Month: December 2011

When Reagan saved Tipper

I think this may be the more damning thing I’ve ever read about former New York Times editor Bill Keller. And there have been some doozies. Ironically, it comes from Keller himself. Apparently, he got some blowback from his readers for using the term “illegals” to describe human beings. And he was confused because he simply didn’t understand why such a thing would be objectionable.

A Christmas Game of Chicken

by digby

So the Republicans in the House passed the poison pill appropriations bill and now we’re looking at a possible government shutdown:

Despite loud warnings from Senate Democrats and a veto threat from President Obama because of poison pills within the text, House Republicans Tuesday passed legislation to renew a 2 percent payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits of one more year.

The bill passed 234 – 193, with 10 Democrats joining with the Republicans and 14 Republicans pitching in with the Dems.

In a private conversation Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid again warned House Speaker John Boehner that his bill remains dead on arrival in the Senate. In particular, Democrats and the White House oppose a number of GOP-backed provisions: a measure forcing the Obama administration to expedite its decision about whether to green light construction the Keystone XL pipeline; out-year spending caps that could further reduce funding to key federal programs; and other restrictions including one that would allow states to drug test unemployment applicants.

The GOP bill also includes a steep increase in Medicare costs for middle class and upper class beneficiaries to help offset the cost of the payroll holiday. Per the Associated Press, it would “rais[e] premiums for ‘high-income’ Medicare beneficiaries, now defined as those making $85,000 and above for individuals, or $170,000 for families.”

Some would pay as much as several hundred dollars a month additional for Medicare outpatient and prescription coverage. Millions who don’t consider themselves wealthy would also end up paying more.

Harry Reid warned them that they’d be shutting down the government if they passed this odious thing, the President said he’ll veto it and the money runs out at the end of the week. Hello shutdown.

Of course, you never know:

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.”

Stay tuned. it looks like we’re in for a little Christmas game of chicken.

Update: By the way, I’m told that the Republicans who voted against the bill did so because it didn’t go far enough. I’m not feeling the bipartisanship.

Income inequality policy is the key to education policy

by David Atkins

Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske penned a fantastic op-ed in the New York Times two days ago for those who missed it. The whole thing is good reading, but here are the key grafs:

The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.

International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?

Yet federal education policy seems blind to all this.

Almost all social policy in this country comes down to the same issue: an over-financialized economy that is yielding all its benefits to the super-rich, which in turn has a distorting effect on every other aspect of society.

The political system is broken, too. But it’s still largely the same system we had 50 years ago, and it was clearly broken prior to Citizens United.

The devil is rampant inequality driven by an ideology that respects neither labor nor human dignity, and the Reagan-era policies that put that ideology in place.

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Ezra Klein finds it odd that the Republicans are both opposing a tax cut for the middle class and pushing permanent tax cuts for the wealthy. Krugman replies that it’s not odd at all because the Republicans don’t really care about deficits:

All the fiscal posturing of the last couple of years has been about using the deficit as a club to smash the welfare state, with the secondary goal of frustrating any efforts on the part of the Obama administration to help the struggling economy.

The entire debate has been fake. If you don’t understand that, or can’t bring yourself to admit it, you’re missing the whole story.

He’s right, of course. But that doesn’t get to the heart of what Ezra was talking about. This has nothing to do with deficits, even in the fake sense. It’s about an economic philosophy that says the wealthy are the “jaaahb creators” and everyone else are are parasites, moochers and looters. To listen to Michele Bachmann and Eric Erickson, who speak for many Republicans, our fiscal problems are caused by the 47% of Americans who don’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes.

Eric Erickson simply says,

“suck it up you whiners”.

Bachman says:

“Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat,”

and

“the problem is, and this is where I deviate from Reagan, he instituted the Earned Income Tax Credit, it’s known as the EITC, and that effectively took many many Americans out of even having to pay any tax liability at all. I would do away with the EITC and if a person has $3 in income they would be subject to something.”

Rick Perry says:

“We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” he said. A few days later, asked about changing the nation’s entitlement mindset, Perry repeated that statistic and said: “One of the ways is [having] as many people as possible to be able to be helping pay for the government that we have in this country.”

“Having more people who are outside of the wagon pulling it … than having all the rest of us that are paying taxes pulling that wagon [is] one of the real answers. And that is a form of personal responsibility.”

As California goes …?

Atrios calls this your moment of zen:

Perhaps he should have called it your moment of Mormon. You really would think that Romney, of all people, would be a little bit less rigid about such things. After all, his forebears thought that marriage was between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman and a woman etc. It’s not as if he can use the Bible as his excuse, is it?

This morning Politico seemed a bit incredulous that Newtie “missed a chance” to correct a looneytunes wingnut talking about Islam taking over the country in a town hall meeting:

The questioner went on for a while, noting that he was a Christian and wanted his rights protected against Islam. The crowd applauded.

Gingrich didn’t quite endorse the question, but he certainly didn’t correct it: There was no caveat that most American Muslims are good citizens, or that Constitutional rights apply to all religions. Instead Gingrich pivoted directly into a riff about the dual threats, to Christians and Jews, of Sharia law and of secularism.

The moment captured Gingrich’s political skills: He offers parts of the Republican base who are used to being dismissed and marginalized by the mainstream media — for what was, in this particular case, an actual fringe conspiracy theory, or at best a wild overstatement — a sense of legitimacy and intellectual heft, a sense that their concerns are part of a profound, deep, and fundamental structural concern.

