QOTD
by digby
New York Times op-ed by By MARK VANHOENACKER
Add in long lines and senseless, disparately enforced rules — for instance, agents shouting at travelers for using cellphones in some arrival halls, while at others, such technology is treated as something other than a threat to the republic — and we give the strong impression of an authority-minded culture that’s coming slightly unhinged.
I’d say that impression is quite true.
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Deja vu vu
by digby
In case you were wondering what the Villagers have decreed is to be the agenda for the second term, David Brooks helpfully spells it out for you:
In December, a re-elected Obama would face three immediate challenges: the Bush tax cuts expire; there will be another debt-ceiling fight; mandatory spending cuts kick in. In addition, there will be an immediate need to cut federal deficits. During the recession, the government could borrow gigantic amounts without pushing up interest rates because there was so little private borrowing. But as the economy recovers and demand for private borrowing increases, then huge public deficits on top of that will push up interest rates, crowd out private investment and smother the recovery.
These big problems won’t be solved during the transition. They are too complicated. Congress will find a mechanism to delay, and the nation will embark on a major effort to do tax reform, entitlement reform and debt reduction. This grand project — reforming the basic institutions of government — will consume the first two years of the next president’s new term, no matter who is elected. It has to get done or a debt crisis will be imminent.
Leading the country through this will require the intelligence, balance and craftiness that Obama has demonstrated. But it will also require indomitable inner conviction and an aggressive drive to push change. It will require a fearless champion who will fight all the interests that love the tax code the way it is. It will require a fervent crusader to rally the country behind shared sacrifice. It will take an impervious leader willing to spread spending cuts everywhere and offend everybody all at once. There will have to be a clearly defined vision of what government will look like at the end.
Obama has talked vaguely about tax reform. He has acknowledged the need for entitlement reform and major deficit reduction. But he has never thrown himself All In. He has never displayed an inner passion, a sense that these projects are his life mission, or a willingness to bear the pain that taking on these challenges necessarily entails.
There you have it. Austerity: always good for what ails you, no matter what. Like tax cuts, a magical elixir for every circumstance.
Also, it’s just possible that Obama’s life mission isn’t what David Brooks wants it to be. (I honestly don’t know — he’s seemed plenty passionate about Grand Bargaining in the past.) But the assumption that this is the Only Path Forward is what’s revealing. They aren’t giving up.
I’ll be very interested to see how far the president goes in the campaign toward promising to protect the safety net and other vital services and programs. If he hedges, it’s a pretty good sign that he’s leaning in the Bobo direction, which is, ironically, what Brooks fears he will do, hence the call for him to go “all-in.” (He doesn’t understand this administration very well, I’m afraid.)
Update: I should be clear here that Brooks’ entire thesis rests on the fact that Obama is always trying to split the baby (be “cagey”) and that it’s served him well thus far. But Brooks holds that if he truly wants to enact the GOP agenda, he’s going to have to totally alienate the people who re-elected him.
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Sandra Fluke and Woody Allen
by digby
For those of you who have not been able to follow the ins and outs of the right wing’s discovery of Sandra Fluke “Jewish problem”, Uggabuga has helpfully supplied one of his charts to help you out:
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A Handy Climate Change Viewing Tool
by David Atkins
Live on the coast and curious to see how far underwater your home will likely be by 2100? The good people at Climate Central have a new tool for you to find out.
Here’s the map of my neighborhood. And a good view of what will happen to Manhattan.
Sometimes I think the best solution to dealing with the politics of climate change in the short term would be to somehow force the deniers to commit to having all their money and their earthly remains stored in vaults on Vanuatu or the Maldives.
h/t RL Miller
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Senior Moment
by digby
God these people are cynical bastards.
You’re a Republican senator. How do you sell a plan to privatize Medicare?
One way is to fashion the massive overhaul as an extension of the private system members of Congress enjoy — the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan — and then trumpet the merits of that system over existing Medicare.
“We have to convince [seniors] this is something better,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), flanked by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rand Paul (R-KY), authors of a new Medicare privatization plan, at a Capitol press conference on Thursday. “If we thought Medicare was better, we would be on it as senators.”
