Month: January 2012

From the “how do you like me now?” files

by digby

So, you’ve probably heard that there was a little “glitch” in the vote count in Iowa, right?:

Caucus night was chaotic in many places, with hundreds of voters, candidates showing up and the throngs of media who followed. The world’s eyes were on Iowa. But in the quiet town of Moulton, Appanoose County, a caucus of 53 people may just blow up the results.

Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.

“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.”

Well hell. But is this really a surprise? After all, ever since 2000, when the Supreme Court declared that it would do “irreparable harm” to George W. Bush if Al Gore ever even temporarily took the lead in the vote count, we’ve known that the winner in a close race must always be the Republican who is declared the winner by the media, regardless of the actual vote count. I’m guessing that GOP politicians never dreamed that little gambit would be used on themselves. Guess who’s feeling the hurt now?

I’m sure this stings too:

“This is politics,” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared Dec. 21, dismissing calls for him to condemn ads attacking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that were run by an independent group supporting Romney’s candidacy.

The ads were part of an unprecedented $3.3 million negative campaign of television spots and direct mail by Restore Our Future, an independent expenditure-only committee or super PAC, which blunted Gingrich’s rise and may very well be the main ingredient in an Iowa victory for Romney next Tuesday.

Never before have the Iowa caucuses seen such a campaign by any group other than a candidate committee. And with days to go before Iowans cast their votes, the new political landscape is coming into sharper focus.

Fully aware of the bazooka he had in his back pocket, Romney on Friday jetted off to New Hampshire to campaign for the primary election there, casually planning a return to the Hawkeye State on Saturday afternoon. Calm and assured that his campaign would keep on going past Iowa, he put an op-ed in the State newspaper in South Carolina and spent the morning taking shots at President Barack Obama in a variety of interviews. Opponents were left grappling for third place in Tuesday night’s vote.

I’m sure they’ll all be passionately defending the God given Constitutional right of anonymous billionaires to destroy Democrats in a few months. But for right now the Republicans are reaping what they’ve sowed. I hope they like the idea of groveling to the wealthy elite for the privilege of being the single anointed GOP candidate in the future because that’s how the presidential candidates will be chosen going forward. It’s not that it’s ever been completely open, but the huge gusher of money in this year’s primary to clear the field for Mittens shows that there’s probably no chance of an underdog ever again actually winning the thing. They’ll just destroy whoever stands in their way with ads and if the people get uppity and vote for the wrong person anyway they’ll take care of it the Florida Way.

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Orwell Santorum

by digby

I hadn’t bothered to watch Santorum’s allegedly brilliant Iowa speech until I saw Rick Perlstein’s post about it. Oh dear God:

Perlstein writes:

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it “by far the best speech Tuesday night.” Santorum’s address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called “freedom.” A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family’s one-time economic privation. It wasn’t off the cuff. “As you know,” he said, “I do not speak from notes, but there’s a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I’m going to read them as I wrote them.” And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: “because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them.” He came because—why else?—he loved freedom.

(Brief digression: he says his grandpa came in 1925. Someone should look into this. The racist Immigration Act of 1924 had the previous year made it very, very difficult for anyone from such a dirty, disgusting, non-Anglo Saxon place like Italy to emigrate to the U.S. Maybe Santorum got the date wrong. In any event, the very fact of the 1924 law is another disturbance marring the official Republican cult of America-Is-And-Always-Has-Been-Perfect that I will be discussing below. End of digression.)

So, from the unfreedom of Mussolini, he marched into the rosy-fingered dawn of American freedom—which Santorum described thusly:

“He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them.”

Let us dwell on that. Grandpa Santorum lived in a company town where he was paid in “scrip” in lieu of cash. That means what his grandson calls “freedom” was, well and truly, something more like slavery.read on …

Those really were the good old days, weren’t they? Perlstein aptly posted the Youtube of Johnny Cash singing “16 tons”, something I’m sure Santorum has heard, but evidently thought was a celebration of the American way of life.

