Month: September 2011

Gotta hit the greedy geezers

by digby

Don’t you love it when rabid right wing partisans who pretend to be bipartisan attack Democrats for partisanship? I know I do.

Alan Simpson, co-chairman of the White House fiscal commission, isn’t a fan of President Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction plan or his new feisty tone.

The decision to shield Social Security from changes “is an abrogation of leadership, a vacancy of leadership,” Simpson told POLITICO Wednesday.

The harsh appraisal is notable even from the outspoken Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming whom Obama tapped last year to lead his bipartisan fiscal commission. Simpson is often blunt, but he has generally avoided direct criticism of the president, even when Obama declined to embrace the commission report and waited months to push a comprehensive plan.

Simpson said he is “saddened” and “tired of watching” the president talk up bipartisanship in public while bashing Republicans at private fundraisers. And by treading lightly on entitlements, Obama’s proposal fails to live up to the principle of shared sacrifice, he said.

Right. The “greedy geezers” need to stop sucking on the national teat. Which translates into the destruction of social security and the fulfillment of his goal, although Simpson won’t admit it.

After all, if he really gave a damn about the deficit, he would have spent a little bit more energy working on his own party and its presidents:

But then, why should he when he has the Politico doing his work for him:

Simpson and his Democratic co-chair, Erskine Bowles, recommended raising the Social Security retirement age to 68 by 2050, along with other changes, to shore up the system that is projected to go broke by 2037.

I’m guessing everyone reading this blog knows that is total bullshit: the SS system is projected to have a slight shortfall in 2037. It’s certainly not going broke.

And hey, if Simpson has his way, they can kill off a whole lot of baby boomers by destroying Medicare before that happens, so I doubt there will even be a shortfall at all.

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Even jerks have a right to free speech

by digby

NEW ORLEANS — There are several political signs attracting all kinds of attention in one Uptown neighborhood.

On Wednesday, crowds gathered at the corner of Calhoun and Coralie streets, looking at several signs depicting President Barack Obama as either a dunce, a puppet or a crying baby in a diaper.

“It disrespects the nation — and President Barack Obama represents our nation,” said Skip Alexander, as he looked at one of the signs. “He represents everybody, not some people.”

Dozens of protesters came by the house in the 1500 block of Calhoun throughout the day, demanding the sign come down.

“He wouldn’t do that to [President] Bush, I’m sure. It’s just insulting. It’s insulting,” said C.C. Campbell-Rock. “He’s going to have to take them down.”

“This is nothing put pure racism,” said Raymond Rock. “This is a disgrace.”

The home is owned by Timothy Reily, who declined to be interviewed about the signs. Former Mayor Ray Nagin showed up at the house and went inside to speak with Reily. He emerged later and would not comment on what they discussed.

Some neighbors tell Eyewitness News that Reily has been putting the signs up for months. Some of the protesters learned about the signs through a local radio station on Wednesday morning.

“He can put up a sign if he wants to. It doesn’t bother me,” said Harold Gagnet, a neighbor.

“I think it’s fine. It’s on his property,” said Katherine deMontluzin. “He can say whatever he wants.”

The signs have created such a firestorm of controversy, though, that police came to the scene– called in by City Council Member Susan Guidry. She represents the district where the home is located. Guidry said she was concerned about public safety and was trying to figure out if the sign was even legal. She also said she spoke to Reily, but didn’t get far.

Of course it’s legal. It’s explicitly political and that’s the most protected speech of all. The idea that any elected official would try to stop him is disturbing.

I don’t care for his message, obviously, and the guy is clearly a jerk. But this sort of political illustration is about as traditional All American as it gets:

That’s Thomas Nast in 1861, skewering Lincoln.

Here’s another one depicting Andrew Jackson hanging John Quincy Adams:

Bill O’Reilly shows off the GOP’s Achilles Heel
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

Close watchers of the news cycle may recall Bill O’Reilly’s recent threat to quit his TV show should the fantastical event occur that his tax rate reach 50%. Well, Mr. O’Reilly made the mistake of going on Jon Stewart yesterday. Stewart predictably went after O’Reilly; but it was O’Reilly’s response that should make some news. Here’s the segment:

Part 1:

Part 2:

What’s noteworthy about this interview is that O’Reilly didn’t and couldn’t stick to his guns on the claim that doing his show would no longer be worth it. O’Reilly admitted that he had been…exaggerating, to put it kindly.

