Month: April 2012

Sunday morning cream

by digby

 I guess we should thank Peggy, Donna and Cokie or we wouldn’t even exist:

While the lean towards the right is more pronounced than in years past thanks to the contentious Republican nomination contest, the heavy favor that Sunday show bookers have towards Republicans is not new. In 2004, a mirror image of 2012 in that Democrats were looking to unseat a Republican incumbent in the White House, Republicans still held a 57-43 percent edge in 2003, and a 56-44 percent advantage in 2004.

Ok, but what about the women and the racial and ethnic minorities? Well, it turns out that half the appearances by women were by Michele Bachman and half the appearances by African Americans were by Herman Cain. It’s just laughable at this point.

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Placing a value on womanhood

by digby

Katha Pollit on the value of “women’s work”:

So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts.

All of which goes to show that it is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood. 

I hadn’t been able to put my finger on what galls me so much about this flap (particularly that toxic bilge water from SE Cupp yesterday) until I read the passage I emphasized above. This discussion about motherhood gets to the very heart of the issue: a women’s “value” is still largely a reflection of her relationship to men in all kinds of ways from economic status to moral agency. And I don’t think most modern women are aware of it on any conscious level — at least I’m not, until something like this ‘War on Women” comes along and I’m forced to take a fresh look at all my assumptions. It’s primal stuff, buried deeply in the human subconscious and hard to ferret out.  But it’s quite real and this so-called conversation we’re having about women’s rights in this political campaign is mostly just dancing around it. Pollit brings it nicely into focus. You should read the whole piece.

Predicting that immigration would become a much larger issue in the fall campaign, Romney told his audience, “We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,” warning that recent polling showing Hispanics breaking in huge percentages for President Obama “spells doom for us.” 

Romney said the GOP must offer its own policies to woo Hispanics, including a “Republican DREAM Act,” referring to the legislative proposal favored by Democrats that would offer illegal immigrants a limited path to citizenship, to give Hispanic voters a real choice between parties. 

And guess what’s suddenly being talked up?

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has thrust himself into the raging illegal immigration debate, proposing a plan that would create a path to legal status for children of illegal immigrants — putting him at odds with an immoveable wing of the Republican Party on this issue.
It’s a risky move for a potential vice presidential candidate, and it puts presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney in a pickle as he may have to decide whether to back an immigration plan rolled out by one of the party’s rising Hispanic stars, or stick to the strident anti-illegal immigrant positions he staked out during the Republican primary. 

Rubio understands full well he’s swimming in turbulent waters. He invited reporters to his office on Thursday to talk about his own version of the Democratic DREAM Act, which would allow some children of illegal immigrants to obtain legal status in the United States. Rubio’s version does not have a citizenship option, as Democrats propose, but it would open the door for children of illegal immigrants who have completed high school to be awarded “non-immigrant visas” before obtaining a more permanent status. 

The Romney camp is closely watching Rubio’s moves on immigration, and campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said the former Massachusetts governor would “study and consider” Rubio’s proposal when he eventually unveils it. 

Leave it to Politico to flog this story as if Rubio bravely set forth this risky piece of legislation without regard to his future as a “rising star,” despite the fact that it is obviously part of the GOP plan to lure Hispanics in November. They beat his sweet so very nicely.

The bill itself is a hoax and Rubio isn’t brave for putting it forth. It’s his job to be the designated Republican Hispanic doing phony “outreach” to the community. The problem for them is that the community isn’t dumb enough to fall for this. Indeed, the community is in a terrible position, caught between a Democratic administration that ostensibly supports the Dream Act but has deported more undocumented workers than the last Republican administration and a GOP base that would like to see everyone who even looks Latino deported immediately. It’s a dilemma.

But this does signal that Romney’s indeed going to try to thread this needle. And it’s not going to be easy. The real question is why the Democrats have allowed themselves to be compromised in any way with the Hispanic community with their cruel deportation policy? I doubt it’s bought them even one vote and it may have just given the GOP an opening they don’t deserve. It’s just another one of many political decisions that only make sense if they simply believe that the policy is the correct one and they are pursuing it without regard to the electoral consequences.

