Month: March 2012

Single minded extremism

by digby

Today’s assault on women is brought to you by … Kansas!

A bill aimed at giving Kansas health care providers more legal protection if they want to avoid any involvement in abortions is moving toward House passage.

The House gave the bill first-round approval Wednesday on a voice vote. A final vote is set for Thursday, and the measure is expected to pass and go to the Senate.

Supporters brushed aside criticism that the bill is broad enough to let doctors and pharmacists refuse to provide birth control.

Kansas already has a law that says that no one can be forced to participate in an abortion or penalized for refusing. This year’s measure says health care providers couldn’t be required to refer patients for abortion care or to prescribe abortion-inducing drugs.

You really can’t have too many laws making it impossible for women to exercize their constitutional rights. If you care about liberty anyway.

Why do I feel that we are all being just a little bit too complacent about all this? Yes, there was a big outcry over Komen and Rush. And Virginia and Idaho did think better of the rape wand. But overall these insane restrictive laws are still being enacted all over the place. If I didn’t know better I’d think that conservatives in this country don’t really care much about a bunch of women and liberal men being upset about what they’re doing. Imagine that.

h/t Randall Gross

So much for the reality based community

by digby

See, This is the problem: the overarching — and very obvious — belief in their own unique abilities. Even the Reagan hagiographers (mostly) waitited until he was out of office to say this sort of thing:

Biden, who has said he’s the last man in the room with Obama before a tough call, often attests that his boss has a “backbone like a ramrod.”

And today he said that mettle — and the “serious problems” Obama faced upon taking office — put the president in a class of his own.

“I think I can say … no president, and I would argue in the 20th century and including now the 21st century, has had as many serious problems which are cases of first-instance laid on his table,” Biden said. “Franklin Roosevelt faced more dire consequences, but in a bizarre way it was more straightforward.”

The vice president claimed that the complexity of the 2008 financial crisis presented challenges in a way the Great Depression of 80 years ago did not

.

The only way this makes sense is if he believes that the “challenges” are that Obama’s domestic opposition is far stronger than that faced by Roosevelt. And that might even have some basis. I think it could be a good argument. But to imply that the problems Obama faced on a policy level were more complicated — not to mention the scope of the problems — is just cracked. I think we can all agree that the Great Depression and Hitler were just a little bit more difficult than dealing with this recession and Mitch McConnell. Nobody’s saying those aren’t tough problems, but let’s keep this in perspective.

I know it’s Biden and he’s given to hyperbolic blather so it’s not a good idea to attach too much significance to it. But as I wrote yesterday, I think they really believe this — have believed it since the 2008 campaign and it’s their Achilles heel. This overconfidence in the face of am extremely close primary campaign and now a very mixed record is a characteristic of the team and I don’t think it’s served them well. It’s one thing to believe in your own abilities and be willing to shut out criticism. I’m sure that’s necessary to reach these exalted positions of power. But it’s also clear from all the evidence that’s come out about the inner working of the administration (and the results, I’m afraid) that it’s weakened them strategically against the Republicans.

Yes, today’s GOP is pretty much stark raving mad. But a good part of the problem is the White House and the Democratic Party’s consistent surprise when they act crazy — and their ongoing confidence that it can’t happen again.

.

Fraudulent recordings? It’s just how they roll

by digby

A conservative lawyer learns that the RNC is a lowdown, dirty, organization that, like most conservative organizations, will engage in fraud and deceit as a matter of routine, even when they don’t need to. Welcome to reality, sir:

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama Administration really could not have had a better week. They did a tremendous job framing their constitutional argument against the statute to the public, the lawyers on their side were brilliant, and it appears that they had a receptive Supreme Court majority. It was an eleven on a scale of one to ten.

Now this. The RNC released an advertisement (embedded in the story linked below) with audio from the halting beginning to Don Verrilli’s oral argument on the individual mandate to make the point that (as the ad’s title says) “ObamaCare: It’s a tough sell.” So far as I can tell, it is less a real ad that would actually run than a stunt intended to draw attention – no less a stunt than the DNC surely has done in lots of other contexts.