Even more remarkably, when mocked by Stewart for his selfishness, the Loofah man didn’t even attempt to defend the principle of “low taxes on job creators” in principle. He knew he couldn’t do it with a straight face.

Instead, he said something amazing: that he would in fact by willing to pay 50% in taxes if government would stop “wasting” his money, and proceeded to raise the issue of the Solyndra non-story, as well as the $16 muffin myth. If I know Jon Stewart, he’ll use Monday’s show to rip O’Reilly apart for perpetuating a story that is known to be a fraud–and even if true, would represent an insignificant amount of money in the federal budget.

But O’Reilly’s excuses are almost beside the point. The newsworthy item from the interview is that the Fox News host not only backtracked from his previous statement, but did not even attempt to defend his position from an ideological basis. He knows that the “job creators shouldn’t pay significant taxes” meme is garbage, and couldn’t stick to it in a mano a mano quasi-debate with Stewart. Instead he agreed in principle with the idea of paying a 50% tax rate, so long as the government could prove it wasn’t wasting his money.

Now, when it comes to government waste and taxes, this is where a progressive naturally shifts to a discussion of billions, if not trillions, wasted on Halliburton and Wall St.. Which is, to be fair, exactly where Jon Stewart went and an important conversation to have. But the discussion of which Party wastes money and which does not isn’t so fascinating here.

What is fascinating is that when push comes to shove, conservatives cannot defend their ideological ground with a straight face when forced to have a real conversation, rather than wage talking point battles before a pseudo-objective media. This is their Achilles’ Heel. When cornered, they either look terrible and lose the debate, or are forced to admit that their ideological stance is garbage, leaning back on the “waste in government” canard.

But that itself is an admission of defeat. At that point, to paraphrase the old joke, we already know what kind of man O’Reilly is and we know he knows what the right thing to do is. Now we’re just haggling over the price.

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A taste of the good stuff

by digby

Atrios takes a little trip down memory lane to remind us just how nuts the beltway press can be when the the right wing gives them a tasty scandal morsel to suck on — no matter how dishonest, no matter how irrelevant it is.

So, following up on David’s post below, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the Village media’s reaction to this Solyndra pseudo-scandal. It isn’t on the level of the Whitewater circus of course and it’s nothing compared to Monica Madness, but when you read articles like this one, you know they’ve had a taste of the good stuff and they’re hoping for more:

The Energy Department on Wednesday approved two loan guarantees worth more than $1 billion for solar energy projects in Nevada and Arizona, two days before the expiration date of a program that has become a rallying cry for Republican critics of the Obama administration’s green energy program.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the department has completed a $737 million loan guarantee to Tonopah Solar Energy for a 110 megawatt solar tower on federal land near Tonopah, Nev., and a $337 million guarantee for Mesquite Solar 1 to develop a 150 megawatt solar plant near Phoenix.

The article doesn’t indicate that there’s anything wrong with either of the companies or that there’s any reason why they shouldn’t be approved for the loan guarantees. Neither does it spell out that the Solyndra pseudo-scandal is utter crap ginned up by Republicans for partisan gain.

Instead, they just invoke Cokie’s Law, implying that because it’s “out there” it’s news, regardless of whether there’s any truth in it.

Some things never change.

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Solyndra in a teapot
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

David Roberts at Grist has a great overview today of the Solyndra nontroversy, based partly on recent polling and focus groups. The upshot? Support for solar energy remains strong even among conservatives, and the non-scandal “scandal” is basically confined to the Fox News nuts:

I just received an interesting memo from a couple of polling firms that have done recent surveys to test the impact of the

The Ryan Express Rolls On

by digby

So Paul Ryan is going to reintroduce some of his most toxic plans to destroy whatever is currently working in the health care system and replace it with vouchers and tax credits. (If he succeeds, look for them to be called “tax expenditures” in about 20 years with centrists and conservatives both clamoring to “reform” the system by cutting them.)It’s the usual nonsense, insisting that people should “shop around” for the cheapest coverage in order to lower costs. And for all of you who haven’t had the fun and privilege of doing that already, he wants to end employer coverage too. Feel the magic.