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A primary reminder

by David Atkins

If there’s any merit left in this country’s creaky and corrupted them, then it still matters who gets elected. And if elections still matter, one of the more important tactics we can pursue is to get more progressives elected to public office, particularly in bluer areas.

Some will argue that third parties are the way to go. I have disagreed strongly and still do, noting that the Goldwater conservatives successfully took over the Republican Party when they faced a similar crossroads. Some will argue that protests are the way–and that’s fine, too, though the one tactic doesn’t necessarily preclude the other. For those who do follow my line of thinking that our best chance lies in making a more progressive Democratic Party, one of the more important occasions to make that happen is in primary season. Once a candidate makes it through a primary, it’s hard to hold them accountable since the alternative is almost always worse.

Some readers will assail one or more points in this edifice of reasoning. And that’s fine: we don’t all have to follow the same path, and success may depend on a confluence of tactics. But for those who agree, there are few more exciting times than primary season, which has come and gone in most states. But many primaries in important blue states still lie ahead of us: Connecticut, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are holding primaries this Tuesday. Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia are on May 8th, Nebraska and Oregon on May 15th, Arkansas and Kentucky on May 22nd, Texas on May 29th, and California, New Jersey, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota on June 5th. Utah will close it out on June 26th, delivering the final feather in Mitt Romney’s cap.

Just in my Ventura County, California backyard alone, there are two crucial primaries: one for Congress in CA26, and one for State Senate in California’s SD19. Both primaries have major consequences not only for the difference between Democrats and Republicans, but also for the differences between progressive and conservative Democrats. I’ve already written frequently of the problems created by centrist candidate extraordinaire Linda Parks, up against the progressive Julia Brownley, who is locked in a battle herself with three other Democrats, two of them quite conservative. Then there’s the awful Jason Hodge, trying to use his conservative interest connections to defeat the far more progressive Hannah-Beth Jackson. Down in Los Angeles, there are interesting primaries to get involved with as well, both at a Congressional and state level (Torie Osborn and Brad Sherman being the more progressive choices in AD50 and CA30 respectively.)

Even local county committee races can often be influential. There are often competing slates of more progressive versus less progressive Democrats, who then have the opportunity to set the agendas of the county parties and more importantly the endorsements in statewide and federal races.

There are races like these happening all over the country. Chances are, there’s one in your area. Even if there’s not, good candidates all over the country usually have ways of being involved by remote. Now is the best time to do it.

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Debunking another big conservative lie about the economy

by David Atkins

One of the lines you’ll frequently hear used to justify stagnating wages and austerity movements in the U.S. (and this goes for other industrialized nations, too) is that American workers “aren’t competitive” on the global market. The argument seems somewhat persuasive at first: after all, it’s hard to expect a company to hire an American worker at ten times the pay of a Chinese worker when the Chinese worker will work longer hours. Even if the Chinese work is only 75% the quality of the American worker, that’s still probably a good business decision for the corporation. And hey, in tough economic times with global competition from companies overseas bringing low-cost goods into America, the only way to compete is by offshoring jobs and lowering American wages, right? Everybody has to cut back now, because we’re not in Henry Ford’s America. Even American corporations are making large amounts, even a majority of their sales in overseas markets. So it’s not as if paying Americans decent wages is even terribly helpful to their consumer business.

So the line goes. And thus, policy makers have tried to paper over and compensate for that “reality” by expanding credit, keeping overseas goods cheap, and inflating asset bubbles to disguise the supposedly inevitable downward pressure on wages.

Except that there’s one little wrinkle in that tidy little argument: CEO pay. As the AFL-CIO notes:

The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010. Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.

CEOs supposedly deserve all this money for increasing shareholder value. However, while the average CEO pay increased 13.9 percent at S&P 500 Index companies in 2011, the S&P 500 Index ended the year at the same level as it started.

This double-digit increase in average CEO pay for the second consecutive year shows just how disconnected the top 1 percent is from the 99 percent. In 2011, average wages increased just 2.8 percent and average worker pay totaled $34,053.

