Month: December 2011

Greg Sargent breaks down the new Pew Poll, which apparently shows that a majority of Americans are more than willing to throw down in the class war. It’s quite inspiring when you think about it. Seems that no matter how hard the 1% tried it can’t quite convince the people that they should put their own needs behind those of the millionaire “jaaahb creators.”

Policy by ego

by digby

Many of the big supporters of the Health Care reform have said that the idea was to eventually apply apply its logic to Medicare. That is, that Medicare would eventually be a subsidy system with “choice” among private insurers and perhaps a public option (as long as the industry says it’s ok.) I don’t know that people understood that to be the eventual goal of the health care reforms, but evidently that was understood by many of those who were most enthusiastic about it.( In fact, a lot of people understood the opposite — that the health care reforms would eventually lead to single-payer.)

*wrong Aaron. Please excuse the error.

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Getting ahead

by digby

Nothing to see here folks:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

“Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too `rich’ to qualify,” said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

“The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal,” he said. “If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years.”

So let’s have some more austerity! It’ll be a bracing wake up call that these people just need to develop the work ethic of a CEO or a banker. After all, they wouldn’t be rich if they didn’twork harder than everyone else.

Demanding sacrifices on the altar of compromise

by David Atkins

The traditional media’s day wouldn’t be complete without another story about those horrible, nasty politicians and their awful insistence on being partisan jerks, and oh, how bad both sides are for not being more reasonable and compromising to do the business of the nation. Democrats and Republicans, tsk tsk. Always the same, bless their hearts, like little children too immature for the No Labels adults. The New York Times is happy to deliver the typical pearl clutching outrage:

Their poll numbers sinking, their constituents badly bruised by economic hardship and with millions of American workers about to get a sudden and unexpected tax increase, what are members of Congress discussing? Shutting down the government. Again.

For the third time in a year, the divided 112th Congress is dancing on the edge of catastrophe, locked in a bitter partisan battle over fiscal measures, with unrelated policy debates clinging to the side.

All right, so what’s the problem?

Republicans and Democrats do not agree on how to pay for something that both sides claim to want — extension of a payroll tax holiday for almost every worker — and have until the end of the year to work it out or see the tax go up, something that most economists say would further damage the nation’s fragile economic health by taking money out of consumers’ pockets.

Wait a minute here. There’s an argument over how to pay for a tax cut? I thought Republican orthodoxy said tax cuts paid for themselves. Where was this debate over making the Bush tax cuts pay for themselves? Where was the insistence on making the the elimination of the Paris Hilton tax pay for itself? Why are we even having this debate at all? Both sides want a tax cut for the middle class. Shouldn’t Republicans be gleeful that Democrats have hopped aboard the tax cut train?

Well, no. First, the Times has another smarmy reproach for politicians on both sides:

Now, with Congress entering a winter of discontent, each side expressed outrage — much of it manufactured — on Wednesday and blamed the other side for the potential debacle looming at the end of the week.

Yeah, we get it. Horrible partisanship, blah blah blah. So what are the actual details of battle lines that the Times has helpfully buried toward the bottom of the article below their both-sides-do-it anti-partisan harangue?

After meeting privately with President Obama on Wednesday, Senate Democrats began to cobble together a new deal to extend the payroll tax without using a surcharge on incomes over $1 million, something Republicans detest. They hope the new measure will have legs in both chambers, but Mr. Obama’s press office said Wednesday that the president would like Congress to pass a short-term financing measure, known as a continuing resolution, for now.

Slow down a second. Democrats initially insisted on paying for the payroll tax cut extension with a surcharge on millionaires, but gave it up because they knew Republicans wouldn’t go along with it–even though every poll shows strong support among an overwhelming supermajority of Americans for raising taxes on the super rich to pay for popular programs. And in this case, not even a popular program, but a tax cut. Democrats gave that up, and are hoping to pass the popular middle-class tax cut extensions with a continuing resolution. In other words, Democrats wanted to do something popular, and pay for it by doing something even more popular. When Republicans denied them the opportunity to do the super-popular thing, they settled for just the popular thing–the tax cut that Republicans refuse to pass on its own. That sounds pretty much like compromise to me. So what is the Republican plan passed by the House?

Mr. Reid wants to quickly vote the bill down because while it would extend a cut in Social Security payroll taxes for 160 million workers, it also eases the way for an oil pipeline opposed by environmental groups, blocks certain air pollution rules, freezes the pay of many federal employees through 2013, increases some Medicare premiums, and greatly reduces unemployment benefits and adds a host of new rules for receiving them.

Perfect. Republicans want to roll back air quality rules (deeply unpopular), build a tar sands pipeline (middlingly popular but apocalyptic for the climate), freeze the pay of federal employees through 2013 (popular but arbitrary, punitive, near useless for deficit reduction, and harmful during a recession), increase Medicare premiums (insanely unpopular), stiff unemployment benefits (unpopular, heartless and again stupid during a recession) and force the unemployed to jump through more hoops (degrading and pointless. Wait, no. Degrading the unemployed as subhuman is the whole point.)