DeMint is 60 years old. Graham is 56. Paul is 49. Medicare eligibility age is 65.
The plan itself is remarkably similar to ObamaCare, but for seniors. The senators say the system they envision would go a long way toward fixing Medicare’s solvency problem, though the details don’t support the claim.
“Right now we pay $11,000 per person for Medicare, the taxpayer does,” Paul said. “Right now for the federal employee health plan is $5,000. It’s going to be about $7,000 when we put an older crowd in there. Federal employees including myself will have to pay more. It’s about $30 a month more. But I think that’s something we have to do to make it fair to help save Medicare.”
Under the plan, seniors would be subsidized up to 75 percent of their monthly premiums, with wealthier seniors receiving smaller subsidies. The eligibility age would also climb, slowly. But FEHBP per-capita costs are rising faster than Medicare’s — so even if the plan were able to save money at the outset as Paul claims, the costs of the new program would likely surpass projected Medicare costs in the near future.
[…]
“Medicare is already set up as a government program,” DeMint said. “So we’re beginning to privatize with this idea. To go the other way in the private sector for people who have private employment, and to bring that under government control and to define benefits is completely the opposite direction. So what we’re trying to do with Medicare is move it back toward a plan that we would like.”
My head hurts. Don’t they hate “Obamacare?” Are they seriously thinking that senior citizens are going to buy this or is it some kind of positioning to screw up the ACA. I’m not honestly sure.
But it does remind me that what they are saying is alarmingly close to what some advocates of the health care bill have said in the past:
If Republicans can make their peace with the Affordable Care Act and help figure out how to make the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges work to control costs and improve quality, it’d be natural to eventually migrate Medicaid and Medicare into the system. Liberals would like that because it’d mean better care for Medicaid beneficiaries and less fragmentation in the health-care system. Conservatives would like it because it’d break the two largest single-payer health-care systems in America and turn their beneficiaries into consumers. But the implementation and success of the Affordable Care Act is a necessary precondition to any compromise of this sort. You can’t transform Medicaid and Medicare until you’ve proven that what you’re transforming them into is better. Only the Affordable Care Act has the potential to do that.
So Bachmann is perhaps right to say that the president is moving us towards a day when ObamaCare — or, to put it more neutrally, “premium support” — might come to Medicare. He’s seeing whether it works in the private health-care market first and, if it does, there’s little doubt that the political pressure to extend it to other groups will be intense. The question is why Bachmann and her party are doing so much to stand in his way? The corollary to Bachmann’s accusation that the president has a realistic plan to privatize Medicare is that the Republicans, for all their sound and fury over the Ryan budget, don’t.
Uhm … maybe not.
I would guess they are staking out this position with the intention of eventually finding some sort of consensus on their “premium support” plan, outlined by Sahil Kapur at TPM last month. But who knows? One thing’s clear, they seem to be intent upon keeping Medicare destruction on the agenda. Maybe they figure at some point people will let them follow through just to shut them up.
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QOTD – Rush Limbaugh
by digby
“Will Bill Maher be the first casualty in the war on women? Ha! Who woulda thought, folks?”
Sadly, it wouldn’t surprise me.
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“Where’s Your Green Card?”
by David Atkins
Members of the University of Southern Mississippi band chanted racist taunts at a hispanic Kansas State player during the schools’ NCAA tournament game on Thursday.
After point guard Angel Rodriguez was fouled late in the first half of the second-round game, a few band members showered the freshman with cries of “where’s your green card?”
Listen carefully to the crowd noise, particularly around the :08 mark of this clip:
The chant and those who participated don’t warrant any civilized dialogue. Both are an embarrassment to the university.
Southern Miss president Martha Saunders quickly apologized for the incident.
“We deeply regret the remarks made by a few students at today’s game,” she wrote in a statement issued two hours after the game. “The words of these individuals do not represent the sentiments of our pep band, athletic department or university. We apologize to Mr. Rodriquez (sic) and will take quick and appropriate disciplinary action against the students involved in this isolated incident.”
Rodriguez was spelled incorrectly in the original draft.