But Bloomberg News had the good sense to actually compare the actual argument audio with what the RNC distributed. It turns out to have been materially doctored. As the Bloomberg piece says, “A review of a transcript and recordings of those moments shows that Verrilli took a sip of water just once, paused for a much briefer period, and completed his thought, rather than stuttering and trailing off as heard in the doctored version.”

I’ve been in practice for seventeen years, and the blog has existed for ten, and this is the single most classless and misleading thing I’ve ever seen related to the Court. It is as if the RNC decided to take an incredibly serious and successful argument that has the chance to produce a pathbreaking legal victory for a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, drag it through the mud, and vomit on it.

Well, that is their specialty.

Sadly, I doubt that this will have the effect that this delightfully naive fellow thinks it will. Nobody cares. Lying right wing operatives have no limits and can literally get away with anything. They couldn’t care less about “serious arguments.” They don’t need them. It’ll be fine — it’s just red meat for a slavering base that is addicted to it.

I have to wonder why this person isn’t more concerned about the fact that at least three of the Supreme Court justices seem to be among those who are demanding a piece of that bloody carcass. They certainly seemed to have absorbed all the Tea party talking points. (Of course, one of the Justices is married to a major Tea Party organizer, so I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised.)

If he has a problem with the Republican Party losing its grip, he really should check out this Chris Mooney post (which David also referenced below) and ask himself how it could have happened:

For a while now, I’ve been aware of a powerful new paper that directly tests the central argument of my 2005 book The Republican War on Science—and also validates some key claims made in my new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. I’ve had to keep quiet about it until now; but at last, the study is out—though I’m not sure yet about a web link to it.

The research is by Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and published in the prestigious American Sociological Review. In the study, Gauchat uses a vast body of General Social Survey data to test three competing theses about the relationship between science and the U.S. public:

1) the cultural ascendancy thesis or “deficit model” view, according to which better education and engagement with science lead all boats to rise, and citizens across the board become more trusting of scientists and their expertise;

2) the alienation thesis, according to which modernity brings on distrust and disillusionment with science (call it the “spoiled brat” thesis if you’d like); and

3) the politicization thesis—my thesis—according to which some cultural groups, aka conservatives, have a unique fallout with science for reasons tied up with the nature of modern American conservatism, such as its ideology, the growth of its think tank infrastructure, and so on.

The result? Well, Gauchat’s data show that the politicization thesis handily defeats all contenders. More specifically, he demonstrates that there was only really a decline in public trust in science among conservatives in the period from 1974 to 2010 (and among those with high church attendance, but these two things are obviously tightly interrelated).

And not just that.

Gauchat further validates the argument of The Republican War on Science by showing that the decline in trust in science was not linear. It occurred in association with two key “cultural break” points that, I argue in the book, heightened right wing science politicization: The election of Ronald Reagan, and then the election of George W. Bush.

This one figure from the paper really, really says it all:

This isn’t really much of a mystery. Pay attention people.

.

Little white slip-up redux

by digby

Poor Rick. I’m almost 100% sure that this isn’t what it sounds like. But he does seem to have something of a problem when it comes to sounding like he’s about to say something very racist:

This one was a little bit less questionable:

It makes you wonder what politicians were saying before Youtube, doesn’t it?

Update: Watertiger has a different theory.

.

Free Market Magic

by David Atkins

I’m shocked, shocked:

Hedge funds have endured a rough year. Tumultuous markets. Tighter regulations. An insider trading crackdown.

But despite the lackluster environment, the top managers still took home $14.4 billion in 2011.

Even when returns suffer, the largest hedge funds can collect big paychecks, thanks to the fees they charge pensions, endowments and wealthy individuals to manage money.

Paul Tudor Jones II charges a 4 percent management fee and takes 23 percent of any profit. So he made $175 million in 2011, although his main fund tracked the returns of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Steven A. Cohen, whose firm, SAC Capital Advisors, keeps 50 percent of the profit, earned $585 million.

