was frustrated that he had changed off of his prior position where he had wanted to go for a real deficit reduction — in the words of Democratic officials — into the short term idea.

And then she said that they are all still meeting tomorrow to discuss detailed spending cuts and for the first time tax revenues will be on the table.

Now I have no idea if Yellin is even close to accurately representing what happened.But if she’s right, it means that the Republicans are now willing to sign on to the McConnell plan, which is a series of essentially cloean debt limits votes, but the President is still insisting on — “in the words of Democratic officials” — real deficit reduction. (I hadn’t actually put together the President’s odd pledge yesterday to veto any short term deal with McConnell’s proposal for … a short term deal.)

As I said, take it all with a grain of salt. Who knows what really happened or what their positions really are? But it’s interesting.

It’s also interesting that despite all the sturm und drang they are still meeting tomorrow to talk about spending cuts and tax increases. It’s a good reminder that much of what these people are saying in public is posturing and positioning to sell whatever the deal might end up being.

Update:

Sam Stein has some more detail and it’s quite revealing:

Lost in the rush to frame the dramatic conclusion of Wednesday meetings was word of the actual substance of the talks. According to several attendees, negotiations stalled from the onset over the same issues that have proved irresolvable. Working off of talks that had been spearheaded by Vice President Joseph Biden, the president said he would be comfortable signing off on northward of $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending and mandatory spending cuts. With additional negotiations, he added, he could move that figure up to $1.7 trillion, and with a willingness to consider revenue increases and tax loophole closures, he added, lawmakers could get to over $2 trillion. His preference, he said, was to continue to push for the biggest package possible, so long as it was balanced.

Cantor, who has taken over the mantel of chief Republican negotiator from Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), responded by insisting that revenues were off the table and that without steeper cuts, the votes likely didn’t exist to pass anything but a smaller, more temporary package. House Republicans needed the administration to go to a higher number, he added.

To which the president responded: “It is easy to get to a higher number when you are not asking anything difficult from yourself. “

From there, the friction remained. When the White House pushed for an extension of unemployment insurance as part of the final package, Republicans objected. The White House was forced to explain that it would be off-setting that extension with cuts elsewhere. When the president pushed to lock in savings from cuts to the Department of Defense, Republicans objected again; this time, they were joined by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who urged (conversely) for the president to go further in pulling savings out of the Pentagon.

According to a Democratic official, the most contentious debate came when talks turned to discretionary spending, and, specifically, whether to count long-term savings based on current spending baselines or by tying them to inflation. Republicans wanted the former. It was, the official said, a debate over the “measurements of savings as opposed to the savings themselves.”

Talks, from there, turned to how to enforce those savings in the long run. Those discussions, which took place between Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and top economic adviser Gene Sperling, were described as cordial compared to the earlier ones. But lawmakers quickly found themselves back on the same sticking point.

Unhappy that negotiators remained at $1.7 trillion-or-so in cuts, Cantor pressed again for a shorter deal or for negotiators to find their way to $2.5 trillion. The president, growing more agitated, argued that attendees where simply looking for ways to say no.

“Talk about arbitrary,” he said of Cantor’s figure, according to a Democratic attendee. “I am totally willing to do the hard stuff to get well above what you need and you won’t do it because you can’t put one penny of revenue on the table.”

Fairly sure this is what’s important:

he would be comfortable signing off on northward of $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending and mandatory spending cuts. With additional negotiations, he added, he could move that figure up to $1.7 trillion

Basically the news is that the President has already agreed to cut 1.7 trillion without adding any revenue. If the Republicans would sign off, they could sign that deal tomorrow. But Cantor wants 2.5 trillion in cuts alone or he’ll take McConnell’s deal to break up the negotiations into increments. That made the president mad because he keeps giving more and more ground and they keep refusing to help him achieve “balance.” I can see why he’s frustrated. It would appear that the McConnell plan has given the Republicans another card that he doesn’t want them to play.

In any case, as of right now we know that any “deal” will be a minimum of 1.5 to 1.7 trillion dollars in cuts. There might be some revenue if the Republicans feel like putting some on the table. Or they will go with something like the McConnell plan, although the president has vowed to veto any short terms deals.

Stein adds this:

I have reached the point where I say enough,” Obama concluded, according to Reuters. “Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.”