While not all of these CEOs are of American companies, a great many of them are. And it hasn’t mattered. If the argument about competitive wages and tight bottom lines for American companies were true, then the top of the pay scale should see some tightening as well. Sure, it’s not quite as easy to outsource a CEO as it is to outsource an assembly line worker, but it’s not that much more difficult. If competition is really that tight, then CEOs and other executives should feel the pinch as well in a global competitive environment.

And yet they don’t. American corporations are still immensely profitable. In fact, American companies are are racking up the biggest profits in history, and it’s mostly coming on the backs of workers.

It’s certainly true that globalization and market forces have enabled corporations and their executives to maximize profits by reducing American standards of living. But it’s not an inevitable consequence of competition to help American companies stay competitive. It’s just being skimmed off the top for the richest 1%, and for the benefit of the top 1/5th of shareholder Americans who have any significant stock investments.

In other words, the line being fed to American workers about why their wages are stagnant is just that: a line. A lie that pretends that what globalization has allowed companies to do to their workers is something that competitive forces have required them to do, when in fact the benefits have simply accrued to the richest Americans.

And that, ultimately, is what the economic argument in this country is about (when it isn’t about spending priorities and racial codes.) We can either choose to be a society that doesn’t care that the old bond because executive and employee has been destroyed, and that doesn’t care if American workers remain able to afford a decent standard of living. We can simply allow the forces to take their course, and let every man fend for himself.

Or we can choose to say “no.” One way of saying no would be to retreat and fight against globalization itself. Some efforts on that front are appropriate, but a lot of them are not. There’s no need to go out of one’s way to sign free trade deals that are an affront to the American worker, and we should incentivize companies to keep their jobs here at home. But attempting to stop globalization itself is a mostly pointless endeavor.

And that is why progressive taxation is so important. If globalization so easily enables increases in income inequality, then it’s extremely important that we as a nation claw some of those ill-earned gains back from the wealthy and spend it to rebuild the middle class.

We may not live in Henry Ford’s American anymore. Modern executives may be able to rake in the dough without paying their workers. But that doesn’t mean we have to live with that idea and do nothing about it.

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Boys and their toys

by digby

Michael Hastings has another blockbuster article in Rolling Stone about America’s secret drone war:

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians.[…]

Drones have also radically altered the CIA, turning a civilian intelligence-gathering agency into a full-fledged paramilitary operation – one that routinely racks up nearly as many scalps as any branch of the military.

But the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we’re not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What’s more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.

I can’t help but be reminded of this every time I read one of these stories about the Drone War.

It’s an interesting anomaly of Barack Obama’s presidency that this liberal Democrat, known before the 2008 election for his antiwar views, has been so comfortable running America’s secret wars.

Obama’s leadership style — and the continuity of his national security policies with those of his predecessor, George W. Bush — has left friends and foes scratching their heads. What has become of the “change we can believe in” style he showed as a candidate? The answer may be that he has disappeared into the secret world of the post-Sept. 11 presidency.
[…]

 Obama is the commander in chief as covert operator. The flag-waving “mission accomplished” speeches of his predecessor aren’t Obama’s thing; even his public reaction to the death of bin Laden was relatively subdued. Watching Obama, the reticent, elusive man whose dual identity is chronicled in “Dreams From My Father,” you can’t help wondering if he has an affinity for the secret world. He is opaque, sometimes maddeningly so, in the way of an intelligence agent.

Intelligence is certainly an area where the president appears confident and bold. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who has been running spy agencies for more than 20 years, regards Obama as “a phenomenal user and understander of intelligence.” When Clapper briefs the president each morning, he brings along extra material to feed the president’s hunger for information.

This is a president, too, who prizes his authority to conduct covert action. Clapper’s predecessor, Adm. Dennis Blair, lost favor in part because he sought to interpose himself in the chain of covert action. That encroached on Obama, who aides say sees it as a unique partnership with the CIA…

Perhaps Obama’s comfort level with his intelligence role helps explain why he has done other parts of the job less well. He likes making decisions in private, where he has the undiluted authority of the commander in chief. He likes information, as raw and pertinent as possible, and he gets impatient listening to windy political debates. He likes action, especially when he doesn’t leave fingerprints.