“The industry’s fees and performance are so out of whack it’s unbelievable,” said Bradley H. Alford, who invested in hedge funds while he was at the Duke Endowment in the late 1990s but today oversees a lower cost mutual fund firm that competes with them. “Fifteen years ago, you got double-digit performance for those returns, but last year, the S.& P. was positive and hedge funds were negative. There’s no alignment with the fees.”

I’m sure that’s nothing a little more free market magic won’t fix if only we get rid of those pesky regulations hampering their success. Remember Rand Paul:

Instead of punishing them, you should want to encourage them. I would think you would want to say to the oil companies, “What obstacles are there to you making more money?” And hiring more people. Instead they say, “No, we must punish them. We must tax them more to make things fair.” This whole thing about fairness is so misguided and gotten out of hand…

“We as a society need to glorify those who make a profit,” Paul concluded.

Now, Rand Paul was admittedly talking about oil companies, not hedge funds. But what’s the difference? They’re jahhb creators.

Razing Arizona

Whose freedom is it anyway?

by digby

Reader sleon asks a very important question:

If the Tea Partiers – to the extent that they believe they are not corporate shills – really think the Health care battle is about freedom, why won’t they accord the rest of us the freedom they crave? In other words, if they don’t want government healthcare and the mandate to buy insurance, fine. Here’s the deal…we’ll eliminate the mandate in exchange for people being able to buy into Medicare for All.

Then they can choose to go without insurance – and be refused care they can’t pay for – or buy private insurance where 40% of their premiums will go to overhead and profit, while the rest of us can choose buy into a plan where only 3% goes to overhead and there is no profit. If you want to be “free” to choose, I should be too.

Why shouldn’t I be allowed to choose Medicare if I want to? I feel that my freedom as an American is being infringed. How come these people are all forcing me to buy private insurance against my will. What is this, Communist China?

Sure, it’s a stretch. But of it infringes on someone’s freedom for insurance companies to make contraception part of a preventive care package, then it sure as hell infringes on my freedom to be denied the opportunity to buy insurance through Medicare.

Who are these people who would deny me the right to buy what I want to buy! This is America!

.

Science is for blowing up commies, silly!

by David Atkins

This likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone:

Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. Fewer than 35 percent of conservatives say they have a “great deal” of trust in the scientific community now, compared to nearly half in 1974.

“The scientific community … has been concerned about this growing distrust in the public with science. And what I found in the study is basically that’s really not the problem. The growing distrust of science is entirely focused in two groups—conservatives and people who frequently attend church,” says the study’s author, University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat.

In fact, in 1974, people who identified as conservatives were among the most confident in science as an institution, with liberals trailing slightly behind, and moderates bringing up the rear. Liberals have remained fairly steady in their opinion of the scientific community over the interim, while conservative trust in science has plummeted.

It would be easy to take this data and simply add it as one more piece of evidence that modern conservatism is a truly radical and dangerous political movement. But it’s more than that. This bit is very interesting:

Interestingly, the most educated conservatives have led that charge. Conservatives with college degrees began distrusting science earlier and more forcefully than other conservatives, upending assumptions that less educated people on the whole are more distrustful of science.

Gauchat attributes the changes to two forces: Both science and conservatives have changed a lot in 40 years. In the post-WWII period, research was largely wedded to the Defense Department and NASA—think the space race and the development of the atomic bomb. Now the scientific institution “has come out from behind those institutions and been its own cultural force.” That has meant it is increasingly viewed as a catalyst of government regulation, as in the failed Democratic proposal to institute cap-and-trade as a way to reduce carbon emissions and stave off climate change.

There’s a lot of truth to this. Back in the day when the image of a “scientist” was a clean-shaven white man working for the government to develop nuclear bombs to drop on the Soviets, or a space program to defeat the Soviets, or one-hit miracle drugs, conservatives could totally get behind it. Now that “science” seems to more about squirrely liberal types telling us about global sustainability and disease prevention, conservatives don’t believe in science anymore.

It’s not really that conservatism has gotten any more extreme since the days of Joe McCarthy and Jim Wallace. It’s that the world has changed around conservatism. The biggest danger facing the world isn’t a takeover by Hitler or Stalin, requiring bigger and bigger American bombs and space capabilities: the biggest danger lies in nuclear proliferation and climate change. Outright bigotry was accepted as part of the cultural norm in those days; today, while it’s obviously still prevalent in multiple forms overt and covert, we as a society think of ourselves as more enlightened, expecting and demanding to move beyond it.