Dave Weigel reported that Ryan has an unusual interpretation of recent events — apparently he believes his plan is working for them. Weigel writes:

Hm. This isn’t how I remember NY-26. Jane Corwin, the Republican candidate, was very clear: She supported the Ryan plan, and blind opposition to the plan was the same as rooting for Medicare to collapse. “It’s not like you’re given a certain of money to go out and you have to shop around,” she told me at the time. “The plans are defined. And how much gets paid is based on your wealth and your wellness, so if you’re sick or you’re lower income you receive more than someone who’s wealthy.” The non-“courageous” thing, maybe, was attacking Democrat Kathy Hochul for Medicare cuts, when the Ryan budget also assumes the cuts. I don’t think that’s what Ryan is talking about.

But once we learned that lesson and started to get our message out… well, a funny thing happened: People listened. They learned that our plan did not affect those in or near retirement; that it guaranteed coverage options like the ones members of Congress enjoy; and that choice and competition would drive costs down and quality up. They also learned more about the Democrats’ plans for Medicare, and they didn’t like what they heard.

And the scare tactics stopped working.

Look at what just happened earlier this month in the recent special elections next door in Nevada and out in New York. The Democrats threw every scare tactic they could think of at the Republican candidates running in two special elections for vacant House seats. But the attacks failed to connect with voters hungry for solutions. The Republican candidates prevailed.

Is that what happened? In Nevada, sure. Democrat Kate Marshall tried to make Republican Mark Amodei suffer for the Ryan plan … in New York, Republican Bob Turner didn’t actually support the Ryan plan. Turner’s backers accused Democrats of lying about the candidate because, hey, even theyadmitted that Medicare would be changed somehow. The Ryan plan was neutralized as an issue. This isn’t great evidence for Ryan’s point that starting to privatize Medicare will no longer hurt Republicans.

Democrats certainly don’t agree with Ryan. According to Greg Sargent, in spite of the President’s foolish unforced error in mentioning Medicare cuts in his jobs speech, they are going after Ryan hard:

The DCCC is going out in the districts of 50 House Republicans with a press release designed to get local media to pressure them to say whether they will — again — support Ryan’s controversial health care vision.

“Ryan acknowledged his new plan doubles down on his earlier controversial budget proposal to end Medicare that Bucshon supported,” reads the release going out in GOP Rep. Larry Buschon’s district. “Will Representative Bucshon go along again, with Ryan’s latest radical scheme to end employer health care at the expense of the middle class? ”

Sargent writes:

Dems are now hoping that Ryan has given them fresh ammo to remind voters just how serious Republicans are about fundamentally transforming the health care system — and profoundly altering aspects of it that remain very popular — in the months and years ahead.

From the defensiveness of the NRCC response to Sargent’s report, they haven’t exactly signed on to Ryan’s double down:

“The only healthcare plan Americans are familiar with is President Obama’s massive government healthcare takeover that is destroying jobs and forcing middle-class families to pay thousands more in premiums when they can afford it the least. ObamaCare’s disastrous effect on America’s weak economy will continue to haunt Democrats at the ballot box in 2012.”

It doesn’t sound to me as if they are entirely confident that proposing that everyone, including those currently covered by their employers and Medicare, should be thrown into the private insurance market to find the cheapest coverage they can is a big winner. But hey, live by the law of the jungle, die by the law of the jungle.

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Snippy Tuck

by digby

The Daily Caller must insist that all of its employees channel Tucker Carlson’s puerile snottiness or lose their jobs. Even when they are are caught outright botching a story so badly that they look like total blithering idiots, here’s the response of the “Executive Editor”:

“The EPA is well-known for expanding its reach, especially regarding greenhouse gas emissions. What’s ‘comically wrong’ is the idea that half of Washington won’t admit it. The EPA’s own court filing speaks volumes,” Martosko said in an email.

“What’s more likely: that the Obama administration’s EPA wants to limit its own power, or that it’s interested in dramatically increasing its reach and budget? Anyone who has spent more than a few months in Washington knows the answer,” he added. “The suggestion that the EPA — this EPA in particular — is going to court to limit its own growth is the funniest thing I’ve seen since Nancy Grace’s nipple-slip.”

The truth is that it is (it’s a legal case, click the link to read the explanation), the Daily Caller has been shown to be pathetic fools — and Tucker Carlson and his minions, like the petulant children they are, refuse to admit they were wrong.