This is the Republican offer. A bevy of ideas by turns unpopular, insane, counterproductive and harmful, each one worse than the last–and all offered as the price tag for a tax cut that Democrats would be happy to pass alone. The Democrats, meanwhile, half-heartedly demanded a popular and useful millionaire’s tax before caving nearly instantly when Republicans refused to play ball.

And for this, the New York Times pooh-poohs both sides for intransigence and bitter, petty partisanship. For this, even members of my own Democratic Central Committee roundly proclaim how tired voters are of the “extremist partisanship,” declare their interest in and support for No Labels, and insist that Democrats should learn to be more “moderate” and “compromising.”

Where, Gray Lady of the Times, should Democrats have given up more ground in order to avoid this situation? Which particular insane poison pills in the Republican House bill should Democrats vote for in order to avert a government shutdown?

What more proof would you have that Republicans don’t care if the government shuts down, because they hate government anyway, and because the economic tailspin caused by a shutdown would, in their calculations, sabotage the economy thereby hurting the President’s re-election chances? What would it take for you to finally tell your readers the truth: that Republicans, like the evil mother in the Judgment of Solomon, are willing to kill the baby to get what they want over and over again, while Democrats continue to play the role of the good mother, giving up everything they own to save it?

Except that in this story, we have no Solomon. We have a vile jurist sitting in judgment of both sides, slapping them equally across the face for daring to sully his courtroom with their divisive argumentation rather than reach a deal with one another through arbitration–even as the good mother’s own supposed friends and relatives would rather sell her and her baby down the river just to avoid hearing another nasty word of partisan argument.

Because as we all know, “divisiveness” is the greatest of all mortal sins, regardless of how far backward only one side is forced to bend to avoid it.

Morally repulsive, one and all. Former Republican blogger John Cole said it best:

Time for the Annual Collapse

It appears Obama will not veto the Defense bill with the hideous detention policies, and I just heard that the Democrats have dropped the millionaire surtax for the payroll tax cuts.

I never knew the amount of depression and self-loathing that was involved in becoming a Democrat. I honestly think I hate Democrats more now that I am one than I did when I was a Republican.

John just doesn’t understand: Democrats just need to compromise more. On something. Anything. Everything, really. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the New York Times. They really know what’s best for America, and that’s more one-sided compromise.

Codifying Chateau d’If

by digby

I think one of the most stunning aspects of the administration’s decision not to veto an historic expansion of government power to imprison even its own citizens indefinitely and without due process is the context. Sure, we live in a very dangerous world. But we’ve been living in one at least since the advent of of The Bomb and the last I heard we were picking off Ad Qaeda members three at a time. The fact that this is happening with the war in Iraq wound down and Afghanistan scheduled to do so as well is what’s odd.

Ginny Sloan of the Constitution Project put it well:

But what will we say to future generations if the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) becomes law? That legislation contains a provision that authorizes the president to indefinitely imprison, without a criminal charge or court hearing, any suspected terrorist who is captured within the United States — including American citizens.

It is difficult to imagine a greater attack on one of the most basic of individual freedoms protected by our great Constitution. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.”

If members of Congress choose — for the first time in our nation’s history — to codify a system of indefinite detention without charge and authorize such confinement on the basis of suspicion alone, they will do so with their eyes wide open. The attacks of 9/11 are now more than ten years old. Although our troops are still engaged in Afghanistan, the fog of war has long since lifted.

Indefinite detention will now be law, not some emergency measure that history will judge to have been a mistake made in a crisis. It is a well thought out codification of certain views that have become commonplace in American society — that “terrorists” (to be defined by whomever sits in the White House) are not to be allowed the due process allowed to other human beings because our government just *knows* they are so dangerous we cannot even take the chance that they won’t be found guilty. That turns the rule of law on its head.

Adam Serwer has been following this story for Mother Jones and described the “changes” this way:

The conference version of the bill gives the White House so much room to maneuver around the “mandatory” nature of the military detention provisions that Congress can argue they’ve given the administration the “flexibility” it needs to fight terrorism effectively. At the same time, the bill creates a presumption of military custody for foreign nationals suspected of terrorism where there was none before.

That means next time a foreign national gets pulled off a plane with their underpants on fire, and the administration doesn’t throw him in a brig somewhere, elected officials can run to the microphones and express their frustration that the White House is defying congressional will.

I think that’s a long shot, don’t you? What administration is not going to simply throw them in the brig rather than “defy congressional will” and try them in a civilian court. It won’t happen.

Instead, we will see “terrorists” (however they’re defined) disappeared into a military justice system indefinitely, just as those Gitmo prisoners, many of them innocent of any serious crime, have been left to moulder in prison basically forever. As Serwer noted, “the transfer restrictions effectively turn Gitmo into the Chateu d’If.” (I have used the same reference many times, calling it “The Count of Monte Cristo effect.”)

The horror of indefinite detention, often in solitary confinement by capricious decision with no due process is one of the greater horrors of the imagination (to me anyway.) Consider what we’ve already done:

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston,South Carolina.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

[…]

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”

“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”

Padilla was famously thrown back into the civilian system when the Supreme Court overruled the decision under which he had been held in those conditions. The damage had already been done. Indefinite detention, particularly with solitary confinement, for anyone, American or not, is a form of torture.