The modern world does not lend itself to the conservative ethic. If conservative ideas ever were decent solutions to major problems in the past (and that’s being very generous), they’ve become increasingly anachronistic.

Conservatives understand this. If climate change is real and caused by humans, it means that something is deeply flawed within conservatism itself. There is no “free market solution” to a problem like climate change, caused by overconsumption of resources, and with a lag time of disaster that current consumers won’t psychologically understand or address of their own volition. There is no “free market solution” to drug-resistant bacteria in a world where “healthcare consumers” will always demand antibiotics for even minor infections. There is no “military solution” to geopolitical problems in an economically interconnected world armed with nuclear weapons.

Faced with a world in which his values and beliefs have become irrelevant, the conservative’s only answer is to divorce himself from it entirely.

.

Un-Godly liars

by digby

I suspect that most of the smart Jesuits I’ve known in my life would weep to hear this drivel:

Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York took his case against the Affordable Care Act’s new rule requiring insurers and employers to provide preventive care services — including contraception — at no additional cost to Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. The Catholic Church is fighting the requirement against the tide of public opinion and despite being specifically exempt from providing birth control to its members.

Dolan pulled no punches, however, going so far as to imply that the requirement would undermine the “American enterprise” and spread “secularism” throughout the nation:

DOLAN: You’re a better historian than I am Bill, you know that every great movement in — in American history has been driven by people of religious conviction. And if we duct tape the churches — I’m just not talking about the Catholic Church — if we duct tape the role of religion and the churches and morally convince people in the marketplace that’s going to lead to a huge deficit a huge void.

And there are many people who want to fill it up, namely a new religion called secularism, ok, which — which would be as doctrinaire and would consider itself as infallible as they caricature the other religions doing.

So to — to see — to see that morally-driven religiously-convinced people want to exercise their political responsibility, I think that is not only at the heart of biblical religion, it is at the heart of American enterprise.

That’s going to come as a hell of a surprise to the founders of this country. It’s utter wingnut bullshit from beginning to end.

Is there any longer a single doubt that this group of Catholic bishops have joined the Republican Party’s political storm troops? They obviously want to finally put an end to the Enlightenment, through lies, manipulation and propaganda. What an un-Godly bunch of crooks and creeps.

.

Frackers Heart Holden: the reckoning

by digby

Earlier this week Blue America made Congressman Tim Holden (PA-17) uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. And he’s going to remain uncomfortable until his primary constest with progressive Matt Cartwright on April 24th.

Everywhere he turns, he and all of his potential constituents, will be seeing this:

It will pop up all over the district on freeways and thoroughfares and rural highways. All his neighbors and potential voters will know just how friendly old Tim is with the fracking industry.

Let’s just say he isn’t happy. According to Politics PA Holden’s campaign issued a press release calling Blue America a “Super PAC” (which is just hilarious.)

Holden’s campaign blasted the Blue America PAC as an outside group trying to meddle in the 17th district, and noted that Holden is taking heat from interest groups on both sides of the aisle.

“Throughout his career, Tim Holden has legislated from the political center, which is where most of America and the 17th district find themselves,” said campaign manager Eric Nagy. “Now he is getting hit from the right by Texas oil baron billionaires with the Primary Accountability PAC and from the left by a Hollywood record company executive with Blue America PAC. It’s clear that no matter where your political ideology falls, you run the risk of offending one of these groups.”

Nagy took a swipe at Cartwright, too.

“What we have here is a case of the rich helping the rich – billionaires and millionaires coming to the rescue of fellow millionaire Matt Cartwright.”

The PAC’s press release highlighted this article from Republic Report, a watchdog website that features writings from former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Cartwright echoed their criticism of Holden.

“I am thrilled by Blue America’s endorsement. The people of Northeastern PA need to know Tim Holden’s record over the past 19 years that he is trying to hide,” he said. “It is not just the Halliburton loophole, but his vote against health care reform, his opposition to legislation that would have made it harder for banks to foreclose on struggling families at the height of the recession, and the fact that he voted with George W. Bush 60% of the time.”