But pandering to your audience when they are peddling crazy theories isn’t actually good general election politics, and it may not be good primary politics. You wind up owning the fringe. And while Gingrich may win over a town hall with a moment like that, it’s an impulse that won’t serve him well as the focus intensifies.

Gingrich has happily owned that fringe for decades. He helped create the modern anti-secular version of it and jumped on the anti-Islam version as soon as it became available. This is why they love him.

Don’t worry. It’s only record levels of climate-killing methane gas

by David Atkins

It seems like every day brings more alarming news that would shock and alarm an intelligent species with the capacity for foresight. Sadly, humanity doesn’t seem to be such a species.

Yesterday brings news of a shocking level of methane gas being released into the atmosphere via climate-change-induced permafrost melt–one of those positive feedback climate change loops we keep hearing about:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said. “I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them.”

Why does this matter?

Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.

And why is methane so bad? Adam Siegellinks to this piece at Thinkprogrss by Joe Romm to explain:

Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!

The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.

But what the heck do all these scientists know? Real Amurkans know it’s time to get science out of politics, tackle the real threat to humanity posed by gay military service, and give the jaahb creators more tax breaks. And that’s all that really matters, right?

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Young Electeds

by digby

Watch that Youtube and then read this from Howie Klein:

I brought a 33 year old first time candidate with me to the [People for the American Way 30th anniversary] event, Dr. Lee Rogers, the Democratic opponent of right-wing carbuncle Buck McKeon. A few days before I asked him to come I had suggested his campaign to a DC mover-and-shaker… who laughed in my face. He vomited back a liturgy of statistics proving, in his limited mind, that McKeon was untouchable and that no Democrat, let alone a first time novice like Rogers, could possibly beat him. It didn’t matter to him that Obama, albeit narrowly, won the district in 2008 and that the demographics are shifting precipitously away from the old white base that McKeon has used to prop up a long out-of-touch career. All that mattered were the Cook PVI (R+7) and that McKeon had beaten (unknown, hopelessly underfinanced) Democrats in 2010 (62-38%), 2008 (58-42%), 2006 (60-36%), etc… back into pre-history.

I imagine Lee hears a lot of this nay-saying. In fact, one of the things I admire about him is his positive spirit in the face of this kind of Insider negativity. The DCCC hasn’t rushed to help him, despite McKeon, being one of the most heinous Republicans in the country, who, for example, has declared that there will be no defense budget next year unless Obama backs off implementing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. He’s the incredibly corrupt chairman of the House Defense Committee but in this case he’s letting his Mormonism get in the way of protecting America and the hefty legalistic bribes he rakes in from defense contractors and arms manufacturers.

As I suspected he would be, Lee, a steel-nerved surgeon, seemed really moved by the presentation from the Young Elected Officials. I had introduced him to Alisha, an old friend, before the event and he had spent some time talking with her about how she– the first African-American elected in Newt Gingrich’s old Cobb County stomping ground, at 23 years old age– had managed to overcome the heavy odds against her. “I was inspired,” he told me yesterday “meeting Alisha and hearing how she and Angie overcame adversity, like age, to defy the political pundits and pollsters going on to win those races. It proves two things– working harder than the other candidate makes a difference, and the voters can sense when an incumbent is arrogant with power. These two attributes are advantages to challengers, especially young ones with fresh ideas in this climate of gridlock partisanship. The basic definition of American democracy is liberty and justice for all, and this PFAW event helped me to realize that we still have many fights ahead of us.” We sure do– and if you’d like to help Lee overcome some of the obstacles he’s have to overcome to succeed in replacing McKeon, you can do that on this Blue America ActBlue page.

I was at the ceremony too and I can tell you that this was a very inspiring moment. I don’t know how much residual “hope and change” optimism in out there at the moment, but this certainly tapped into it. With the outside pushing hard through OWS and these young progressives pushing hard from the inside, you feel as if maybe there might be a chance.

Oh, and in case you think the older folks don’t have anything to say on all this, get a load of the formidable Norman Lear:

Over the past several decades, the power-grabbing right has built a powerful infrastructure of radio and TV networks.

They’ve built think tanks, colleges and law schools.

And funded political groups that prepped the way for the Supreme Court, in Citizen’s United– to grant Corporations the right to provide any amount of financial backing to a candidate or a cause just like any other average citizen.

And all of it carried off with an air of holier-than-thou sanctity– no less apparent than Pat Robertson’s when he told me my arms were too short to box with God.

And now, as frightening as it is, where do we find that holier-than-thou sanctity most apparent in politics today?

Among the seven candidates attempting to prove in every debate we have seen that they are the right kind of Christian to be the Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

In light of the circumstances we liberals and progressives have succumbed to, it is hard to remember that we– not the right– WE are the spiritual heirs to those Americans who struggled to end slavery and segregation– to end child labor and win safe conditions and a living wage for workers.

And WE are the spiritual heirs to those who conceived of and fought for just about every bit of social legislation in the last century, legislation that everyone, left and right, now take for granted– and that resulted– until not that many years ago– in the most flourishing, hopeful and empowered middle class in the history of nations.

Say what you will about liberal Hollywood, but this is one guy who put his money and his time where his mouth is and went out and created an institution for the long haul to fight the religious right and preserve the constitution. He deserves all the accolades he received that night. If only there were more like him.

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