Month: April 2012

A True National Treasure

It’s not like they don’t know exactly what they’re going to get when they invite him ….

TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE

APRIL 24, 2012

SPEAKER: STEPHEN COLBERT

MR. STEPHEN COLBERT: Thank you, very much. Lovely.

Good evening, and congratulations my fellow influencers. How is everyone feeling this evening?

Oh, come on, you could do better than that? Look at this room. Look at this people. Look at the view. You are the TIME 100, and we are better than other people. I’ll say it, it’s just us chickens. No one is live blogging this, right? You’re on your honor. And I don’t know about you, but it is such a relief to be away from the kind of riffraff who aren’t influential enough to make the list. People like the Pope and Oprah. The Poprah.

You know, it’s actually a bit dangerous to have this many influential people in the room. What if something should happen? It would wipe out the world’s supply of influence. That’s why some members of the TIME 100 are not here tonight, we have sequestered Warren Buffett and Viola Davis and in an undisclosed location in case we need to repopulate the world with influentialness.

That’s right, Warren Buffett made the list. You know, who didn’t? His secretary. That’s why he gets to pay less in taxes, he earned it.

But we’re not just icons tonight. According to TIME, we are also breakouts, and pioneers, moguls, and leaders. So remember, tonight, don’t forget to mingle outside your category. Moguls, hook up with the pioneers, see if you can make a monguneer.
It would be fun to watch. I don’t want to brag, but I happen to be on the list for the second time. Anybody else? Show of hands? Anybody else, the second time? We are an elite club. One more and we get a free hoagie.

Secretary Clinton was on the list for the seventh time. She had to leave earlier. Still is an honor to have met her. She’s a feminist icon, a role model for so many women. Like the one young woman here tonight who bravely stepped into the media spotlight this year, and was immediately labeled a slut. I’m talking, of course, about Chelsea Handler.

Chelsea, you handled that with such poise. The horrible, horrible things that were said about you, tramp,gutter skank, and a lot of those were you talking about yourself. Brava, madam, you’re a feminist icon.

Also, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke is here tonight. Also an instant, instant feminist icon. Famously tested, testified before Congress, that Georgetown, a Catholic institution, should be required to provide insurance coverage for her birth control.
Now, TIME 100 honoree, his eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan disagrees — sir, lovely to see you again.

Of course, now some, some critics have said in response to this that if the Catholic church’s insurance does not cover Sandra Fluke’s birth control, it shouldn’t cover Cardinal Dolan’s Viagra.

Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, that’s called celibacy plus. That’s how the pros do it. Because chastity is one thing, but it shows true commitment to uphold your vows when you are sporting a crook you could hang a lighter on. Oh, wow, see you at mass on Sunday, sir?

I hope he doesn’t become Pope.

I’m a Catholic, it’s okay. I go to confession, it will be fine. Thank you.
And I am so happy that the TIME 100 included a true Christian role model this year, his holiness Tim Tebow. Is he here? Is Tim Tebow here, anyplace? Is he not?

Well, that just proves that they really shouldn’t put Jesus on the list because, according to Tim, he did all the work, and you know, you know Jesus would have shown up to this dinner. Jesus loves Louie CK. He does, Louie. Jesus loves you. And he is always standing before you. And he’s waiting for you. Open the door. Let him in, Louie. Let Jesus in.

He’d also like to you masturbate less, or at least stop talking about it publically. You have children. Okay, would you think about it? Okay.

Of course, all of us should be honored to be listed on the TIME 100 alongside the two men who will be slugging it out in the fall: President Obama, and the man who would defeat him, David Koch.

Give it up everybody. David Koch.

Little known fact — David, nice to see you again, sir.

Little known fact, David’s brother Charles Koch is actually even more influential. Charles pledged $40 million to defeat President Obama, David only $20 million. That’s kind of cheap, Dave.

Sure, he’s all for buying the elections, but when the bill for democracy comes up, Dave’s always in the men’s room. I’m sorry, I must have left Wisconsin in my other coat.

I was particularly excited to meet David Koch earlier tonight because I have a Super PAC, Colbert Super PAC, and I am — thank you, thank you — and I am happy to announce Mr. Koch has pledged $5 million to my Super PAC. And the great thing is, thanks to federal election law, there’s no way for you to ever know whether that’s a joke.

By the way, if David Koch likes his waiter tonight, he will be your next congressman.
Craig Newmark is here someplace. Craig Newmark, there you are, Craig. Nice to see you again, my friend, founder of Craig’s List, recent TIME 100 honoree.