Yes, there’s another group coming at Holden from the right. Seems a Blue Dog just can’t get a break these days.

There has been a flurry of press in Pennsylvania, from P0liticsPA to the Scranton Times-Tribune and the Pocono-Record, among others. Progressive blogs in the area like NEPArtisan are all over it. Holden is clearly rattled.

And for Howie, it’s now personal:

I don’t write a lot about my days in the music business here at DWT but then I’ve never been attacked– not even by a Republican– for being in the music business before. Yesterday was the first time and it was in a press release from corrupt Blue Dog, Tim Holden. Reacting to the billboards Blue America put up revealing his shady role in the fracking industry he decided to ignore the substance and attack our PAC and my old job instead. Holden sent out a press release calling Blue America a SuperPAC– our average contribution is $45– and whining he’s being attacked “from the left by a Hollywood record company executive with Blue America PAC.”

I retired from my job at Warner Bros almost a decade ago and work full time running by blog, DownWithTyranny, exposing corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle, like Holden. But, for Holden’s sake, I’ll give a brief run-down of my experience as “a Hollywood record company executive.” I started a small, independent label called 415 in San Francisco in 1978, on of the country’s first “alternative rock” labels. It was funny when I heard from Borys Krawczeniuk at the Scranton Times-Tribune yesterday morning. He asked me if I was the same Howie Klein he used to chat with about SVT and Romeo Void when he was music director at WRKC (88.5 fm) at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre. What a hoot; we hadn’t talked in 30 years!!! Funny how music brings people together!

A small indie label with absolutely no capital– I lived in a $90/month apartment in the Mission District and often had to decide if I wanted to put $2 of gas in my car or eat a meal– 415 thrived and eventually attracted the attention of the major labels. CBS bought the label and my life changed, although I keep my old Fairlane and stayed in my old Mission District apartment. But I could at least afford health care for the people working at 415. I ran the label for CBS for a few years and then went to work for Warner Bros, as general manager of Sire Records, where I helped guide the careers of the Ramones, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, k.d. lang, The Pretenders, The Smiths, Morrissey, Ice-T, Ministry, Tommy Page and dozens of other musicians who have probably had more of a positive impact on people’s lives than a hack politician in Washington. And speaking of Tommy Page, he was just a teenager when Seymour Stein signed him to the label and we released the #1 worldwide smash hit I’ll Be Your Everything.

But the career of a teen idol doesn’t usually last forever. When Tommy came to me and told me he had decided to go back to college and get a degree he asked me if I would give him a job at the label when he graduated. Four years later he was back and he started at the bottom of the ladder– a promotion department assistant, where his hard work and dedication earned him promotion after promotion until he was an A& R man and then a senior vice president of promotion. Around that time I had bought an old house in gorgeous Monroe County in what is now the 17th CD. Many of my music business friends, hearing from me how beautiful the Poconos are, also bought homes there. One was Tommy and his growing family. Tommy still calls Stroudsburg home– and now he’s the publisher of Billboard Magazine.

Read on for the full screed. It’s priceless.

We’d like to keep the pressure on Holden all the way through the primary. If you can help with a few bucks we’d really appreciate it. This is a newly drawn Democratic district — no Republican can win it. So, it’s a race between a progressive Democrat and a corrupt, conservative Democrat who half the district has never heard of. Holden’s so desperate that he’s bringing in Steny Hoyer to prop him up. And he’s clearly nervous about Cartwright’s excellent fundraising and support. These billboards are sending him over the edge.

Holden is a plodding Beta Blue Dog foot soldier who does whatever he’s told by the people who run him. He’s a super social conservative, anti-choice, ant-gay rights and a guy that Steny can always count on to vote on behalf of the 1%. He has no business representing working families. And he’s beatable.

If you can help, please send a couple of bucks to our Fracking Holden campaign. Let’s make him lose some sleep before he loses his seat.

You can also follow this campaign at Facebook.com/FrackersHeartHolden