Month: May 2012

Sickening factoid ‘o the day

by digby

A very brief primer on why we live in a backward country:

The United States is the only developed nation that does not require employers to give their employees paid sick leave. For many Americans, that means choosing between their pay and their health — a devil’s choice if there ever was one.[…]

In 2009, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced a bill called the Healthy Families Act that would require businesses that have at least 15 employees to offer some paid sick time to their employees. Although it gained an impressive 125 co-sponsors, it never made any progress in the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives, let alone the Senate.

A quick look at the interests backing and opposing the bill explains why. After the bill was introduced, a number of labor unions, faith groups, and non-profit organizations declared themselves in support. But on the other side of the issue was virtually every titan in corporate lobbying — ranging from the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the American Hotel and Lodging Association to the National Retail Federation. That’s right, these businesses all worked to ensure that the waitress handling your food could be sick with the flu.

But Big Money hasn’t just taken aim at paid sick leave on the federal level. In Denver, Colorado, the local chamber of commerce worked with restaurants and business-backed tourism groups to finance a propaganda campaign in 2011 against that city’s paid sick leave referendum. Voters were spooked, and the referendum was defeated.

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A brilliant racket

by David Atkins

This is darkly comic:

Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to provide a little relief to the nation’s struggling homeowners is being diverted to plug state budget gaps.

In a budget proposed this week, California joined more than a dozen states that want to help close gaping shortfalls using money paid by the nation’s biggest banks and earmarked for foreclosure prevention, investigations of financial fraud and blunting the ill effects of the housing crisis. California was awarded more than $400 million from the banks, and Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed using the bulk of that sum to pay the state’s debts.

The money was part of a national settlement valued at $25 billion and negotiated with five big banks over abuses in their mortgage and foreclosure processes.

The settlement, reached in February after a year of talks and intervention by the Obama administration, was the second-largest in history involving the states, trailing the tobacco industry settlement, and represented the first large-scale commitment by banks to provide direct aid to borrowers.

It’s a brilliant racket. Let’s see how it works:

1) Privatize gains and socialize losses.

2) Take huge risks with other people’s money.

3) Lower taxes and drown government in a bathtub.

4) When the house of cards comes crashing down, get a bailout and run with the money like a bandit.

5) Skate free of accountability by buying politicians with your ill-earned goods, and by forcing cuts to white-collar law enforcement in order to plug budget gaps from pension funds and other sources directly impacted by your exceptional thievery.

It’s a great plan, really. Hans Gruber has nothing on these guys.

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I mentioned the annual Pete Peterson Poor People Ritual Sacrifice confab earlier, but this piece about the man’s material devotion to his cause by Ryan Grim is a must-read:

According to a review of tax documents from 2007 through 2011, Peterson has personally contributed at least $458 million to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to cast Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and government spending as in a state of crisis, in desperate need of dramatic cuts. Peterson’s millions have done next to nothing to change public opinion: In survey after survey, Americans reject the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare. A recent national tour organized by AmericaSpeaks and largely funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation was met by audiences who rebuffed his proposals.

But Peterson has been able to drive a major shift in elite consensus about government spending, with talk of “grand bargains” that would slash entitlements, cut corporate tax rates and end personal tax breaks, such as the mortgage deduction, that benefit the middle class.

To put Peterson’s spending in context, all corporations and unions combined spent less than $4 billion on lobbying in 2011.

This shows, once again, just how dangerous it is to have this .001% that is richer than God deciding they’d like to buy themselves a government. They can, literally, afford it. Just as we are seeing obscenely wealthy people write checks for millions to Super PACs without blinking an eye, ideologues like Peterson are willing to put up even more over time to completely change the basic structure of government for their own gain.

The article goes on to describe the breadth of his endeavors to shred what’s left of the safety net and it’s amazingly comprehensive. I’ll just add a bit of history from an earlier post of mine:

The alternative

by David Atkins

The Obama campaign has come out with a devastating six-minute web ad slamming Mitt Romney’s record as a job destroyer. Most people won’t watch a lengthy web video, of course, but the themes in it will be difficult for the Romney campaign to dispel as they’re diced into 30-second commercials over the summer and fall.