As if things could get any more ignorant, the basis for the band’s racism was itself misguided. Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States.
The university does at least deserve some credit for the rapid apology.
It’s important to remember, though, that these are the sorts of people that the media describes as “values voters,” as opposed to supposedly values-free Georgetown Law students like Sandra Fluke. The same voters who think the President is Muslim, and a third of whom believe interracial marriage should be forbidden.
Maybe it’s time the press started calling them what they really are. “Hard-working” and “values voters” don’t begin to describe the truth.
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There but for the grace of their greater virtue and superior work ethic
by digby
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that the rightwing had to make up the trope that Democrats were trying to force the government to pay for birth control when it was actually a regulation that insurance companies pay for it as a normal part of the preventive care package. I mused the other day that it had to do with the absolute belief by conservatives that the government really only exists to take their hard earned money and give it to the undeserving. And in many cases, these undeserving happened to be wanton women who were unable to contain their primitive urges and thus lived lives of slatternly abandon. This attitude goes way back, of course, and was especially prevalent during the Victorian era.
Today, Mother Jones has published a fascinating article by Barbara Ehrenreich (originally on TomDispatch)in which she discusses the more modern iteration of the “blame the poor” (women), which actually came out of the liberal tradition. She discusses both Michael Harrington’s seminal book of the 1960s, The Other America and The Moynihan Report, both of which had the effect of pathologizing the poor. It was called “The Culture Of Poverty” which I’m sure most of you remember.
The left, as well as the right,bought into this theory, which basically said that poverty was caused by a cultural divide, in which the good hard working Real Americans were on one side and the lazy, intemperate Others just didn’t know how to behave. It wasn’t their fault, but Real Americans needed to do something to break the “cycle of poverty.”
Since this fit rather nicely with certain conservative beliefs about race the Republicans took it to a whole other level, followed closely by the New Democrats:
By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.
So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”
In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)
Yep. “Chastity training.” Signed by Bill Clinton. I’ll just leave you to think about that for a minute.
She goes on to detail just how pervasive this idea still is, particularly on the right where they routinely make the charge that the jobless are spoiled and lazy dependents who need a good kick in the pants (along with a drug test) despite the fact that we have had the longest stretch of high unemployement since the Great Depression. Many Americans agree — after all it reinforces the fact that they are superior people, more moral and upright and therefore more deserving.
What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the “culture of poverty” theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he’d have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase “the culture of poverty.” Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because “he didn’t want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.”
The ruse—if you could call it that—worked. Michael Harrington wasn’t red-baited into obscurity. In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he had fatally botched the “discovery” of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves—disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.
It was a pretty lethal “botch,” and typical of the effect of liberals always trying desperately to escape the toxic labels the right has inflicted on them. It managed to reinforce a a bunch of enduring American stereotypes, mostly along racial and gender lines, that fed into some rather ugly impulses.
She doesn’t go into it, but I think this latest front in the culture war around birth control has provided a small opening to talk about this. The right had to lie through their teeth to activate the wanton woman, “undeserving poor” piece of the reactionary lizard brain. They are reaching well into the middle class and it’s seriously dissonant — Rush’s advertisers running is a good sign that it’s a problem for them. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
Ehrenreich says that it’s time to take another look at this problem:
And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Indeed. And that would mean that all the conservative Real Americans (and all the well-off liberals) would finally have to admit that they aren’t doing better by virtue of their greater virtue. That would be revolutionary.
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Just close your eyes, honey
by digby
Where do they find these morons?
Gov. Tom Corbett (R) reaffirmed this week that he supports the anti-abortion measure so long as it’s not obtrusive because women could simply close their eyes during the procedure:
QUESTION: Making them watch…does that go too far in your mind?
CORBETT: I’m not making anybody watch, OK. Because you just have to close your eyes. As long as it’s on the exterior and not the interior.
Why do it then? If you aren’t making the infantile sluts who are getting abortions without knowing they are pregnant watch the ultrasound, then what’s the point? I’m thinking they probably need to do the old Clockwork Orange routine if they really want this to work.