This year Craig’s List made the decision to no longer accept prostitution ads. It was the right thing to do, though, of course — no, give it up, it was the right thing to do. Though, ofcourse, it was hard on the Secret Service.

They left with Secretary Clinton, right? Good. Okay.

Of course, the founder of Huffpo, AriannaHuffingpo, is here, looking down on all of us lowly TIME 100s, as she silently strokes her new Pulitzer in her mind.

Interestingly enough, the Pulitzer Committee did not give out an award for fiction this year, which is surprising since both Rumsfeld and Cheney released there memoirs.
Fans of those books, are you?

Arianna, of course, is the fun table. She’s sitting with Elie Wiesel, always a good time. I want to party with you, cowboy, or at least look for meaning in the Godless universe. Either way, I’ll be drunk.

One of my favorite comedians Kristen Wiig is here tonight.

Kristen, congratulations on the TIME 100. Lovely to see you.

Her movie, Bridesmaids, huge success, andproved once and for all to the Hollywood boys club that women can have explosive diarrhea, too.
You are a feminist icon. Brava, madam.

But perhaps the most influential person on the list is here, Sara Blakely. The inventor of the Spanx. Give it up.

No one, no one has done more to control women’s bodies, except maybe Cardinal Dolan.
Cardinal, congratulations, sir, you are afeminist icon.

Anyway, it is a true honor for all of us to be on the list, and a great business decision by TIME because given the state of the publishing industry, this might be the only way to guarantee selling 100 issues of a magazine this week.

Oh, and thank — for the first timers, remember to keep your TIME 100 pins, it gets you 15 percent off of any hot entree at participating Applebee’s.

Thank you, everyone. Congratulations to you all, and good night.

Balls of steel.

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A last gasp of hate

by David Atkins

Speculation has been intense about the Supreme Court’s seemingly supportive reaction to AB1070, Arizona’s stringent immigration law. If oral arguments are any indication, the most conservative Supreme Court in history will probably uphold the core parts of the law. That in turn has been seen as a political setback for the Obama Administration in specific, and for progressives more broadly. And on its face, that may well be accurate.

But there’s another storyline here, too, reflected in the Arizona presidential polls. Two recent polls show a dead heat in Arizona between President Obama and Mitt Romney. While I wouldn’t bet money on Arizona going blue this presidential cycle, the trend is as clear in Arizona as it is across much of the rest of the West: the days of the current incarnation of Republican politics are nearing a point of no return. A more liberal youth and the influx of Latino voters make that a certainty. Arizona’s immigration law, far from being a harbinger of tougher restrictions down the road, is the last gasp of a dying and hateful demographic and ideology.

That’s not to say that the Republican Party won’t backtrack, reinvent itself, put forward more minority politicians to muddy the waters, and find other ways of dividing the population so that their rubes vote to give rich people even more money. And it’s not to say that the current incarnation of the Republican Party won’t have legs in many places across America for years, even a generation to come.

But it is important to note that conservatives can’t keep going down this road forever. The polling in Arizona is a far better indicator of that fact than anything the Supreme Court might do this summer.

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Un-American cool

by digby

If you think the 60s are dead, think again. It’s not just the absurd hippie punching in the Facebook fever swamps. Take a look at this:

Karl Rove knows his people. Anyone who is genuinely comfortable with popular culture sets their teeth on edge. In fact, it’s often seen as an outright threat.

I happened to watch the following with my rightwing Dad and I thought he was going to bust a gasket. Everything about it offended him from the Elvis tune to the dark glasses to the cheering audience. He would never have liked him, but this sparked a loathing for Bill Clinton so deep he was prepared to believe anything about him.

Paul Waldman has more.

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Liberals hate children

by digby

This is nice. I’m glad that everyone can agree that liberals are the most hate filled baby killers on the planet:

“The hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” Bryant told conservative radio host Tony Perkins on Tuesday.

Bryant touted the bill, which increases the requirements for doctors to legally perform abortions, as the “the first step” in ending abortions in Mississippi, a goal the governor campaigned on.

“We passed that bill and I think you’ll see other states follow,” Bryant said Tuesday in a video of the radio show segment posted by Right Wing Watch. “And when that happens, at least these fly-in abortionists are going to be regulated under the state laws of the Medical Procedures Act here in the state of Mississippi, as they should be across the nation.”

Well, he partly got that right. I loathe children with a burning passion and I want to kill them all, regardless of whether they are in the womb. It’s just that killing them while they’re inside another person is so much more enjoyable.