Recall this sad little episode back in the day when Carlson would pollute the airwaves on a regular basis. That anecdote was almost certainly a total lie from beginning to end.

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Rigid Politics

by digby

Somebody’s dishing (sort of) about David Plouffe:

Often considered a cold, calm cyborgian number-cruncher who reflects his cold, calm cyborgian boss, Plouffe, 44, is in fact deeply passionate man, enamored with the success of the 2008 campaign that cast Obama as a transformational candidate who would change Washington from above. It was an insurgent strategy that bested Hillary Clinton, but it has failed Obama as an incumbent. While Plouffe appears to be pushing Obama toward a more partisan approach, doubts linger over whether he has sufficiently gotten over the last election to win the next one.

Yes, this is a rather snide Washington Post profile, but I have to say that observation about the 2008 campaign really rings true. I have written here many times about the continuing insistence on the campaign as a governing model, despite the fact that it is almost completely irrelevant — and vastly overrated to begin with. After all, the Party was almost evenly divided in the primaries (but they were all Democrats who came together because they were more or less on the same side) and his opposition in the general was a doddering old man and a lunatic. Plus the country was in the ditch, Republicans had something like a 23% approval rating and virtually everyone hated the outgoing GOP president. I know the campaign was inspirational to a lot of people but it wasn’t exactly the apotheosis of political strategy. Nonetheless, they all seem to have believed their own hype and governed from that experience.

And is wasn’t just Plouffe. The President still refers to running the campaign as if it is a meaningful comparison to actually being president. He does say in the Suskind book that he learned from the campaign that you have to make people switch gears when things aren’t working, which I find somewhat ironic, since it apparently has taken Plouffe nearly three years to do so.

Plouffe’s defenders inside the White House argue that until recently he calculated that aggression against Republicans would hurt the economy and the president’s political standing with independents. Fighting might make liberal groups feel good, White House officials said privately, but it isn’t reasonable.And Barack Obama is a reasonable man.There is also a less-sanctioned sense within the White House that Plouffe’s above-the-fray path was safe for the naturally cautious president. The problem, according to people in and close to the administration, was the lack of a strong voice to counter Plouffe, who had absorbed many of the roles formerly played by Obama’s hands-on-everything manager, Rahm Emanuel.But now, the famously panic-proof strategist appears to have answered the appeals of his party and finally set the president on a more partisan — and unPlouffian — course.

Some might call it rigid and stubborn, but YMMV.

Plouffe’s defenders in the White House argue that he has been moving this way all along and that the pursuit of compromises has removed the paralyzing threat of default and put the president on firmer ground: Yes, the public’s discontent with Washington wounded the president, but it hurt Congress more. And now, Republicans will have to compromise on Democratic terms, as happened in this week’s avoidance of a government shutdown. Republicans, the thinking goes, will help the president to help themselves.“Plouffe sees the whole game,” said Stephanie Cutter, Plouffe’s deputy, who is leaving the White House to work on the 2012 campaign. “Not just the individual plays.”To the wider Democratic universe, this strategy constituted a year of magical thinking.

Indeed. If failing to push for policies that could have made the economy better and convince the people that he’s on their side for the first three years of an monumental economic crisis is part of their long term strategy then I suppose it’s a big success. The more obvious explanation is that the control freak Plouffe was so convinced of his brilliance in executing the “no drama Obama” presidential campaign that he failed to switch gears — and his boss, being of similar temperament, didn’t see that this 2009 “plan” going into the White House wasn’t working. I have always thought they all assumed that the economic crisis was no biggie and that the best strategy was for the president was to keep his head down and pursue his plan for a transpartisan Grand Bargain, settling our difference for all time and ushering in a new era of good feeling and comity. (Just like they did during the campaign ….) Voila: Morning In America Part II. And in a different country, at a different time, under different circumstances that might even have worked. Here in America, right now, it was indeed magical thinking, which I would guess is the last thing anyone would ever think the no-drama team would ever indulge in. I’m afraid they were blinded by premature hagiography..

Playing hard to get

by digby

This is how a constituency that has clout gets the job done:

JP Morgan honcho Jamie Dimon, once a “fat cat” ally of President Obama, seems to have strayed to Republican contender Mitt Romney.