The big question, though, is what exactly the President will offer as his own counternarrative. The stimulus and salvaging the American auto industry are helpful, of course. But given that the President has been cutting government jobs and preaching austerity economics himself, the anti-Romney message isn’t going to be nearly as effective as it might have been.

And then there’s the fact that it’s bad policy. But since the Obama team has been a lot more worried about what would appeal to swing voters in Ohio, it’s worth pointing out that austerity doesn’t make for great politics, either. If one is going to oppose the Romneys of the world and their barbaric ideology, one has to present a compelling and significant contrast.

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Sweden shows the way

by digby

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that Tom Coburn believes that we need to stifle growth in order to keep inflation down. Or something.

What is clear is what he says here:

EK: When Bowles-Simpson went before the House, it was rejected by a huge bipartisan majority. Do you see there as being any possibility that one outcome of the taxmageddon period could, be a grand bargain in the Gang of Six/Simpson-Bowles vein?

TC: I don’t know the answer to that, frankly. My hope would be we reach a grand compromise. But the vote in the House proves what I said in the book. You had a vote in the House on a plan that could solve our problems and the Democrats didn’t vote for it because it touches Social Security and Republicans vote against it because of revenues. Both sides accentuated their differences rather than sending a signal to the international community that we could get together and cut $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years. Which raises the question: Why are they here? If you’re here just to get reelected, you’re worthless to the country…

EK: It seems your view is that just as the market needs to have faith in your demographics and in the flexibility of your labor market and the competitiveness, it has to have faith in your political system’s capacity to deal with long and short-term threats. Do you see any reason for the market to have that faith right now?

TC: No. One of my biggest worries is what happens if Romney wins and Republicans control both chambers, do they have the courage to do what it takes to fix the country? It’s kind of their last chance. If they’re given the favor of control and they don’t act on it, why should you ever trust them again? You shouldn’t. It’ll be the death knell of the Republican Party. They controlled it all for four years under Bush and grew the government. They created a new entitlement with no revenue. Went against the very tenets of what they said they believe.

One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show a whole lot of people how many stupid things we do. I don’t really blame presidents too much. You gotta get appropriations. I say the problem is not that we don’t get along. We get along too well. Government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. The president can’t spend the money if we don’t appropriate it. So it’s not a president problem. It’s a congressional problem.

EK: On the other side of that hypothetical let’s say Obama wins, but Republicans hold the House and maybe even take the Senate. How do they act in that hypothetical? Are they more or less willing to compromise with Obama?

TC: I don’t know. I’m not good at predicting that. If President Obama is president again, those problems are still there and we have to solve them. He knows that. We’ve had conversations where he’s told me he’ll go much further than anyone believes he’ll go to solve the entitlement problem if he can get the compromise. And I believe him. I believe he would.

Gosh, it sounds like ole Tom is getting ready to endorse somebody. If I read that right, he has more faith that Obama will compromise with the lunatic Republicans than Romney will.

Read the whole interview. It’s a doozy. You’ll especially enjoy the anecdote about Krugman in which Coburn says he’s all wet about austerity because Sweden is doing well. Ezra was pretty tart in his response, but I so hope the good professor responds.

It’s clear that these deficit scolds are simply operating on auto-pilot. No evidence will persuade them that slashing spending isn’t the answer to everything.And I’m being charitable in assuming that Coburn is a true believer and not a cunning Norquistian revolutionary who is simply trying to bury the tattered remains of the American welfare state. It’s depressing. And alarming.

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Today’s toxic concoction from the laboratories of democracy

by digby

Robin Marty reports:

With the signing of a new expanded conscience clause bill in Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback has now legally blessed a virtually open-ended number of situations in which “religious” workers can refuse to assist women under the guise that they believe they “may be” terminating a pregnancy.[…]

Idaho already had a case of a pharmacist who refused to fill a perscription for a woman who needed drugs to stop bleeding, believing that the woman may have had an abortion which caused her blood loss, and the pharmacist received no punishment for the action. How long will it take for that to become the rule, rather than the exception, as the Kansas law goes into effect?