Update II:

Negotiators have been aiming for a deal that would secure at least $2.4 trillion in deficit savings in order to extend the debt limit through the end of next year. Cantor charged Wednesday that the White House’s figure for those potential deficit savings was consistently “going downward,” from $1.8 trillion last week to “not even” $1.4 trillion, due to Democrats’ insistence on the inclusion of unemployment insurance and health-care expenditures in the final deal.

I’d heard the UI floated yesterday. I don’t know what the health care “expenditures” might be, but using the unemployed is the way they will get the Democrats to vote for these draconian cuts without revenue increases. Smart.

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Quote of the Day

by digby

(This is actually from a couple of months ago.) Guess who?

“It is true that divided government is the only government that can do transformational, difficult things… One thing I do tell my members is: whatever we do with this President is not going to be an issue in the next election. Because when you do it with divided government, no one can take advantage of whatever the difficult part of it was. You saw that on display with [Ronald] Reagan and Tip O’Neill on tax reform in ‘83, Bill Clinton and the Republicans on welfare reform in ‘96. And, you know, balancing the budget in the late 90’s was not easy; that was done by Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress.

So, I view this discussion surrounding the debt ceiling as actually an opportunity, an opportunity to do something important for the American people and to actually get a result. And those discussions are under way and I’m hoping that they can lead to something that I can recommend … and that at least most of them will conclude that it is an important accomplishment for the country…

If you guessed it was the President, you’d be wrong.

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Not a dime’s worth of difference

by digby

The Economic Policy Institute analyzed all the current budget plans and issued a report comparing them side by side. It isn’t exactly reassuring:

The current budget debate has generated various plans to bring revenues and spending into alignment, including proposals by the president, congressional caucuses, individual legislators, and outside groups. The majority of these plans focus disproportionately on the non-security discretionary (“domestic discretionary,” or NSD) budget, that portion of the overall budget that not only delivers the primary source of investment in our nation’s future, but also provides vital services to people in need, protects Americans from corporate abuses and environmental degradation, and keeps the government itself operating…

This analysis examines President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal, the president’s April framework, the Bowles-Simpson debt commission’s plan, and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget resolution. The major findings of this analysis are summarized below:

• Each of the proposals cuts the NSD budget [as a share of GDP] to its lowest level in over half a century.

• Under the proposals, the NSD budget in 2021 would range from 1.5% of GDP (Ryan) to 2.2% of GDP (President Obama’s 2012 budget request)— below the previous low of 2.6% in 1962; far below the historical average of 3.3%; and well below its averages during both the Reagan (3.4%) and Clinton (3.0%) presidencies.

• Over half of the NSD budget is composed of public investment (for example, education, infrastructure, and R&D), so these proposed cuts make it practically impossible to maintain our investment levels—let alone begin to close our substantial public investment shortfall—without cutting at the rest of the NSD budget by at least 70 percent.

This is how we are going to Win The Future?

If one were to “negotiate” using these proposals as a starting point, the leftward position is NSD spending lower than it’s been since 1962.

The last fifty years of the non-security discretionary budget can be characterized by four time periods. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, the NSD budget rose from less than 2.6% of GDP to about 4.5% of GDP, mostly due to increased investments in ground transportation (nearly all of which went to highway investment), training and employment, pollution control and abatement, and housing assistance (see Figure A).

From 1980 to 1989, the NSD budget was cut by over one-third, from 4.5% to 2.9% of GDP, with the most severe cuts made to training and employment, community development, ground transportation, pollution control and abatement, and energy supply.

Between 1989 and 2008 the NSD budget remained relatively constant, never rising above its 1995 high of 3.2% of GDP or falling below its 1999 low of 2.7% of GDP. It averaged 3.0% of GDP during this 20-year period and ended exactly where it started, at 2.9% of GDP. But the composition of the NSD budget changed, with education (mostly K-12), health care services, health research and training, and ground transportation
investments rising as a share of the budget and defense-related atomic energy environmental activities (technically part of the NSD budget despite being associated with security activities), space activities, and training and employment spending falling.

Ok, let’s set aside the lunacy of any of these people proposing to do this while unemployment is still high and the economy is faltering. But even if the economy was recovering smartly, why in the world is a Democrat proposing to go below 3%? Are they just giving up the idea of liberal government altogether? Apparently so, although it’s unclear if they know it:

This would be the lowest level in over half a century and about one-third below its previous low of 2.6% in 1962. Keep in mind that 1962 was before the entire Great Society and before modern environmental regulation; back then the federal government’s role in funding education, law enforcement, and keeping families off the
street was minimal. In short, an NSD budget level that falls short of its 1962 level would cripple basic government functions and fail the needs of a growing population.