I might also point out that Rick Santorum has to be the most macabre Presidential candidate ever. Who talks about dead bodies in their acceptance speech? But then Santorum has kind of an obsession with them.

Read the whole Perlstein treatment. I think Santorum represented the GOP’s basic belief system quite well. What’s shocking is how everyone seemed to celebrate it.

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Good news for some American families

by digby

The jobs numbers are good, but there also good reason to contain the jubiliation for the time being, at least according to Jared Bernstein, who’s not a hostile emo-prog the last I heard.

But this is genuinely very welcome news worth celebrating:

Obama to ease path to green card: This will get comparatively little attention in today’s crush of news. But it’s still a very big deal:

Obama administration officials announced on Friday that they will propose a fix to a notorious snag in immigration law that will spare hundreds of thousands of American citizens from prolonged separations from immigrant spouses and children.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve had this Kafkaesque system in place for so long in the first place, but it’s good news that they’re dealing with it:

The change that immigration officials are offering would benefit United States citizens who are married to or have children who are illegal immigrants. It would correct a bureaucratic Catch-22 that those Americans now confront when their spouses or children apply to become legal permanent residents.

Although the tweak that officials of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services are proposing appears small, immigration lawyers and advocates for immigrants say it will make a great difference for countless Americans. Thousands will no longer be separated from loved ones, they said, and the change could encourage Americans to come forward to apply to bring illegal immigrant family members into the legal system.

Illegal immigrants who are married to or are children of American citizens are generally allowed under the law to become legal residents with a visa known as a green card. But the law requires most immigrants who are here illegally to return to their home countries in order to receive their legal visas.

The catch is that once the immigrants leave the United States, they are automatically barred from returning to this country for at least three years, and often for a decade, even if they are fully eligible to become legal residents…

Now, Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes to allow the immigrants to obtain a provisional waiver in the United States, before they leave for their countries to pick up their visas. Having the waiver in hand will allow them to depart knowing that they will almost certainly be able to return, officials said. The agency is also seeking to sharply streamline the process to cut down the wait times for visas to a few weeks at most.

I know someone who went through this and it was unbelievably difficult and painful. It took her husband nearly six years to wade through the process. It was awful. I’m sure people will still fall through the cracks, but eliminating Catch-22s like this will help a lot of American families.

This is what real journalism looks like

by David Atkins

Anyone who watched that just learned more about Congress and the problems with America’s system of government than “serious” people do in 3 days of reading the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal cover to cover.

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Some of my best friends are blergh

by digby

He says he didn’t say black people. Ok. What the hell did he mean? Blue people? Bland people? Blah people? No. His little white slip was showing, I’m afraid.

In any case, his whole thesis about Medicaid making people dependent so they’ll vote for Democrats is offensive whether he was referring to blacks, Blues, Blands or Blahs.

More pundit nonsense, and the real conservative divide

by David Atkins

E.J. Dionne has a Washington Post column today where he talks about the battle within conservatism as being between the visions of Santorum and Huntsman, of all things. It contains this remarkable paragraph:

If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they’d send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight. Huntsman is a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He’s a defender of science, a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejects Santorum’s neoconservative moralism, and he speaks the policy language of an upper middle class that likes its politics to focus on deficits and our future competition with China.

It would be nice if Dionne could assemble just one piece of evidence to suggest that the upper middle class is obsessed with deficits and China. He and his fellow pundits, including Thomas Friedman who clocks in today with his usual out-of-touch technocratic utopianism, might fill their days with such reveries. But most middle-class people, even those making six figures, are usually more concerned about their mortgages, their jobs and their health insurance. Instead, modernism is linked inextricably in Dionne’s mind with deficit hysteria.

The pundit class really, really wants Huntsman to be relevant because he culturally reflects their worldview. Fortunately, polling realities show Huntsman’s ethic to be as out of touch with actual voters as those of Washington pundits.