“Assisting in terminating a pregnancy” has already become an overly expansive phrase that many anti-choice activists are applying to even more unrelated situations — from the nurses who refuse to do intake of women in the hospital for a termination to the bus driver who won’t drive a route to Planned Parenthood.

Creating a law that allows a person’s moral convictions — not science — to determine what is “terminating a pregnancy” is legislation begging for legal challenge.

I’m guessing the majority of the locals there think it’s just fine or they wouldn’t be voting for these people. It’s unfortunate for the women who need prescriptions filled but hey, you just can’t be too careful when it comes to religious liberty. If a few women have to schlepp all over town to convince a pharmacist that her need to not bleed to death isn’t a threat to his religious beliefs, well that’s a small sacrifice for freedom.

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Boehner’s promise

by digby

The annual Pete Peterson Poor People Ritual Sacrifice Confab is in full swing and tonight they have a very special guest scheduled. It’s the deficit hawk version of a lap dance:

In remarks at the 2012 Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Boehner will erect the same requirements for raising the debt limit this coming winter that nearly led the country to default on its debt last August.

“We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction,” Boehner will say according to excerpts of prepared remarks provided by his office. “That night in New York City, I put forth the principle that we should not raise the debt ceiling without real spending cuts and reforms that exceed the amount of the debt limit increase…. When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase. This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance. If that means we have to do a series of stop-gap measures, so be it – but that’s not the ideal. Let’s start solving the problem. We can make the bold cuts and reforms necessary to meet this principle, and we must.”

They are going to have to pass out cigarettes and bottles of cold water to the attendees after that one.

Of course this was preordained. And they are fairly likely to kick the can down the road. Even if their real Armageddon happens and the Bush tax cuts expire, there’s little doubt that they’d extend most of them again. (This is one reason why I don’t get why they’re all so against it. Why pass up the chance to enact more tax cuts, and strut around like conquering heroes, even if they are just the old ones re-enacted?)

Anyway, enjoy your election. The minute it’s over, no matter who wins, we’re going to be rolling around in a pile of lame duck droppings.

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Confirmation bias for dummies

by digby

When is someone going to shut this ridiculous operation down?

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.

The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.

In fact, if O’Keefe had done a simple Nexis search for “Zbigniew Gorzkowski”, he would have found a single article from the News & Observer in 2008 noting that Gorzkowski and his wife are naturalized citizens:

Customers flock through the red door of Zbigniew “Ziggy” and wife Halina Gorzkowski’s European grocery and flower shop to buy one of the 12 varieties they sell. The pierogis and 400 eastern European food items and flowers are also punching the naturalized citizen couple’s ticket for their version of the American Dream.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gorzkowski this morning. He verified that this information was indeed correct and he had been an American citizen since the late 1980s. Therefore, his votes in the 2008 and 2010 elections were not only perfectly legal, but encouraged as a civic duty.

We already knew he was a liar, so no big surprise there. But this is just sloppy, even for him.

On the other hand, “motivated reasoning” will almost certainly make the right wing true believers either discard this proof of O’Keefe’s mendacity or construct an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain it. O’Keefe has been shown over and over again to be duplicitous and frankly, dumb. But he keeps on doing what he does and they keep on believing him.

This is particularly pernicious in the so-called voter fraud area, where the fact that there is no known case of voter fraud that could possibly sway an election didn’t stop even the US Supreme Court from deciding that making voting more difficult was required simply because cheating was theoretically possible. This, in the face of common sense that argues any widespread cheating by individual voters was nearly impossible in practice.

O’Keefe may be a clown, but every time he puts one of these dishonest videos out purporting to “prove” voter fraud, it just confirms the bias of millions of people and there’s just no way of talking them out of it, short of their own validators (Republicans) repudiating him for his dishonesty. And I don’t see that happening. Why should it? They benefit from it. Indeed, they are behind it.

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Dana does it again

by digby

Oh, Dear God, what is wrong with these people?

The current issue of Newsweek has a photo of President Obama with a rainbow-colored halo superimposed over his head and the title “The First Gay President.”

Nonsense. Obama is not the first gay president. He is the first female president.