I’m not sure what this fellow means by the comment that “fly-in abortionists” should have to be regulated under Mississippi’s state laws, but I’m guessing he meant that the federal government should enact such a law, which would be more than a little bit ironic coming from the state of Mississippi which pretty much invented the States’ Rights doctrine to preserve their own right to discriminate, enslave and kill whomever they choose. Maybe he really thinks that all the other states agree with this blatant manipulation of the law to circumvent the US Constitution they claim they love, but he’s got another thing coming. California’s going in another direction entirely. What are they going to do about that?

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Soft Serve Austerity

by digby

So we have disappointing news again today on the unemployment front. As Atrios points out, “it happens every spring” (lately.)

In my piece about Krugman’s various posts and articles yesterday, I mentioned this.

Here’s more

from Doug Henwood:

As of March, the most recent data we have, we were 33 months into the recovery/expansion. In a “normal,” or at least average, expansion, total employment would be up 6.6% (which is why the index number on the graph is 106.6). But now it’s only up 1.8%. But there’s an enormous divergence in public and private sector employment. In an average recovery, private employment would be up 6.7% and the public sector up 6.4%. This time, though, the private sector is up just 2.7% (4 points short of the average)—but the public sector is down 2.5% (almost 9 points below average).

Putting some numbers on that, total employment is 6.3 million below where it would be in an average recovery. (As the graph shows, the decline in employment was far deeper than average, and the recovery slower to kick in.) Of that shortfall, 4.3 million comes from the private sector, and 2.0 million from the public. So the public sector is responsible for about a third of the deficiency. But that’s twice its share of total employment.

No doubt yahoos will cheer the fall in public employment as a reduction in waste—though there’s no visible payoff in private sector job growth. (Of course, the yahoos don’t care about the continued deterioration in public services.) Public sector austerity is a major drag on the job market. If public employment had merely matched the anemic growth in the private sector, the unemployment rate would be more like 7.4% than 8.2%. And if it had matched its post-World War II average, the unemployment rate would be under 7%.

Propagandists love to go on about how the socialist in the White House is scaring the private sector, leading to a hiring strike. But public sector austerity—mainly at the state and local level—is a major drag on the job market. That doesn’t get anywhere the attention that it should.

I have some sympathy for the states and cities. They are often hamstrung by balanced budget amendments and odd triggers and locks enacted by right wingers hoping for any opportunity to drown government in the bathtub (with babies and old people.) They cannot print money or borrow on the kind of terms the feds can. But there’s no good reason why the Federal government isn’t making up the difference. Certainly, it’s ridiculous that it is operating under a hiring freeze at a time like this. But it is.

We may not have had the kind of austerity program like the UK’s which has thrown them back into recession. But our government’s soft-serve austerity has certainly been instrumental in keeping the US economy from rebounding.

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Compassionate Randroid

by digby

This is the most interesting development in right wing framing I’ve seen in a while. Jamelle Bouie reports:

I’m not surprised that Michael Gerson, architect of “compassionate conservatism,” has convinced himself that this generation of Republican leaders is carrying on in his footsteps (via Mike Allen):

Obama’s overreach has also produced another conservative reaction – a Reform Conservatism. The key figure here is Paul Ryan … Its brain trust includes thinkers such as Yuval Levin, James Capretta and Peter Wehner. The reform movement … looks for ways to achieve the ends of the welfare state both through more private means and more efficient public means. … Speaker John Boehner has adopted Ryan’s reform approach as the de facto ideology of the House Republican majority.

The Ryan budget does a lot of things. It flattens the tax code and dramatically cuts taxes for high-income earners. It caps federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, and it calls for higher military spending. It turns Medicaid into a block grant for the states, and gradually shifts Medicare to a private insurance plan.

He goes on to show just how absurd it is to claim that Ryan’s budget will “achieve the ends of the welfare state through more private means and efficient public means.” It’s ridiculous on its face. Conservative philosophy doesn’t believe that the ends of welfare state are even desirable, much less achievable. And Ryan’s budget shows absolutely no such thing. It is a blueprint for shrinking the welfare state, period. If there’s any idea that there will be a consequential private “fix” it’s left to a combination of fairy dust and crossed fingers. Presumably, once the yoke of “government dependency” is removed everyone will be “free” to go out a get one of those fabulous, good paying jobs that are going unfilled.

But it’s quite brilliant, nonetheless. What they are doing is appropriating the DLC mantra of the 90s.