Dimon, a lifelong Democrat who was rumored to be on Obama’s short list for treasury secretary before he settled on Tim Geithner, met privately with Romney on Tuesday morning before a fund-raiser at Brasserie 8¹/2 hosted by Highbridge Capital, a JPMorgan-owned hedge fund.

Dimon, who was spotted “in a discreet one-on-one” discussion with Romney, cannot publicly endorse a candidate because he sits on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But he donated to Democratic candidates in 2008 and privately supported Obama.

While Dimon’s spokesperson declined to comment, a JP Morgan insider tells us that Dimon has not attended an Obama fund-raiser and has not made any contributions to his campaign during this election cycle. And Dimon has met privately with many of the Republican presidential candidates.

Political insiders are buzzing that a defection would signal further Wall Street hostility toward Obama, who famously called them “fat cat” bankers in 2009. Dimon responded, “I don’t think the president of the United States should paint everyone with the same brush.”

One insider said, “There is not a person on Wall Street, with the exception of the genetic Democrats, who would get anywhere near supporting Obama. The hostility to the administration is huge. Dimon will continue to look bipartisan, then work behind the scenes to get a Republican elected.”

I’m sure that’s true. But these fat cats have so much money they can buy candidates of both parties and make them all dance to their tune.

There’s a lot of speculation about why the administration and the congress have been easy on Wall Street, from psychological reasons to ideological sympathy. But the easiest and most likely explanation is that it’s just about the money. Politicians want it and Wall Street’s got it. This is how they do their mating dance.

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Faith-based policy and American exceptionalism
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)

As the Republican presidential candidates fall all over themselves to outdo the other in pushing reckless anti-government, anti-tax ideology, there is one progressive response that I’ve always been particularly fond of but is far too seldom used: the fact that never in the history of the modern nation state has an economy successfully operated along the lines the Tea Party envisions for America. Bill Clinton of all people made this point just recently in a meeting with bloggers:

You know, there’s not a single solitary example on the planet, not one, of a country that is succesful because the economy has triumphed over the government and choked it off and driven the tax rates to zero, driven the regulations to nonexistent and abolished all government programs, except for defense, so people in my income group never have to pay a nickel to see a cow jump over the moon. There is no example of a succesful country that looks like that.

This is one of the reasons that conservatives are so desperate to hold onto the notion of American exceptionalism: liberals have a wide of range of models from Japan to Scandinavia to prove the efficacy of various progressive solutions to America’s problems. No country is perfect, of course, and solutions that work elsewhere may not work here. But as a general rule, progressives have effective examples worldwide to prove the value of our approach, whether it be in medicine, criminal justice, labor or otherwise.

Conservative approaches by contrast are a failure wherever and whenever they are tried. Theocracy inevitably leads to tyranny and despotism, whether it be the Christian theocracies of the Middle Ages or the modern theocracies of the Islamic world. Weapons-happy libertarianism ultimately ends in the sort of anarchic despotism we see in Somalia. Conservative approaches to finance, taxation and regulation lead inevitably to economic collapse, as seen in the history of basically every single country that ever even temporarily earned the “tiger” moniker from Austrian economists seeking to validate their theories.

So it’s crucial for conservatives to insist that America never learn from anyone else’s positive example, and that every problem in America be seen as sui generis. Faith-based policy making can only exist in an informational vacuum where real-world examples are never considered.

Progressives often lament that the conservative rhetorical construct is nearly impossible to demolish. But that’s actually not true. Republican rhetoric, built as it is on a foundation of lies, is incredibly rickety when challenged in the right places. Destroy one pillar, and much of the rest of it comes tumbling down. But doing so would require taking on some taboo subjects that have been so vigorously protected by the conservative establishment as to have become sacred cows.

American exceptionalism is one of those sacred cows. It is what allows faith-based policy to exist. The notion, accepted by so much of the Democratic establishment, that we cannot even rhetorically challenge the idea that love of America means never looking abroad for ways we can improve, has to go by the wayside if we want to have a chance of taking this country back.

Of course, doing that won’t happen overnight. But an easy way to lead into the argument would be to provide the negative counterexample: maybe we’re not yet in a position where independent voters will pay attention to examples of solutions from around the world. But they should at least be open to the argument that Republican policies have never worked here or elsewhere, not least because it’s true.

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