I’m fairly sure that David Ignatius, who wrote that for the Washington Post, really admires that about him.

I care little about the president’s image as a superspy man-of-action. All that stuff kind of makes me sick if you want to know the truth. But there is a foreign policy implication in all this that should be discussed before the United States government just starts patrolling the entire world, including our own cities, with militarized sky robots.

Hastings writes:

“Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration,” says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. “What I don’t think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we’re trying to attack it?’ A great deal about the drone strikes is still shrouded in secrecy. It’s very difficult to evaluate from the outside how serious of a threat the targeted people pose.”

That would be the point, I’m afraid.

I think Barbara Tuchman’s observation in The Guns of August about how untried technology leads to hubris is probably worth contemplating here. This new weapon makes it very easier to start wars but there’s nothing in the technology that will make it easier to end them.

Update: In case anyone thinks that this is only a Commander in Chief problem, think again.  The congress has a whole bipartisan caucus formed around this topic called the Unmanned Systems Caucus, chaired by crooked Republican “Buck” Mckeon. We have a chance to replace him with a progressive congressman named Lee Rogers this time out. (You can contribute to his campaign here.) He will not be joining the Unmanned Systems Caucus. Baby steps.

Building a nest for the lame duck

by digby

Earlier this week we had this:

All the Senate Republicans — and even some Democrats — who’ve attacked President Obama for refusing to embrace the storied Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan in 2010 may end up with a chance to replace their preening with recorded votes.

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) announced Tuesday that he will introduce the framework as a blueprint for the upper-chamber’s official budget resolution — a response to Republicans who for years have hectored him and his party for failing to advance a plan with a vision for the country’s future.

At a Capitol press briefing, Conrad downplayed expectations of the plan passing anytime soon, pointing out that it will take time for the fiscal commission report, issued in late 2010, to be adjusted for economic and policy developments that have occurred in the intervening months. He also expressed doubt that any long-term budget can be agreed to in the polarized 112th Congress.

“It’s going to require a lot of negotiation, and the negotiation is going to take time,” Conrad told reporters, adding that it “could be” months before the committee votes on a final product. “If one is interested in really getting a result, the time is not yet right. Nothing could be more clear. I don’t rule out being able to act more quickly.

Today we have this:

Senate Democrats are prepared to back House Republicans into a corner if they refuse to relent and fund the government next year at the level the parties agreed to during last summer’s fight over raising the debt limit. And two recent developments — a pre-emptive White House veto threat and an olive branch from Senate Republicans — make them think they have the upper hand.

“I hope that [Senate Republicans] can persuade their House members and their colleagues over there to come to their senses and come back to the deal that we made last August instead of threatening us with another government shutdown,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) — a Democratic Senate leader and appropriator — at a Capitol briefing Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he’s “glad” the White House stepped in and drew a bright line, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that Democrats will have the upper hand if House Republicans don’t back off voluntarily.

For now, House Republicans aren’t addressing whether they’ll bend on funding levels for the federal government. But Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for top GOP House appropriator Hal Rogers, lambasted the Obama administration for inserting itself into the process, and said the GOP and Senate Dems will reach an agreement on funding the government on their own.

It’s hard to know what the real strategy is, but I’m guessing they would prefer to stage a kabuki dance, extend the funding and deal with all this in the lame duck session. If Conrad can have the “new” Simpson-Bowles ready and waiting, it could be the template for one of those wonderful lame duck deals.

On the other hand, the Republicans are insane and might just think shutting down the government in the month before the election works in their favor. They do keep you guessing.

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Nuge’s moment

by digby

Toxoplasmosis 

 Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that American singers could get themselves in big trouble by going to a foreign country and criticizing the President of the United States. They had their records burned, were subjected to death threats and were blackballed from radio stations.

That was then and this is now. Here’s Ted Nugent in England this week:

  “I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.” 

 It’s a good thing he didn’t say that he was ashamed of him. Them’s fighting words.

I would suggest a boycott of his CDs but I don’t think he’s come out with anything new since about 1975, so we’d have to go down to the basement and dig out the old moldy vinyl. And I’m pretty sure the only radio stations that play “Cat Scratch Fever” these days do it as a retro joke, sort of like “Muskrat Love” by The Captain and Tenille. It’s just not worth the trouble.