I think dday’s analysis of why this happened is probably correct:

Remember that the White House has little problem with indefinite military detention. They just want to be able to dictate when it gets used and on whom. So they obviously see enough flexibility here to carry out unconstrained intelligence gathering and detention policies.

The part at the end, where they hope and pray that Congress will go back and fix the bill if it ever becomes a problem, is just nonsense. And the bill overall is ripe for abuse. The White House simply didn’t want to take the political hit for vetoing a bill that “supports the troops.” And they weren’t aroused enough by the thought of indefinite military detentions to mount any serious opposition to it.

The status quo remains in practice and the symbolism of codifying indefinite detention is probably a price they are willing to pay. The word is that the National Security types were overruled by the political people, but at the end of the day the only people who are worried about this for the long term are a bunch of shrill civil libertarians who are watching some very basic human rights and constitutional principles be eroded even years after the fog of war has cleared.

And those of you who trust that the Obama administration will not misuse this discretion should not be soothed. This law will remain on the books long after he is gone. How do you suppose the first Tea Party president will interpret it?

Remember this from yesterday?

Democrats continue to push Republicans to accept a small income surtax on income over $1 million to offset the cost of renewing the payroll holiday, but with little time until the government shuts down and the current tax cut expires, they may be willing to cut a deal.

Said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the number two Democrat in the Senate, “We’re open to ideas.”

Here’s one “idea”:

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats on Wednesday discussed abandoning efforts to impose a surtax on millionaires to help pay for extending a popular payroll tax break for workers, a Senate Democratic leadership aide said.

Obama and fellow Democrats in Congress are trying to find a way to pass the payroll tax extension in the face of stiff Republican opposition to the millionaires surtax.

The tax workers pay to the Social Security retirement system will rise to 6.2 percent from 4.2 percent at the end of the month unless Congress acts to extend the lower rate.

This may be a trial balloon, in which case mark me down as a “hell no.” But I wonder. I cannot imagine the Democrats are willing to shut down the government over this. I have no reason to believe they really care that much about millionaires paying more in taxes.

A welcome change

by David Atkins

It’s not the most important rule change in the grand scheme of things, but this is a welcome development nonetheless:

Excessively loud television commercials should be a thing of the past, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission.

Responding to years of complaints that the volume on commercials was much louder than that of the programming that the ads accompany, the FCC on Tuesday passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act to make sure that the sound level is the same for commercials and news and entertainment programming…

The act comes a year after Congress passed legislation regarding commercial volume and directed the FCC to come up with enforcement rules. The architect of the bill was Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park), who pushed for the legislation after hearing complaints about loud commercials from her family.

The FCC said cable and satellite TV companies as well as local broadcasters will be required to make sure the volume on commercials is kept in check. The rules go into effect in December 2012.

“We’re glad that consumers are finally going to get some relief from extra-loud TV ads,” said Parul P. Desai, policy counsel for Consumers Union. “People have been complaining about the volume of TV commercials for decades.”

It would be easy to joke about this, to call it a luxury 1st world problem, to call it irrelevant when compared with people being foreclosed on and out of work. All of that would be true. But for the millions of Americans of who watch hours and hours of TV every day, this is not unimportant to them. Changing the rule shows that government can be responsive to their needs and do what the “free market” left to its own devices would not.

It’s an easy teaching tool about the power of regulation to step in and force companies to do the right thing when otherwise they would not. And that in turn can have an impact on voter perceptions of regulations that do have more life-and-death consequences.

Now, if only Congress would step in and reverse the ruling allowing pharmaceutical marketing…

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Just a coupla progressive dudes talkin’ transparency

by digby

Here’s an inspiring conversation between Occupier (and blogger) Jesse LaGreca and Raul Grijalva (co-opting the hell out of each other 😉

Read this DKos diary for a thorough and informative take on the Occupy DC actions last week.

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Quote of the Day

by digby

David Brooks:

Did you see the Gallup chart that has been making the rounds that many, many more people fear big government than big business? …

This is one more piece of evidence, by the way, that the Occupy movement is the most over-hyped story of the year. The O.W.S. people want one thing, and the rest of the country is shifting in the opposite direction. The only people who lavish attention on the Occupiers are editors at various coastal media outlets. The rule seems to be that the more Louis Vuitton ads a magazine carries, the more stories it will run on O.W.S.

How very droll. Putting Occupy Wall Street in the same sentence as Louis Vuitton is exceptionally clever, I’m sure. No doubt Peggy Noonan and George Will tittered all over their brioche toast and truffle butter when they read it.

But perhaps someone should remind David that he works for a coastal media outlet that carries more Louis Vuitton ads than any other in the nation. If what he says is true,those out-of-touch Occupier elites are what’s keeping him in Guccis.

Lest we forget, there is an alternative. If it weren’t for Rand worshipping lunatics and corporate lackeys, this is what would be done:

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