The DLC “seeks to define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.

This rhetoric is still floating around in the ether, just waiting for the “compassionate conservatives” to pick it up in time for the election season. If Paul Ryan puts his imprimatur on it, I have little doubt that they think they can persuade some swing voters to their side. The groundwork has been well-laid by the DLC.

They know very well that it’s going to be a fools game for Democrats to try to refute this concept by citing the specifics of Paul Ryan’s plans. They’ll sound just like liberals did back in the 90s — boring and hidebound and tied to policies that have been proven not to work. Everyone says that Paul Ryan is a Very Serious Person and he doesn’t look at all like a hardcore extremist. Let the fresh-faced young people with new ideas have a chance!

This sort of message is one that Mitt Romney can carry much better than the ultra-conservative message of the primary campaign. He’s a “private sector problem solver” who can shrink government while “innovating” with “incentives” to create jobs and protect the vulnerable. We’ve seen this movie before.

Update: This is rich. From Sarah Posner:

Rep. Paul Ryan has decided that he doesn’t like Ayn Rand after all, because she’s an icky atheist. He told National Review’s Robert Costa, in advance of his speech today at Georgetown University:

“I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

Ryan enjoys bantering about dusty novels, but it’s not really his bailiwick. Philosophy, he tells me, is critical, but politics is about more than armchair musing. “This gets to the Jack Kemp in me, for the lack of a better phrase,” he says — crafting public policy from broad ideas. “How do you produce prosperity and upward mobility?” he asks. “How do you attack the root causes of poverty instead of simply treating its symptoms? And how do you avoid a crisis that is going to hurt the vulnerable the most — a debt crisis — from ever happening?”

First, about that “dusty novel” Atlas Shrugged: here’s Ryan in a 2009 video he posted on his own Facebook page, in which he claims that contemporary America is “like we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel” and that “Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did a fantastic job explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and that, to me, is what matters most.”

And let’s not forget this.

Sarah surmises that this is also a new right wing frame: Real Catholics don’t just hate abortion, they hate “statism” too.

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Give the people what they want

by David Atkins

The numbers are in on the California “Millionaires’ Tax” initiative, and they’re looking good:

Likely voters in California continue to support the tax initiative that Gov. Jerry Brown seeks to place on the ballot in November, but they have strong reservations about the provision that would raise the state sales tax.

Those were among the findings reported Wednesday in the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California’s latest survey of 823 likely voters who were interviewed April 3-10 on landline and cellular phones.

The survey showed likely voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Brown initiative. It temporarily would raise the income tax rate on couples earning $500,000 a year or more and also increase the state sales tax by one-quarter cent.

Overall, likely voters supported the proposal 54 percent to 39 percent. Three-quarters of Democrats backed the idea, while nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Republicans opposed it. A slight majority (53 percent) of the key group in the middle, independents, were in support.

The survey asked respondents separately about the two components of the initiative. An overwhelming majority (65 percent) supported the notion of raising income taxes on the wealthy, while a slight majority (52) opposed the sales tax idea.

Not a surprise. Consider it data point #1,317,928 that the public supports progressive taxation and opposes regressive taxation. But that’s just spoiled voters wanting to raise somebody else’s taxes, right? Surely the rich already pay more than their share of the burden, right?

Not so. Per the California Budget Project, the bottom quintile of California incomes pay 10.2% of their incomes in state and local taxes. The 2nd poorest quintile pay 8.7%. The next three quintiles pay anywhere from 7.5% to 8.2%. And top quintile? The lowest rate at 7.4%.

The wealthy have it very good in California. They’ve got it especially good because of the 2/3 supermajority rule (created by Proposition 13) on increasing taxes in the legislature, which means that any remotely progressive taxation measure has to go straight to the voters, since Republicans control a smidgen over 1/3 of the seats in each chamber of the legislature.

The only reason the initiative might fail is because Governor Brown insisted on keeping the quarter cent sales tax provision–a move his supporters have said was necessary to avert furious opposition from the Chamber of Commerce and other conservative organizations. I’m skeptical that the conservative organizations will hold their fire regardless–and I’m also skeptical of the idea that even if the Governor were right, the full opposition of business interests would do more damage to the legislation than the sales tax itself creates.

It might be better–at the state and national level–to simply give the people what they want, especially since the people are entirely justified and fiscally responsible in demanding it. That’s how democracy is supposed to work, isn’t it?