Yet the budget plans by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the Bowles-Simpson debt commission, and President Obama as outlined in his April speech all propose to slash NSD to an even lower level than that reached in 1962. As shown in Figure A, the Bowles-Simpson plan and the president’s April plan both propose to cut the NSD budget down to 2.0% of GDP in 2021, while Chairman Ryan proposes to cut it down to 1.5% of GDP. Not even President Obama’s 2012 budget request proposes allowing the NSD budget
to keep up with inflation (the CBO baseline), with funding in 2021 at 2.2% of GDP—still lower than it has been in over half a century. And all of these plans propose NSD levels far below the averages during both the Reagan (3.4%) and Clinton (3.0%) presidencies

The cuts proposed under these plans will be even more difficult and painful than the topline numbers suggest. Public investments—such as education, infrastructure, and R&D—are vital to the nation’s long-term economic growth and global competitiveness. Yet public investments are extremely low, currently near their lowest level in 60 years (Pollack 2011), leading to a lagging and inadequate education system, crumbling infrastructure, and absence of innovation. Accordingly, support for safeguarding public investment has grown, as evident in the Bowles-Simpson commission plan, which proposed protecting public investment spending, and the president’s 2012 budget, which proposed expanding public investment.

Yet an analysis of account-level data provided by the Office of Management and Budget reveals this to be a near impossibility because public investments represent over half of the non-security discretionary budget. Furthermore, the NSD portion of public investment represents nearly 90% of total federal non-defense public investment. In other words, it would be practically impossible to cut the non-security discretionary budget to the levels proposed in the various plans without either significantly cutting public investments or nearly eliminating everything else.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether these people know what they’re doing or not. But any way you slice it, this cutting fetish is hugely destructive regardless of their alleged good intentions. The numbers don’t lie.

It’s hard to see where this ends but it’s obvious that it’s going to be extremely hard to crawl back out of the hole that’s already been dug. Proposing to cut already inadequately financed programs has already made it impossible to grow them, even if the draconian cuts of Ryan or the other plans are stillborn. Why?

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The forgotten players

by digby

Hmmm. Maybe it’s not the all powerful Teabaggers who are calling the GOP shots on this debt ceiling fight after all.

I just saw this on CNN:

In case you were wondering, that’s sponsored by a PR group representing hospitals:

WHAT IS THE COALITION TO PROTECT AMERICA’S HEALTH CARE?
The Coalition is a unique organization of hospitals, national, state, regional and metropolitan associations united with the business community behind one goal: to create television, radio and print advertising that seeks to protect and preserve the financial viability of America’s hospitals. The Coalition is a tax-exempt organization with an independent and diverse board representing all sectors of membership.

WHY IS THE COALITION UNIQUE?

The Coalition has one mission…to mount massive advertising campaigns on a sustaining basis on behalf of the entire hospital field – efforts that are unprecedented in their scope and inclusiveness. In addition to thousands of individual hospitals and health systems, Coalition members include every major national hospital association as well as each state, regional and metropolitan hospital association. Coalition ads are triggered solely by threats to the stability and well-being of hospitals.

My goodness. Wouldn’t it be a shock to find out that the GOP is resisting huge spending cuts not because of their fealty to the principle of low taxes but their fealty to Big Business? Bowl me over with a feather.

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Senator Frank Lautenberg calls for hearings on Murdoch:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) called on Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Mary Schapiro to investigate whether U.S.-based News Corp violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Allegations have arisen that reporters employed by News Corp’s News of the World newspaper bribed law enforcement officials, which may be a violation of the FCPA.

“The limited information already reported in this case raises serious questions about the legality of the conduct of News Corporation and its subsidiaries under the FCPA,” Lautenberg wrote. “Further investigation may reveal that current reports only scratch the surface of the problem at News Corporation. Accordingly, I am requesting that DOJ and the SEC examine these circumstances and determine whether U.S. laws have been violated.”

Eliot Spitzer thinks it’s possible:

So how does all this concern Americans? First, it is hard to believe that the misbehavior in Murdoch’s media empire stopped at the water’s edge. Given the frequency with which he shuttled his senior executives and editors across the various oceans—Pacific as well as Atlantic—it is unlikely that the shoddy ethics were limited to Great Britain.