Dionne also seems to fail to grasp that whatever Santorum’s outward Spanish Inquisition moral sensibilities, his economic views are almost exactly aligned with Huntsman’s. On economics, theirs would be less a debate than a love-in.

No, the real battle within the conservative movement is between the hard-line full-on Objectivists who want their totalizing philosophy to come fully out of the closet, and elitist plutocrats who subscribe to some Objectivist views but know that they can’t fully admit it and still win elections, and that their staying rich depends on preserving at least the veneer of a middle class.

The bible-thumping crap isn’t a part of the debate, so much as a way to keep people in line and pacified once all other social supports have been removed. But that’s nothing new. That’s just the latest edition of right-wing feudalism.

No, the only real battle line here is the Romney traditionalist conservatives who will win this cycle, but are increasingly besieged by the 75% of the conservative base that rejects them (“Tokyo Rove” is Karl’s new nickname over at Free Republic) in favor of the Objectivist cult.

And given Romney’s recent lurch toward Objectivist rhetoric, it would seem that battle is already almost over.

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Looks like somebody’s a Santorum fan:

Unless you believe, as some do, that we must get on with our impending dystopian nightmare so that we can rebuild from the rubble (sometimes known as destroying the village in order to save it) this is probably a useful group of articles. The question posed is what would happen if the Republicans win the next election:

“To say it doesn’t make any difference is to show your contempt for the general population. A lot of this is correct. The two parties are effectively two factions of one party. The business party. But the factions are somewhat different. And as I mentioned, over time, the differences show up in benefits, working conditions, wages the things that really matter to people.

So yes, there’s a difference. There’s a narrow difference. And the spectrum within the political system is well to the right of public opinion. And incidentally, the public is well aware of it. So 80% of the country will say the country is I’m quoting, “run by a few big interests” looking out for themselves, not the population. You can argue about the details, but the picture is essentially correct. Nevertheless, there is some difference. You have to make a choice.

If you’re in a swing state you have to ask, “is this difference enough for me to pick the lesser of two evils?” And there’s nothing wrong with picking the lesser of two evils. The cliche makes it sound like you’re doing something bad. But no, you’re doing something good if you’re picking the lesser of two evils.

So, is it worth doing that or is it worth it to act to create a potential alternative. For instance should I vote Green because they’re party building and someday may be a real alternative, or should I express my disdain for the right wing orientation of both parties by not voting, say, or should I pick the lesser of two evils, thereby helping people. That’s a decision people have to make.

And, by the way, if you are a progressive/liberal keep in mind that whichever choice you make there are some politicians you can support without feeling as if you are accepting the lesser of two evils.

Update: the Chomsky clip is from three years ago which I’m told is hugely significant. I assumed that his point of view on this issue was well thought out and deeply held but it always possible he’s changed his mind and now believes the opposite.

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Tort Reform!

by digby

Pennsylvania reporter Will Bunch has the goods on Santorum’s corruption all the way down the line in this piece. The man is a religious radical and a right wing extremist, to be sure. He’s also a corrupt hypocrite.

Bunch’s piece is very thorough but it did leave out one of my favorite Santorunm stories. From the time he came into office, like all right wing Republicans, he railed against malpractice claims, blaming them for high medical costs and insinuating that they are mostly fraudulent wastes that benefit the Democratic party and the “trial lawyers.” They were so successful that they managed to persuade a whole bunch of Americans that, despite their own observations and personal experience, medical malpractice is a scam. They even got them to cheer wildly at the mere mention of the phrase “tort reform!” even though most of them wouldn’t know a tort from an apple pandowdy.