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The other day I wrote about the incredible shrinking lunch hour in the workplace and g0t a deluge of emails from people telling me that this is the new normal. If you want to get ahead, you’ll quickly gobble a sandwich at your desk and get right back to work. In this economy, nobody’s complaining.

[M]oney isn’t the only scarce commodity cafeteria operators have to grapple with. Another one is time. Get this:

In the Minneapolis public schools, we are supposed to have 15 minutes to eat, which would be bad enough. But realistically we get only 10 to 11 minutes (we have been timing it).

That’s from Minneapolis sixth graders Talia Bradley and Antonia Ritter, writing on the op-ed page of the Minnesota Star Tribune. Ten to 11 minutes to eat lunch? Welcome to fast-food nation, kids, where eating is a necessary inconvenience, to be dispatched with as rapidly as possible.

Nationwide, similar trends hold sway. According to the School Nutrition Association, elementary-school kids get a median of 25 minutes for lunch, while middle and high school students get 30.

Over at the Lunch Tray blog, University of Iowa law professor and parent of public-school children offers the following explanation for what he calls the “incredible shrinking lunch period”:

At a meeting with concerned parents, the school superintendent sympathized with our concerns, but explained how much pressure the administrators were under, because of No Child Left Behind, to raise standardized test scores. As a result, administrators felt that they had to add instructional time to the day, and there were only so many places to find those minutes. Hence the disappearing lunch and recess.

Evidently, they’re extending this to bathroom breaks as well. If you can make it all the way to the end of this odd story about a kindergartner having a bathroom accident you’ll find out that it happened because the child wasn’t allowed to leave her desk because she was taking a test.

Premature anti-confidence fairy-ist Paul Krugman comments on the entirely predicatble news that Britain officially has a double dip recession on its hands:

When David Cameron became PM, and announced his austerity plans — buying completely into both the confidence fairy and the invisible bond vigilantes — many were the hosannas, from both sides of the Atlantic. Pundits here urged Obama to “do a Cameron”; Cameron and Osborne were the toast of Very Serious People everywhere.

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Britain is also unique in having chosen the Big Wrong freely, facing neither pressure from bond markets nor conditions imposed by Berlin and Frankfurt.

Now, the defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here.

It’s hard to believe the Austerian excuse is that it’s not their fault because the real pain hasn’t even begun, but there you have it.

As for Murrica, Krugman has this:

That spike early on is Census hiring; once that was past, the Obama years shaped up as an era of huge cuts in public employment compared with previous experience. If public employment had grown the way it did under Bush, we’d have 1.3 million more government workers, and probably an unemployment rate of 7 percent or less.

And let’s not forget that it’s only thanks to the Tea Party being total morons that we were spared the full Austerian Monty. If the powers that be had had their way, our confidence fairies would all be hitting the ground and splatting at our feet as well.

Update: When academics face off:

Ben Bernanke responds to my magazine piece; as I see it, in effect he declared that he has been assimilated by the Fed Borg:

I guess the, uh, the question is, um, does it make sense to actively seek a higher inflation rate in order to, uh, achieve a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate? The view of the committee is that that would be very, uh, uh, reckless. We have, uh, we, the Federal Reserve, have spent 30 years building up credibility for low and stable inflation, which has proved extremely valuable, in that we’ve been able to take strong accommodative actions in the last four or five years to support the economy without leading to a, [indiscernible] expectations or destabilization of inflation. To risk that asset, for, what I think would be quite tentative and, uh, perhaps doubtful gains, on the real side would be an unwise thing to do.

Notice the framing — “a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate”. It’s basically an assertion that we’re doing all right, maybe could do a bit better, but not worth endangering the Fed’s reputation — oh, and as long as we don’t have actual deflation, no problem.

Read Krugman’s article for the whole ugly tale. What is millions of people suffering and having their futures irrevocably altered in the face of the Fed’s reputation being (further) sullied? Priorities!

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It’s Romney

by David Atkins

With Gingrich dropping out, the last sideshow in the GOP primary is gone. The Republicans have their nominee, and they’ll just have to learn to love him.

Someone recently asked in the comment why the contraceptive issue had seemingly died down on the political radar. I’m sure it will be back, particularly in campaigns at the congressional level, but one reason it’s gotten less play of late on the presidential level is the Romney ascendancy. The rest of the campaign for the White House is going to be fought mostly on the ground of economic justice–and while social issues obviously have an economic component, that’s not quite as clear to the voters.

This would be be a lot easier if the Obama Administration had been more active on issues of economic justice, and less friendly to the interests of Wall Street. But you go to war with the army you have…

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