Month: June 2012

Keeping the argument on their terms

by digby

Here’s Karl Rove’s latest:

The truth:

This series of charts spells it out in living color.

I’m not even sure this about defeating Obama. And even if it is, it does double duty as a Pete Peterson special. After all, the economic reality is that that the administration has cut too much and spent too little. I don’t see that articulated much in this discussion do you? And that’s just how they want to keep it, no matter who wins in November.

The point is to ensure that nobody gets it in their heads that the primary reason for our economic woes isn’t government debt. And as long as they can keep provoking the Democrats into defending their awesome spending cuts, they’ll be in good shape.

The president tried to get out of this box by speaking the truth yesterday — that it was government spending cuts that were damaging the economy — and he got smacked down hard, even by his own allies.(As I said at the time, he bears some responsibility for that — he has, after all, promoted the idea that cutting government is necessary in a recession. Live by the bad metaphor, die by the bad metaphor.)

He might have avoided that if he’d used different words, but I doubt it. That particular truth — that cutting government spending is hurting the economy — is so far outside the Village consensus that it cannot even be articulated. And that’s the point.

This is what I and others have been so frantic about for the last three years. The administration’s blind determination that the economy would recover without more intervention and their rigid adherence to the grandiose plan to “fix everything” in one Big Deal has led to a bipartisan agreement that we must slash the welfare state and totally reform the relationship between the government and the people at the worst possible time.

It’s not too late to change that. But it will take the president being willing to make a few more “gaffes” like he did yesterday and absorbing the blows of Chris Cilizza and George Stephanopoulos and the rest of the Village gasbags whose world is organized around protecting the conventional wisdom. After all, even though he was treated like a criminal for telling the truth, it was the first time most people had ever heard it. He got it out there. He can keep it out there.

Update: Chris Hayes talked a little bit about this on his show this morning:

I’m hearing more and more public hostility toward those who Jonathan Alter characterizes as “heroes”: the firefighters, police and teachers who are “getting more than their share.” I’m not sure Romney’s “gaffe” wasn’t as potentially useful for the GOP argument as Obama’s was for the Dems’. Sure, he too could have used different words, but the truth is that public employees are public employees and if the GOP thinks the lesson from Wisconsin was that people want them fired, then the “heroes” are certainly among them. (I wrote about that yesterday.)

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Retrograde

by David Atkins

Time will tell if the extreme reactionary conservative backlash is the last gasp of a dying ideology, or the new vanguard of a retrograde, revanchist counterrevolution. On more optimistic days I’m convinced it’s the former, but in times of greater darkness it often seems the latter. Whichever it is, this sort of thing is always scary to read:

An enthusiastic crowd of mostly conservative Christians gathered Friday at the Ventura County Government Center courtyard as part of a nationwide rally against federal rules requiring most employers’ health care plans to include coverage for birth control.

About 300 people showed up for the midday Stand Up for Religious Freedom event, according to Ed Wurts, the Ventura rally captain. Similar gatherings were held Friday in 164 cities across the United States, according to the organization’s website.

Signs blared “Stop President Obama’s HHS Mandate,” referring to the Department of Health and Human Services.

A roster of fiercely religious speakers captivated attendees for more than an hour through an amplified public address system, warning of government overreach, tolerance of sexual perversion and the threat of Marxism, among other things.

Jason Jones, who coproduced the pro-life movie “Bella,” said Christians need to take back Hollywood and take back “the song of our nation.”

Obama’s presidency has a purpose, he told the crowd.

“God is using him to wake us up,” he said.

Jones’ biggest applause line came when he said: “We need to stop sending our children to government schools.”

Local limited-government activist Carla Bonney also roused the crowd, asking if they wanted hospitals to be forced to perform abortions. Attendees shouted “No!” in response, and Bonney continued with a series of similar questions.

“Do we want our military to stop praying in Jesus’ name?” she asked.

“No!” the crowd echoed.

It’s amazing how seamlessly rightwing rhetoric on healthcare mandates ties in with forcing the troops to pray to Jesus and abolition of public education for these people. Sometimes I wish they could go found their own little country somewhere, fulfill their strange mix of economic libertarian and social theocracy on their own turf and see how well it works out for them.

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Taserrific Friday

by digby

This was sent in by several people. It seems to have really hit a nerve:

A 30-year-old pregnant Chicago woman is claiming she was tased Tuesday night by police in a south side parking lot.