Much more importantly, the facts already pretty well established in Britain indicate violations of American law, in particular a law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Justice Department has been going out of its way to undertake FCPA prosecutions and investigations in recent years, and the News Corp. case presents a pretty simple test for Attorney General Eric Holder: If the department fails to open an immediate investigation into News Corp.’s violations of the FCPA, there will have been a major breach of enforcement at Justice. Having failed to pursue Wall Street with any apparent vigor, this is an opportunity for the Justice Department to show it can flex its muscles at the right moment. While one must always be cautious in seeking government investigation of the media for the obvious First Amendment concerns, this is not actually an investigation of the media, but an investigation of criminal acts undertaken by those masquerading as members of the media.

I think the chances that this doesn’t hit the US are vanishingly small. Especially when you think about events like this:

Ailes called Zucker on his cellphone last summer, clearly agitated over a slam against him by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. According to sources familiar with the conversation, Ailes warned that if Olbermann didn’t stop such attacks against Fox, he would unleash O’Reilly against NBC and would use the New York Post as well.

O’Reilly gave out GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s address on the air, reportedly at Ailes’ direction. And this happened too:

On May 19, their Page 6 gossip monger, Richard Johnson, asked if Olbermann was “on the verge of yet another professional meltdown?” Today the same Ailes apple polisher flatly asserts that Olbermann has not paid his taxes. Johnson’s source is the utterly disreputable attack dog site, OlbermannWatch. This allegedly factual assertion is made despite the fact that it is contradicted a few lines down in the very same paragraph.

And then there’s this:

A few months ago, Ailes called Chris Christie and encouraged him to jump into the race. Last summer, he’d invited Christie to dinner at his upstate compound along with Rush Limbaugh, and like much of the GOP Establishment, he fell hard for Christie, who nevertheless politely turned down Ailes’s calls to run.

Those are just three small items that came to mind as I sit here.

There is a ton of stuff that we already know about Fox News’ intrusion into the political process and blackmailing rivals and political foes. That’s what’s at the heart of the UK scandals as much as the criminal hacking. There’s very little reason to believe that an ethos that so closely tracks in the one way isn’t likely to have tracked in the other.

Update: An excerpt of Howard Kurtz’s new article in The Daily Beast:

“There were people you were not supposed to mess with,” says the former reporter for the gossipy Page Six, if they were “friends” of executives at the Post or its parent company, News Corp. At the same time, “word would come down through your editor, ‘This is someone we should get, should go after.’ The people high up had people they just didn’t like.”
[…]
“There was a kind of thuggishness,” says Jared Paul Stern, a former Page Six contributor at the center of the controversy. He says Murdoch was on the phone with Post Editor in Chief Col Allan “all the time. He was down in the newsroom. I can’t imagine anything of that scale could go on and him not know about it.” Allan and a Post spokesman have not responded to requests for comment.

Update II: h/t to JS @tinyrevolution for reminding me of this one from 2009:

Gossip, for Murdoch, is partly business intelligence, but Murdoch also likes to know who is sleeping with whom. He especially likes to know what liberals are sleeping around (but he will take conservatives, too). It is a prurient interest, but it is also leverage. He refers to having pictures and reports and files—though this may be as much what he imagines a powerful person like himself should have, whereas all he really has is some speculation from sycophantic reporters feeding him what he wants to hear.

The Guardian’s report about the revelations of massive illegal tapping of government officials by private investigators in the employ of his tabloid newspapers in London has as much to do, I believe, with currying favor with Murdoch as it does with selling newspapers (no less uncovering the truth).

Did Murdoch know his daily gossip fix came from illegal wiretaps?

Murdoch calls Rebekah Wade, the former editor of News of the World and of the Sun and a family favorite, at least twice a week, sometimes daily. He checks in with the editor of the weekly News of the World before every issue. He wants to know what his editors know—at the same time they are careful not to tell him what he doesn’t want to know (he wouldn’t listen anyway).

When the New York Post’s Page Six editor, Richard Johnson (who regularly supplies the boss with unpublished tidbits), admitted taking bribes from sources and subjects, Murdoch was furious. But a good publisher, Murdoch believes, must tolerate the bad behavior in a newsroom—he didn’t fire Johnson—understanding that it is precisely such bad behavior that gets the story and provides the gossip that the boss lives for (and that sells the papers).