Consider his activities on Monday: He sat down to tape a session with the ladies of ABC’s “The View” — his fourth appearance on the talk show by women and for (mostly) women. He accepted an award from Barnard College and gave the commencement speech to graduates of the women’s school. Heck, he even appeared in public wearing a gown.

Obama was still early in his address when he acknowledged that his praise for the young generation of women is “a cheap applause line when you’re giving a commencement at Barnard.”

But Obama was being modest. He didn’t deliver a cheap applause line. He delivered an entire speech full of them. His reelection campaign has been working for months to exploit the considerable gender gap, which puts him far ahead of likely GOP rival Mitt Romney among women. But Monday’s activities veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique.[…]

In making the appearance on the Ivy League campus in Manhattan, Obama risked confirming that he is the coastal elitist he’s often accused of being. On that score, it perhaps didn’t help that he shared the stage with fellow honoree Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry. The president nodded as Wolfson was hailed for fighting the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay scoutmasters.

Am I the only one who gets the feeling that if Mitt called and wanted to round up some of the boys to shave Barack’s head that Dana Milbank would elbow his way to the head of the crowd? (Plus, girls have cooties …)

But then old Dana has quite the history with nasty puerile jokes:

“Ménage à Stella Artois” manages to be both glibly insulting and extraordinarily un-funny. Milbank and Cillizza, through a series of (bad) puns that use the colorful names of microbrewed beers to poke fun at people in the news (swine flu victims should drink…Isolation Ale! Ha!), suggest, among many other things, that “the entire Republican Congressional leadership team” should drink Satan Red/Devil’s Brew/Fallen Angel/Evil Eye/Hell Bier (get it? because they’re demonic, I guess?). Oh, and that the Secretary of State should drink…Mad Bitch.

What a card.

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They can’t help themselves

by David Atkins

When Barack Obama became the first sitting President to support marriage equality, there was genuine hope from various conservative quarters that it would doom him in the general election against Mitt Romney. But then something funny happened: Republicans looked at the poll numbers and realized that doubling down on homophobic bigotry wasn’t their best move, after all. They would light a small fire under their own base, but at the cost of losing even more women and young people, which they can’t afford. So the GOP establishment was remarkably silent in the wake of Obama’s statements, hoping that the conversation would shift as quickly as possible back to the economy. The base wanted to pounce, but wiser heads were tugging back on their leash.

The GOP used to be quite disciplined about such things and able to turn on a dime. But no longer. Every day it seems some new story about a retrograde Republican bigot hits the airwaves, the latest being Oklahoma representative James Lankford’s declaration that being gay is a choice and thus a fireable offense:

STRASSER: Would you support a law that says you can’t fire someone for their sexual orientation –

KEYES: Similar to protections for people on race or gender?

LANKFORD: Well, you’re now dealing with behavior and I’m trying to figure out exactly what you’re trying to mean by that. Because you’re dealing with — race and sexual preferences are two different things. One is a behavior-related and preference-related and one is something inherently — skin color, something obvious, that kind of stuff. You don’t walk up to someone on the street and look at them and say, “Gay or straight?”

KEYES: But you think that even if you can’t see they’re that way, you don’t think someone is born gay necessarily?

LANKFORD: Do I personally? No. I don’t. I think it’s a choice issue. Are tendencies and such? Yes. But I think it’s a choice issue.

We’ve seen a similar lack of discipline from the conservative ranks on women’s issues. Loyal readers of this blog know that Digby and I are less sanguine on the advantages of Republican extremism against women than most (we tend to worry about the Overton Window effect.) Still, it’s undeniable that where Republicans had hoped to thread the needle on a message about “religious liberty”, they were undermined by one whackadoo after the next (including Rush Limbaugh) exposing their real misogynistic agenda. Regardless of the long-term effect, there’s no doubt it’s been a short-term political disaster for them due to a lack of discipline from their rank and file.

This has been and remains the inherent danger for Republicans in relying on an increasingly retrograde base of voters to maintain power. They end up electing people who won’t keep their heads down and hide how they really feel. And that in turn makes it difficult for Republicans to generate the message discipline they need to pass off bigotry and selfishness as wholesome virtues. They just can’t help themselves anymore.

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