She says she pulled over in a handicap spot to let her husband out of the car. When police tried to give her a ticket, she says she got out of her car to approach them then she ripped it up. Police reports indicate she swore repeatedly at one white and one black officer then then threw the ripped up ticket in one of the officers’ faces and tried to take off in her SUV.

Her fiancé came running out and then he, too, found himself handcuffed.

Rent, who is 8-months-pregnant, said if things weren’t bad enough, officers surrounded her while she was on the ground and joked and made fun of her after she had been tasered.

Well, she should consider herself lucky. According to police authorities and taser international, tasering is all about saving lives. If they didn’t have their tasers they would have had to shoot a fetus and nobody wants that.

I understand that the women behaved disrespectfully toward the police. But this was a parking ticket we’re talking about. I find it very hard to believe that this was the only way to deal with the problem. Is it not possible for the cops to simply issue another ticket and let the legal system deal with it after the fact. Is it really necessary to get full compliance on the spot?

The ironic thing is that this seems to be a replay of the case the Supreme Court declined to hear last week in which the 9th circuit held that officers who tasered a pregnant woman for refusing to sign a traffic ticket used excessive force. Unfortunately, this woman is not in that district and so that ruling won’t apply to her.

Personally, I think the use of “pain compliance” for traffic violations on anyone is barbaric and disgusting. Unless the person is a danger to others, there is no reason not to treat this as a bureaucratic matter for the person to deal with in front of a judge or pay a fine. Escalating it into violence and feeling the need to electro-shock a citizen for parking in a handicapped zone and then acting like a drama queen when she gets ticketed defies common sense. The woman wasn’t a criminal, she was an overwrought citizen. Cops used to know the difference.

(If I were her attorney, I’d file suit for assaulting a fetus. That’s far more likely in this day and age to get a sympathetic reaction. A pregnant woman just doesn’t have much standing in our legal system.)

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“They aren’t fighting the special interests. They’re fighting us.”

by digby

Following up on David’s post below, I think it’s refreshing when Presidential candidates say what they really believe. This comment by Mitt Romney is truly revealing and I appreciate the fact that he said it:

“Obama wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

I think I’ll just ask Ms Peggy Noonan what she thinks about that:

Who were the firemen? The Christian scholar and author Os Guinness said the other night in Manhattan that horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. “The real mystery,” he added, “is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness.” Maybe it’s because of that mystery that firemen themselves usually can’t tell you why they do what they do. “It’s the job,” they say, and it is, and it is more than that.

So: The firemen were rough repositories of grace. They were the goodness that comes out when society is cracked open. They were responsible. They took responsibility under conditions of chaos. They did their job under heavy fire, stood their ground, claimed new ground, moved forward like soldiers against the enemy. They charged.

But, you know, who really needs ’em? After all, only 343 firefighters and and 72 police officers lost their lives on 9/11.

We’ve come a long way since this — and it was only 2 years ago:

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) picked up on that theme today on ABC’s Top Line, calling it a “massive state bailout.” When host Z. Byron Wolf asked what the GOP plan would be to help teachers who are about to lose their jobs — particularly the 3,600 in Indiana, Pence didn’t have much to offer:

PENCE: Well, look I’m married to a school teacher. My wife spent more than a decade in a public school classroom. So I love teachers! Teachers, firefighters, policemen are all Americans and they all know that the economic policies of bailouts and handouts have failed to create jobs.

In 2005, Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special election to dramatically cut funding for teachers, firefighters and nurses. He campaigned by calling them “special interests.” They fought back hard with a series of ads that reminded Americans that he was talking about them and their neighbors. He tanked in the polls, his initiatives were soundly defeated and at the time people wondered if he could win reelection.(He did, of course, but he dropped this plan like a hot potato.)

Here’s one of the ads:

I’ve written about this before, thinking they were very clever and that it would be a good way for the unions to fight back nationally. But maybe we’ve so lost any sense of solidarity that we really just don’t give a damn about anyone but ourselves, even our own neighbors and families.

I honestly don’t know. Romney said what most of his voters believe which is that anyone who gets a government paycheck (other than a soldier) should be fired.

Meanwhile, you’ll be happy to note that some government functions are still sacred:

Members of the House of Representatives voted Friday to protect their own office expense accounts from budget cuts.

The bipartisan 307-102 vote came on a $3.3 billion measure funding congressional operations.

Republicans controlling the House have been trying to cut domestic agency budgets by about 5 percent. But when it came to their own staff, travel and office expenses, GOP leaders opted to freeze their $574 million budget after two years of cuts.

The funding bill includes a 1 percent cut that comes chiefly from cutting back on repairs to the iconic Capitol dome, which dates to the Civil War.