And yet Rick had no problem filing a malpractice claim of his own when the opportunity arose. But then, like most “values” Republicans (and Wall Street hustlers), when you look at Bunch’s bill of indictment, it’s clear that his main value is to never leave any cash on the table:

Back in 1994, when Santorum was in Congress and running for the Senate, he introduced H.R. 3918, which would have capped non-economic damages awarded by juries in medical malpractice cases at $250,000. On February 7, 2003, Senator Santorum said the $250,000 cap set in Congressman Jim Greenwood’s bill was “too low.” The next day, he told The Associated Press that he’d “been hesitant to sign on to any bill that has a cap.”

Did something happen to change Santorum from one who authored a bill capping damages for a victim’s pain and suffering into one who couldn’t even sign onto such a bill?

Yes. Reality happened to Rick. In 1999, Santorum’s wife, Karen, filed her own medical malpractice lawsuit against a chiropractor in Virginia, seeking $500,000 in non-economic damages – twice the amount allowed in her husband’s own legislation five years earlier…

Here’s how the Washington, DC newspaper Roll Call summarized part of Santorum’s testimony in the lawsuit:

“Karen Santorum, he said, ‘likes to be fit,’ but has had trouble losing weight since the birth of their two youngest children – Sarah Maria, who was born two years ago this month, and Peter, who is 2 months old – because she can’t exercise as easily as she once could.

“While Santorum described his wife as an exercise fanatic who used to engage in everything from step aerobics to jogging to lose weight after the birth of each of their first three children, the herniated disk changed all that.

“‘We have to go out and do a lot of public things. She wants to look nice, so it’s really difficult,’ Santorum told the jury.

“The Senator also said he fears his wife will be unable to help him out much with his upcoming re-election campaign because of her physical limitations and the poor self-image she has developed since her back problems changed her life and her daily routine.

“‘She has always been intricately involved in my campaigns,’ Santorum said, explaining that he and his wife ‘knocked on 20,000 doors together’ during his previous campaign.

“Now, he says, she ‘does not have the confidence to do that.’”

On December 10, 1999, a Fairfax County, Virginia jury awarded Karen Santorum $350,000 in her malpractice lawsuit. When asked about the judgment, Santorum said:

“The court proceedings are a personal family matter. I will not be offering any further public comments, other than that I am not a party to the suit. But I am fully supportive of my wife.”

On December 14, The Associated Press published the following statement by Santorum spokesman Robert Traynham:

“Senator Santorum is of the belief that the verdict decided upon by the jury during last week’s court case of his wife is strictly a private manner. The legislative positions that Senator Santorum has taken on tort reform and health care have been consistent with the case involving Mrs. Santorum.”

On December 25, The Washington Post reported:

“Santorum spokesman Robert Traynham said the senator’s wife never asked him for his opinion of the lawsuit and Santorum never offered it. ‘The senator and his wife, believe it or not, disagree on some issues,’ Traynham said. ‘This is a case between her and her attorney and her chiropractor. It has nothing to do with Senator Santorum.’”

A few weeks later, in January 2000, the judge in Virginia set aside the jury’s award, saying the $350,000 was excessive and reducing it to $175,000.

We wish Karen Santorum only the best of health, but for Senator Santorum the question is: What happens to the millions of people outside his own family whose pain and suffering he clearly doesn’t feel?

His [senate] web site ays: “Legal reform is an important issue that I place high on the agenda in the 109th Congress, as it is crucial to curb lawsuit abuse.” His press release says: “Senator Santorum has supported 3 prior attempts to pass medical liability reform including measures targeting the plight of OB/GYN’s and emergency room doctors. Democratic opposition prevented the measures from moving forward.”

Here’s what Rick said about this in Iowa:

Rick Santorum, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, told people at a town hall meeting earlier this month in Centerville, Ia., that he would push for tort reform. He noted that while serving in Congress from Pennsylvania, he fought for tort reform on medical liability and gun manufacturing issues…

Santorum’s remarks in Centerville have brought him some criticism from Iowa trial lawyers who have cited his wife’s lawsuit. He said in an interview Thursday that his wife made the decision to sue the chiropractor and anyone who thinks his wife has to hold the same policy positions as he does is “pretty chauvinistic and insulting.”