His distinction between the “interior” and the “exterior” is also wrong because the Pennsylvania bill will likely require a rape wand for many people because you can’t see an embryo in the early months of pregnancy which is when the vast majority of abortions take place. Indeed, that was the reason for the rape wand in the first place — to shame the women who were having abortions very early in their pregnancies as everyone suggests they should do and which the constitution explicitly allows with no restrictions. That just will not stand.
Meanwhile, in the vaunted laboratories of democracy:
Several state legislatures were inspired rather than dissuaded by the contraception debate in Washington, and are considering their own versions of the Blunt Amendment — keeping alive an issue national Republicans thought they were putting to bed. Arizona, New Hampshire, Idaho and Georgia have taken up bills to expand exemptions for contraception coverage. Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Idaho and Wyoming lawmakers are moving symbolic resolutions condemning the administration’s contraception coverage rule.
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Santorum wants to ban internet Santorum
by digby
Rick Santorum has a new crusade:
Internet pornography could conceivably become a thing of the past if Rick Santorum is elected president.
The unapologetic social conservative, currently in second place behind Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination, has promised to crack down on the distribution of pornography if elected.
Santorum says in a statement posted to his website, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”
If elected, he promises to “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”
Although the idea of Santorum vanquishing Internet pornography may seem far-fetched, a serious effort to combat online smut might actually be successful, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told The Daily Caller.
“If the government wanted to aggressively move against Internet pornography, it could do so,” explained Volokh. “Here’s the deal: In most parts of the country, a lot of pornography on the Internet would plausibly be seen as obscene.”
I’m fairly sure he wants to just ban the internet. It hasn’t been kind to him. But this is a good first step.
The more one examines the data, the more evident it becomes that Republican-dominated states with a heavy concentration of far-right culture warriors are also states where erotic entertainment is very much in demand. Adult industry advocate Bill Margold, who was one of the top adult film stars of the 1970s, has often described the United States as a place where people hypocritically condemn adult entertainment with one hand while pleasuring themselves to it with the other hand; recent data bears that out.
In 2009, Benjamin G. Edelman of the Harvard Business School published the results of a state-by-state study on the number of people who were subscribing to adult membership Web sites; Edelman found that eight of the 10 states that had the highest per capita consumption of online porn were states that Republican John McCain won in 2008’s presidential election. Utah topped the list, and other red states in Edelman’s top 10 included Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, North Dakota and West Virginia. The only states in Edelman’s top 10 that Obama won in 2008 were Florida and Hawaii.
More recently, in December 2011, Rutgers University researcher/blogger Omar Haq published the results of his study on Google searches for gay porn. Haq found that between 2004-2011, the top 10 states that had the most Google searches for gay porn included five states that McCain won in 2008 (Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia) and five states that Obama won (New York, Ohio, New Mexico, Nevada and Florida). “People subscribe to a lot of porn in the southern Bible Belt states,” Haq noted. “I really believe it is suppression. Freud himself said that the more you suppress people, the more they are going to want to do something. It might be due to conservatism; I think that definitely plays a role.”
Yeah, I think it might too.
The statistics also show that way more men watch porn on the internet than women, so maybe Santorum has a method to his madness. These red state women seem to love his earnest, blue-nosed boyishness, so this could be a way to solidify his vote with them. He’s going to need them – crusading against porn is obviously not going to win the male vote in the Red States.
The truth is that this is often a winning issue all around. I don’t know if those men will vote against Santorum because of this when they are alone with their ballots (if you know what I mean) but parents in general have been very queasy about porn on the internet since the beginning of the internet. It does seem that the hysteria has died down a bit since the early days, which I assume has to do with all this fancy filtering softwear that’s available now.
Still, I think most people feel uncomfortable defending porn, for innumerable reasons. It’s a cheap get for the social conservatives. The reason it never goes anywhere is because it’s such a huge, huge part of the media business. And I think we know who wins when it comes to a battle between the so-cons and the Big Money Boyz.
The big twist is that porn profits in the majors are down — not because people are watching less internet porn, but because of new ways they are consuming it. Maybe Santorum’s found his moment.
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