There’s more…

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Remember Betty

by digby

Perlstein on Betty Ford in the NY Times:

Though she was never an elected official, industry titan or religious leader, few Americans changed people’s lives so dramatically for the better. I learned it for myself in the most unlikely of places: a Ford family estate sale in 2007.

Some historical background: in August 1975 Betty Ford went on “60 Minutes” and said that if her 18-year-old daughter had an affair, she would not necessarily object. Soon after, she volunteered in McCall’s that she had sex with her husband “as often as possible.”

Those comments were widely reported. Less well known is what happened next.

Experts considered her a political liability. A syndicated humor columnist imagined aides seeking her resignation — before it was too late: “The networks and women’s magazines … are making incredible offers to get the First Lady to sit down and openly discuss adultery, drinking, homosexuality and a proposed postal rate hike.”

Bad joke. Two months later a Harris poll found that 64 percent of Americans supported what Mrs. Ford had said on “60 Minutes.” By then she was known for her self-assuredness before the media: she had already announced that she had breast cancer, then let herself be photographed in her hospital room after her mastectomy — at a time when respectable people only whispered the word “cancer.”

Then, a year and a half after leaving the White House, she famously owned up to her alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, even as her husband was quietly putting himself forward as a 1980 presidential possibility. Once more the public embraced her, voting her ahead of the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, no slouch in the popularity department herself, on Good Housekeeping’s list of the country’s “Most Admired Women.”

No one would have predicted this. America had been a nation of shame-faced secrecy in so many of its intimate domestic affairs. The 1970s was when that began to change. Betty Ford was that transformation’s Joan of Arc.

Read on to find out about that estate sale.

Betty Ford was my favorite first lady and probably contributed greatly to my first presidential vote going to a Republican. (The contrast between her and the extremely religious Carter meant something to my youthful self.)

When Jerry Ford died a few years back, it happened to be right after the 2006 election, which you’ll recall was a Democratic rout. The press had been determined to downplay any ideological significance in the win and began to assert that people had voted in the previous November to return to the alleged bipartisan halcyon days of the Ford administration. This was my impression at the time:

Fox News Watch:

Eric Burns: Grandma Pelosi goes to Washington. Don’t you think the handlers have to back off just a little bit?

Neal Gabler: yeah, perhaps. I mean the themes of this week were really moderation and bipartisanship, not being grandma. We saw that in Ford’s funeral and we saw that with the celebration.

Burns: Celebration meaning?

Neal Gabler: Moderation meaning, we’ve had … and this is a slap clearly at the Bush administration — “we’ve had six years of hyperpartisanship” …. and what we’re looking at in Gerald Ford is a model of bipartisanship and moderation and what we’re looking for in terms of the new congress is the hopefulness of bipartisanship and moderation.

That pretty much covers it all in one muddled, hangover stew. Evidently, the brainless punditocrisy does believe that people voted for the Democrats last November because they were yearning for 1974 and wanted the Democrats to act like Jerry Ford. These people have decided that the Democrats are supposed to “pardon” President Bush in order to heal the nation.

I don’t think so.

60 Minutes last night reminded us of what it was really like back in the good old days when Betty Ford was in the White House being excoriated for her courageous decision to act like a normal human being instead of a robot:

Betty wouldn’t step back. In fact, her outspokenness was such a trademark that there are several exhibits about her candor at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.

For one, the Fords abandoned the notion of separate bedrooms. At the time, people were shocked by this.

“We had always shared a bedroom, and I thought there was no reason we had to change our lifestyle if I wasn’t gonna give him up entirely,” Mrs. Ford told Stahl.

But if that shocked the country, it was nothing compared to Betty’s interview with Morley Safer in 1975. All hell broke loose. She said that if she were a teenager, she probably would try marijuana, that she’d seen a psychiatrist, and that she was pro-choice. And then there was the question about her 18-year-old daughter.

“Well, what if Susan Ford came to you and said, ‘Mother… I’m having an affair’?” Safer asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls,” the first lady replied.

Historians consider the interview so important, it runs perpetually at the Ford Museum. At first, two-thirds of the mail and phone calls were negative. Editorials criticized her for being too candid and too liberal, potentially an enormous problem for Jerry Ford.

Asked if her husband was upset with her, Ford told Stahl, “When he saw it, he said, ‘Well, honey, there goes about 20 million votes, but we’ll make it.'”

But other people were outraged. “There were people who actually demonstrated in front of the White House and said I was a embarrassment as a first lady,” she remembered.