After passing the measure, lawmakers immediately left Washington for a weeklong vacation.

This was a full page ad in the New York Times today:

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The consequences of Wisconsin

by David Atkins

Digby noted earlier that, despite the press and the GOP jumping all over President’s Obama’s “gaffe” this morning that “the private sector is doing fine,” the President is correct that the private sector would be doing much better but for the austerity-fueled anemia of the public sector. Predictably, Obama is walking back his remarks as we speak.

Well, here’s Mitt Romney:

“[Obama] says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers,” he said. “Did he not get the message from Wisconsin? It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

This is what it has come to. Direct attacks on some of the most popular professions in America from a candidate who is explicitly saying he wants to fire teachers and firefighters, while implicitly denying their identity as “American people.”

This, even as the core of the President’s argument that private sector growth has been dragged down by public sector austerity remains entirely accurate.

These are dark times.

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Licking their chops: Capitol hill is drooling over the possibility of exchanging health care for more military spending

by digby

I’ve heard some cynical takes on the health care bill (including this depressing NY Times article about the newly revealed details of the White House deal with Pharma) but I have to say this really takes it to a new level:

Congress could stumble into a big pile of cash from an unlikely source: the Supreme Court.

The justices will deliver their landmark ruling on the 2010 health care law this month, and the government is in line to reap hundreds of billions of dollars in savings — perhaps more than $1 trillion — if certain parts of it are struck down.

That money could be freed up just in time for a battle over whether automatic cuts to the Pentagon and social programs will kick in, and some members of Congress are already dreaming about the possibilities.

“We’re thinking [about] different options, but there are so many variations of what could happen from the court decision, it’s hard to make any hard plans,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). But, he added, a windfall “would be a factor” in discussions about whether to keep in place pending Pentagon cuts.

How much money would they have to spend on killer drones and missile defense? A lot.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the law’s individual mandate would save $282 billion over 10 years, a figure based on 16 million fewer people signing up for health care through Medicaid, new health exchanges and private insurance.

Bill Hoagland, a vice president at the insurance company Cigna and the former top Senate Republican budget aide, says that number would jump to more than $500 billion through 2022 if the mandate and related insurance market reforms, such as the requirement that insurers provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, are struck down. And there’s even more money at stake in the law’s expansion of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which the court reviewed alongside the individual mandate, during oral arguments in March.

If the court throws them all out but keeps revenues in place, the savings could eclipse $1 trillion

And wouldn’t that be fabulous. What a nice simple way to pay for our obscene defense spending: tax people more for health care and give them less! And if they can keep those lazy poor kids and sick people from having health care too we’ll be good to go. Sheer genius.

No one knows what the court will do — it could uphold the law, strike down parts of it or knock down the whole damn thing. If the law is upheld, the budget picture doesn’t change. If it’s struck down in its entirety, deficit projections would most likely go up by $100 billion to $150 billion over 10 years. But it’s the prospect of a partial strike-down that has some folks on Capitol Hill licking their chops…

With respect to how this affects the budget discussions at the end of the year, I think people will take a little bit of a wait and see,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee.

But many wonks have their eyes on the money.

During oral arguments in March, the justices focused in large part on whether the mandate is unconstitutional. The mandate would force consumers to buy insurance or pay a penalty, and it is among the cost drivers for the government. CBO’s estimate of a $282 billion savings from killing the mandate includes $149 billion less in Medicaid costs for the government, $69 billion less in subsidies for Americans who purchase health care through exchanges created by the law and $80 billion in new tax revenue because fewer companies would offer health plans to their employees.

Jon Gruber, the MIT professor who helped devise Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care law and then the federal version, said, “It’s just penny-wise and pound foolish” to eliminate the mandate. “You’re basically saving a little to hurt a lot. You spend three quarters as much to cover half as many people.”

In addition, most experts agree that striking down the mandate but leaving in place insurance industry reforms — like requiring plans to cover people with pre-existing conditions and letting 20-somethings stay on their parents’ insurance — would have disastrous consequences for consumers. The logic: Costs would go up for insurance companies, and the bill would be passed on to consumers.

The court also looked at the constitutionality of the law’s expansion of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which account for $936 billion in government spending through 2022, according to CBO’s latest projections. Some of that overlaps with the money calculated as stemming from the mandate. If both the mandate and the Medicaid and CHIP expansions are struck down, only the provisions designed to pay for the cost of the program remain in effect.