Thomas Friedman’s Constituency

by David Atkins

 Does wanker Thomas Friedman ever tire of being wrong? Is there really anyone left in America besides maybe Linda Parks) who can read this without laughing?

And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.

President Obama has significant achievements to his record. He has done a solid job stemming the economic crisis he inherited and a good job managing national security and initiating important reforms — from health care to auto mileage standards…

This election has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this.

But, today, neither party is generating that mandate — talking seriously enough about the taxes that will have to be raised or the entitlement spending that will have to be cut to put us on sustainable footing, let alone offering an inspired vision of American renewal that might motivate such sacrifice. That’s why I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate — like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg — who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America’s global leadership before we implode.

Jonathan Chait served up the best response to this stupidity a few months ago:

What, by contrast, are we to make of third-party activists like Thomas L. Friedman or Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz? They have a president who supports virtually everything they want—short-term stimulus, long-term deficit reduction through a mix of taxes and entitlement cuts, clean energy, education reform, and social liberalism. Yet they are agitating for a third party in order to carry out an agenda that is virtually identical to Obama’s. In a column touting the third-party Americans Elect, the closest Friedman comes to explaining why we should have a third party, rather than reelect the politician who already represents their values, is to say that such a party “would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default.” He agrees with Obama’s plan, in other words, but proposes to form a new party because he disagrees with his legislative sequencing.

As political analysis, this is pure derangement. It’s the Judean People’s Front for the Aspen Institute crowd. But these sorts of anti-political fantasies arise whenever liberals are forced to confront the crushing ordinariness of governing. (Matthew Miller, a fervent promoter of Americans Elect, likewise pined for a third party in 1996, on the curious grounds that President Clinton wasn’t doing enough to balance the budget.)

In a sane country, Thomas Friedman would be laughed off the cocktail circuit. But this is not a sane country.

There is admittedly a small section of the comfortable educated population that shares the Thomas Friedman view about the prime desirability of social progressivism mixed with fiscal conservatism. They tend to be a small subset of creative class pseudo-liberals who either labor comfortably for the government or depend heavily on the stock market to provide them an income stream. So cutting wages and safety net provisions while juicing the stock market all while keeping abortion safe, legal and rare as long as we don’t talk about it too much seems fine and dandy for them.

But it’s a pretty vanishingly small crowd, one that fools itself into believing that it has more support than it actually does.

What actually drives so-called “fiscal conservatism” in this country, beyond the propaganda of the very rich, is a sense of aggrievement that decent standards of living are provided to “those people.” Remember: almost everyone wants to tax the rich. The main reason the rich don’t get taxed is because a bunch of people are conned into worrying the money might go to people who don’t look like them, act like them, or live where they live. The “deeply conservative” Deep South loved them some FDR and some socialism until the mid-1960s or so, for reasons that can only be credibly explained by those who want to be banned from the Very Serious circuit. In short, there’s very little in the way authentic, enlightened support for “fiscal conservatism,” otherwise known as austerity. Policy that is as wrong in Spain today as it was in America in 1937.

But that doesn’t stop the Thomas Friedmans of the world from thinking they have a big constituency out there that agrees with them, or the New York Times from publishing it while more honest and knowledgeable writers heave exasperated sighs in futility on blogs and the pages of Rolling Stone.

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Border Taseriffic

by digby

TPM reports:

A video uncovered by PBS’s Need To Know and set to air this week appears to show US border agents from California using a stun gun on a Mexican man before his death.

Anastacio Hernandez-Rojas died in 2010 following an altercation with agents from the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection near San Diego.

The full segment is set to air Friday, but Need To Know has posted a preview online. In the video, Hernandez-Rojas can be seen on the ground, surrounded by about a dozen agents. He did not appear to be resisting arrest when an agent deployed a stun gun.

Apparently a succession of undocumented workers expired from Taser International’s mysterious “diagnosis” for an illness that only affects people who’ve been tasered in police custody. What’re the odds?

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