She went on to become extremely popular because, shocking as it was, she was actually like the vast majority of the country. Her views were not out of the mainstream — she was just one of the few people in public life who had the courage to not be a hypocrite.

If everyone wants the Democrats to emulate the Ford era, being independent, outspoken and broadminded like Betty would be the right way to go about it. People were sick and tired of mushmouthed platitudes and insulting deception after all the years of lies. After Bush, I have a feeling people might just be looking for a little of that same Betty Ford straightforward honesty and clarity.

Yeah well, it was a nice thought.

I’m guessing that if you are under the age of 35 you can’t even imagine what it was like when there were Republicans like her.

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Rooting For Mitch

by digby

Dday has a good piece up in The American Prospect this morning about the McConnell plan, explaining the ramifications for both sides. He explains the ridiculous mechanics of the proposal and then offers this analysis:

He doesn’t want him or any of his GOP colleagues to have to vote to increase the debt limit. His primary concern is that Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson and Joe Manchin—moderate Democrats who could fall to Republicans next year—have to take that vote, and that Obama has the full responsibility for engineering it. In other words, he wants what every Senate Minority Leader has wanted since time immemorial: to put all the responsibility for approving a controversial and unpopular measure on the majority party. Under this plan, Republicans could vote against the increase without worrying about causing a default and accuse Democrats of racking up debt. And since the President would have to submit a specific request for the increase, it fits with McConnell’s other goal of driving down Obama’s popularity and making him a one-term President. What’s more, the spending cut term paper that Obama would have to write may prove useful in the upcoming 2012 budget talks.

He goes on to explain that this is fatally flawed because there’s no reason to believe that any endangered Democratic Senator will have to vote to raise the debt ceiling — nor is it obvious to me that this is the horrifying prospect that McConnell thinks it is. (It is true, however, that if this deal goes through the Villagers will probably begin to portray these votes as the political kiss of death. They’re very suggestible.)

This seems to me to be the weirdest aspect of McConnell’s proposal. If, as Dday says, he’s doing it because his overarching desire is to put Democrats in a bind having to take this “tough vote” over and over again, then this doesn’t really do it. Without it being attached to Presidential pressure on spending cuts or tax hikes, I don’t see any reason why these are particularly difficult votes.(It’s true that it ends Obama’s apparent delusion that he could take the deficit “off the table” but that was never going to happen anyway so no harm no foul. He helped put it there and now he’s stuck with it.) It seems to me that this is very weak face saving, but if McConnell can sell it, more power to him. Essentially this is a clean vote and that’s the most important thing.

But the story doesn’t end there, unfortunately. Dday continues:

But if Republicans believe themselves to be without leverage, the Democratic President in the White House is in the opposite role. He’s now the one using the debt limit to force a deal, one bigger than even his own party favors, with major cuts to cherished programs like Medicare and Social Security. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in response to McConnell’s plan that President Obama still wanted to “seize this unique opportunity to come to agreement on significant, balanced deficit reduction.”

Given the righteous conservative anger at McConnell and Obama’s preoccupation with a bipartisan deal, this doesn’t mean we can close the book on this debt limit increase just yet. But even if McConnell’s plan passes, the legacy of what Obama put on the table for cuts in these talks will haunt Democrats for many years, and we’ll see those proposals again—with lines like “Even Barack Obama supported” attached to them. It was a damaging strategy.

Indeed it was. And any “pivot” to jobs has been severely hamstrung by the President’s endless rhetoric about “belt tightening” and spending cuts. But at least they won’t be cutting spending with over 9% unemployment at the same time, so if they do manage to get some infrastructure on the table they won’t have already robbed Peter to pay Paul and destroyed any stimulative effects.

And then there’s Dday’s final line, which is sweet, even if it only holds for a moment:

But for the first time in a while, you heard the words “Republicans” and “spineless capitulation” in the same sentence.

Why do I keep getting the image of a jealous and tipsy old Mitch reeling onto the stage during the final act of the kabuki dance, ruining Boehner and Obama’s carefully choreographed ending?

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“The government called us paranoid”

by digby

So it looks as though Murdoch may not be able to close his big media deal after all. And then there’s this on the phone hacking, which isn’t surprising in the least:

But the scandal may encompass other forms of technology, too. On 8 July, The Guardian newspaper said the police investigation has been hampered by one News International executive deleting thousands of potentially incriminating emails from an internal archive.