“You really just have a shell of a program on the spending side at that point,” said Jim Capretta, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who was an associate director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget during President George W. Bush’s first term.

Fantastico!

Still, I’m not sure they wouldn’t honestly prefer the whole bill to go down. That would make the projected deficit go way up — and possibly allow for a budgetary bloodbath in the fall the likes of which we haven’t contemplated up to now. And the Dems, as is their wont, would be shellshocked and walk right behind them over the cliff. After all, they could blame the Supreme Court and still be deficit hawks. That’s what they call a real win-win …

But short of that, this is an excellent outcome for the faux deficit mongers. And you have to admit that using health care money to kill people is diabolically brilliant.

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A Teacup Pig’s partisan politics

by digby

This makes a much sense as anything else:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Plus it’s really cute …

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The belt-tightening boomerang

by digby

Fox Nation tweeted that this is Obama’s “greatest gaffe ever”:

We’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the past 27 months. Over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help they’re accustomed to from the federal government.

It is, of course, true. But in political bizarroworld, telling the truth is a gaffe.

Now, it’s hard for me to feel tooo sorry for the president when he gets the “Obama says the private sector is doing fine!” treatment from the press and the Republicans because he was the one talking about “tightening our belts” and freezing government hiring for months, making it sound as though government must slash spending in the middle of a recession. That was a big mistake, not because it changed the policies — the Republicans were hardly going to allow any more stimulus. What it did was create a bipartisan consensus that government should be cut — after all, the president and the Republicans agreed, didn’t they? And now we’re stuck with it.

Still, this is going to be a particularly frustrating brouhaha. Of course the president is right that the private sector is doing ok and it’s government cutting spending that’s causing the depression. But I’m not sure how much it benefits him to point it out at this late date.

Update: Also too — he should have said “doing better” rather than “doing fine” which isn’t the way people feel and sounds odd to the ear. Plus it isn’t actually working up to capacity, so “fine” is more optimistic than it should be.

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Netroots Nation Keynote: The war on women — 12Noon est

Some of 2012′s most exciting races involve strong, progressive women who are leading the national conversation on not only on women’s issues but also things like the economy and LGBT rights.

Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono and Washington’s Darcy Burner are each known for standing up for workers, the middle class and equal opportunity for all. That’s why we’re excited to have the three of them on the big stage at Netroots Nation.

In a Friday lunchtime session moderated by the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel, Warren, Hirono and Burner will address the past year’s growing War on Women and the GOP war on the middle class. They’ll discuss what playing offense looks like for women and how election wins this fall will translate to policy victories in 2013 and beyond.

Making the irrelevant voter relevant

by David Atkins

Never has the need to eliminate the electoral college been more clear:

With so many resources focused on persuading an ever-shrinking pool of swing voters like those here in Nevada, the 2012 election is likely to go down in history as the one in which the most money was spent reaching the fewest people.

Much of the heaviest spending has not been in big cities with large and expensive media markets, but in small and medium-size metropolitan areas in states with little individual weight in the Electoral College: Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in Iowa (6 votes); Colorado Springs and Grand Junction in Colorado (9 votes); Norfolk and Richmond in Virginia (13 votes). Since the beginning of April, four-fifths of the ads that favored or opposed a presidential candidate have been in television markets of modest size.

There are two major problems with this. First and most obvious, this system renders the needs and desires of huge, otherwise important states like Texas and California irrelevant. There is a grand ideological battle being played out in America, and the argument between blue states and red states needs to happen honestly and in the open. When the entire presidential election gets decided on the whims of states like Nevada, Florida and Iowa, perverse things start to happen. The nation adopts bizarre and counterproductive stances on a variety of issues, from Cuba policy to corn and ethanol subsidies. Issues important to big, comfortably partisan states on both sides tend to be ignored.

But perhaps of greater concern is that the acceptable range of political discourse in the country shrinks dramatically. There are a lot of reasons why it’s difficult for progressives to gain traction in America, but one of them assuredly is that any Democratic President cannot afford to adopt major stances that would offend swing voters in places like Ohio or suburban Virginia. Republicans are similarly forced to nominate candidates like McCain and Romney who in no way openly represent the true soul of the modern GOP.

The sort of voters who live in purple states and pay so little attention or are so conflicted that can’t seem to make up their minds whether to cast their vote for tickets as markedly different as Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin in no way represent the real America. Putting the entire fate of the country in their hands is preposterous.

It’s long past time to enact the National Popular Vote and give Americans of all political persuasions wherever they happen to live an equal chance at affecting the direction of presidential politics.

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