He also said his wife’s suit was consistent with reforms he has sought. Furthermore, he said his wife sued only because she considered the chiropractor to be a “bad actor.” She wanted to expose him to prevent others from being similarly disadvantaged by his care, he said.

“I think I have been very clear. There needs to be a medical malpractice system. I just think there needs to be reasonable constraints in order for there to be proper incentives for everybody in the system to bring costs under control and to provide quality care,” Santorum said.

I just love the feminist defense coming from this guy. The slimy hypocrisy is overwhelming.

A brief followup on liberalism and pacifism

by David Atkins

One of the more pointed critiques of my post on liberalism and interventionism from a couple of days ago is that it ignores the pacifist tradition in liberal thought.

This critique is well-taken. So I’d like to address it here briefly before returning to our regularly scheduled programming, as it were.

It is certainly true that there is a proud tradition of pacifism on the left that would seem to be at odds with what I have broadly and perhaps crudely termed “interventionism,” but I would argue that the conflict is not so great as one might imagine.

There are two distinct arguments on behalf of pacifism: 1) that the use of force is morally wrong at all times; and 2) that the use of force as a solution to problems is often counterproductive, and/or worse than the original problem.

The latter argument has been at times the province of liberals and isolationist conservatives alike. This view was best summed up by Thomas Jefferson when he said: “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” Of course, Thomas Jefferson also supported the colonists’ use of martial force against Britain to establish America’s independence, so one might argue that Jefferson was being selective in his judgment here.

But the argument that war is so atrocious, so ugly, so awful and wasteful that it is only necessary under the very most extreme set of circumstances is a powerful one, and one that as a liberal I wholly agree with. Interventionism does no good if the intervention causes more harm than it removes. When it comes to the use of force, the burden of proof is on the interventionist to show that the good that might be done would outweigh the harm–and from there it is a moral judgment whether the loss of even one life is worth whatever goal is being sought. How one feels about these things can differ depending on how greatly one’s morality is shaped by Kantian moral imperatives and circumstantial utilitarian rationales.

Most modern liberals, myself included, tend to believe that military force should be used exceedingly sparingly due to its negative consequences. On the other hand, it’s awfully hard to look at a situation like the Rwandan genocide and argue that the world should have done nothing to intervene and stop it, given the obvious reality that there was no version of diplomacy adequate to the task. These are value judgments that are circumstantial in nature, and reasonable people will differ on a case by case basis.

But the first argument, that the use of force is always wrong, is more problematic. It assumes that the conflict that arises from the oppression of one person by another can always be resolved through non-violent, non-forceful channels. That assumption in turn is based on the notion that people are fundamentally good toward each other, and for one reason or another learn to be bad toward each other, and that violence is caused by some sort of economic imbalance or slighted honor that can always be rectified through adequate diplomacy.

This is where certain strains of liberalism and libertarianism intersect, but are usually sidelined by more mainstream versions of liberalism and conservatism alike, which both assume that people are mostly selfish, and that intervention is required to maintain the social order. Conservatives and liberals disagree on the form of intervention: conservatives believe that wealth, patriarchy and privilege must be defended by force from the lazy, undeserving, lesser rabble who would try to take it illegitimately, while liberals believe that the historically weak and oppressed must be defended by force from the greedy, rapacious tyrants who would wring every last shred of dignity from them.

How one feels about Ron Paul–whether one is on the Right or the Left–may depend greatly on how one feels about fundamental human nature and the origins of evil and oppression. Those on the left who see oppression as a more or less learned Western capitalist construct will be likelier to support more libertarian notions; those who view oppression as an evil endemic to the human condition (and thus requiring levels of intervention) will be less likely to do so. But I think both kinds of people can come to pacifism from different directions.

And now, back to the issues of the day…

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