It may not help: a corporate IT specialist contacted by New Scientist says it is highly probable that NI has off-site backup storage of its data for disaster recovery reasons.

On 11 July, yet another type of technocrime emerged. The New York Times said News of the World staff had bribed police to track people’s cellphone locations. This must be authorised by a senior police officer under English law, but the NYT says corrupt officers did the job – dubbed “pinging” – on request for around £300.

This is possible because any cellphone network can be used to track people (or rather, their phones) simply by triangulating signal strength from the three masts nearest their phone.

“If the police want to hear the content of a phone call, they must get permission from the Home Secretary,” says Ian Brown, a security and privacy researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. “But if they only want your location, a senior police officer can authorise it.”

Brown and like-minded colleagues warned British lawmakers about this self-authorisation and other anomalies during the passage of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in 2000. Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer at the time, today revealed that his child’s medical records had been appropriated by another News International title, The Sun.

“We predicted facilities like RIPA’s self-authorisation would be abused, but the government called us paranoid, asking us what we had to hide. We said it’s not so much government we’re worried about as hackers and corrupt insiders – and we have been proven right,” says Ian Brown.

It doesn’t end there: two formerly anonymous sex bloggers turned authors, Brooke Magnanti and Zoe Margolis, claim they may have been the victims of spyware attached to emails from News International’s Sunday Times. Both believe trojans downloaded when they opened the emails may have played a part in the uncovering of their identities.

It’s a criminal enterprise, that’s all there is to it.

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Death by 2 trillion cuts

by digby

Everyone’s calling this a blink but that’s only if you ever believed they were going to balk in the first place:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is proposing a new plan that would give the Republicans everything they want — $2.5 trillion in spending cuts — plus 12 new chances to blame Obama for everything. Under the McConnell plan:

1. Obama would have to request and increase in the debt ceiling along with “a plan to reduce spending by a greater amount.”
2. Ether chamber could pass a “Resolution of Disapproval” blocking the plan. Since the GOP knows they don’t have enough votes in the Senate, this method ensures the House would pass such a resolution, sending it back to the President.
3. Obama would then have an opportunity to veto the resolution.
4. Obama would have to round up enough Democratic votes to avoid the veto from being overridden.

Each of these unnecessary steps would repeated three times giving Republicans a chance to bash Obama on 12 separate occasions, while avoiding any accountability for the debt ceiling increase or spending cuts.

Luke Russert is reporting this as a “clean vote” so perhaps the 2 trillion in spending cuts aren’t actually on the table. (Or maybe Russert just sees that as a given, I don’t know.) But everything I’m seeing says that the President will have to propose cuts in the amounts equal to each of these debt ceiling hikes.Frankly, I don’t see why the President would be hostile to this. This way he gets to be the biggest spending cutter in town over and over again, which the White House seems to see as a major vote getter.

The deal is certainly preferable on policy grounds to gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a Grand Bargain. But it isn’t clean and it isn’t free. It feels like the death by a thousand cuts instead.

On the other hand, Arthur Delaney just tweeted that they may throw in some extended unemployment to make the medicine go down, so that’s good. Creating jobs would be better, but that’s highly unlikely under this austerity so this is the next best thing.

Update: According to dday, these spending cuts are hypothetical:

Based on this summary from McConnell’s office, it appears that the President would have to write down a plan for spending cuts right away, but they would not be enacted alongside an increase in the debt limit. They would be hypothetical. Rich Lowry says the House reaction is dim to this proposal.

If McConnell’s plan could make it through without required spending cuts then it would essentially be a series of clean votes, albeit clumsy, confused and byzantine. And that’s a good thing! No wonder the wingnuts are going batshit. (I wonder how the White House sees it.)

Update II: NY Times reports this:

“Mr. McConnell’s proposal would give Mr. Obama sweeping power to increase the government’s borrowing authority, in increments, by up to $2.4 trillion – enough, it is estimated, to cover federal obligations through next year – only if Mr. Obama specifies spending cuts of equal amounts. But Congress would not have to approve the spending cuts prior to the debt-limit increase.”

So it’s essentially clean. They think they’re trapping the President into proposing unpopular spending cuts and the Democrats into raising the unpopular debt ceiling. I think that’s deluded. The President isn’t exactly fighting spending cuts and the Democrats aren’t fighting raising the debt ceiling. It’s just a Get Out Of Tea card for the Republicans and a chicken sandwich for some centrist Dems. Something for everybody.

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