Month: June 2012

DREAMing of vote stealing

by digby

Ari Berman reports on the latest election suppression news:

In order to justify new voter suppression laws, GOP operatives are spinning increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about the extent to which the Obama campaign and its allies are trying to hijack the 2012 election. “Stop the corrupt Obama machine from stealing the 2012 elections,” reads the headline of a recent fundraising letter from the conservative legal organization Judicial Watch (see below).

According to Judicial Watch, which led the fight to impeach Clinton, the Obama Administration is “aggressively pursuing plans behind closed doors to enact ‘stealth’ amnesty’ for millions of illegal aliens in a move to curry favor with Hispanic voters and potentially make it easier for illegal aliens to break the law and vote in 2012,” along with “continuing to funnel tax dollars to the corrupt and criminal ACORN.”

Such assertions are easily debunked. There is no “stealth amnesty” program, there is no record of noncitizens intentionally voting in US elections and ACORN no longer exists. Yet such outlandish claims are deeply ingrained in the conservative psyche. A 2009 survey by Public Policy Polling found that “52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”

The purveyors of such discredited arguments, like Judicial Watch, continue to be deeply influential in conservative political circles. Nancy Pelosi recently said that Republicans are going after Attorney General Eric Holder, another frequent Judicial Watch target, as payback for the Justice Department blocking discriminatory voting laws under the Voting Rights Act. “His department’s blatant refusal to enforce federal law requiring states to clean up their inaccurate voter-registration records, combined with DOJ lawsuits against state voter-ID laws, must bring smiles to any ACORN-like groups contemplating electoral mischief this fall,” conservative columnist John Fund wrote recently in National Review.

I was way too early predicting this theme, so I’m not sure it counts as being prescient. But I think the reasoning is still sound. I wrote the following six years ago in the wake of a special election here in California in which the Democratic candidate said that “you don’t need papers to vote” and everyone went into a frenzy. (It wasn’t what she meant, but that doesn’t matter…) Anyway, this has been a long time coming:

As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”

I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”

Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similiar to third world dictatorships.

“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.

That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference…

The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on “criminal” Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us.

And in 2012, that’s pretty much where we are.

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Whistling past the graveyard on climate change and sea level rise

by David Atkins

David Roberts at Grist has more bad news that policymakers will continue to ignore:

The news is not good. The press release struggles to put a positive spin on things by noting that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C “could halve sea-level rise by 2300, compared to a 2-degree scenario.” In their mid-probability scenario for 2 degrees, sea levels rise up to 3 meters (9.8 feet) by 2300. The good news is that 1.5 degrees raises seas only 1.5 meters (5 feet) by 2300!

These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. It will be the rate of sea-level rise, more than sea level itself, that determines how difficult it will be for humans and other species to adapt. So can we slow down or stop the rate of change in sea levels?

It matters a great deal, because small differences in the rate of sea-level rise over the coming century will have huge consequences for total sea-level rise in subsequent centuries. (Once again: the decisions we make in the next few years are very important!)…

So can we ever stop sea levels rising? Er … theoretically. If we limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, Schaeffer et al. project that by 2300 the rate of sea-level rise will decline back to zero — i.e., sea levels will stabilize, albeit more than a meter higher than they are today.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that if we let temperature rise even 2 degrees C, by 2300 sea level will still be rising at a rate of around 8 millimeters a year, lower than its peak rate but still higher than humans have ever experienced.

So that’s the, ahem, good news. The bad news, as anyone who’s read my brutal logic posts knows, is that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C is probably flatly impossible at this point, and limiting to 2 degrees C is, while technically and economically possible, probably politically impossible. We’re currently on a trajectory for as much as 6 degrees…

So, if we f*ck around and allow temperature to rise 4.5 degrees C, by 2300 sea levels could be up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) higher and rising at around 13 mm a year. That will be tons of fun to adapt to for all Earth’s creatures, I’m sure.

Roberts also notes that the next fifty years of sea level rise are guaranteed even if the world dropped emission rates to zero tomorrow.

This is the sort of problem that democracies and free markets are mostly incapable of solving. Politicians who have to come up for reelection every two to four years aren’t good at annoying business interests in order to solve problems that won’t even show up in a significant way for the rest of their lifetimes.

And even in its most ideal form, the logic of “free market solutions” is predicated on companies getting punished by angry consumers if they don’t do the right thing. There are all sorts of things wrong with this approach, of course: if a bunch of people die due to food poisoning, it’s not as if it’s always easy to identify where in the production chain the problem occurred, or which corporations to punish by not buying their product (not to mention the obvious fact that the deaths should have been stopped by regulation and oversight in the first place.) But in its most simplistic form it might work if the impact of corporate malfeasance is immediate.

But how does a “free market solution” work when it comes to carbon emissions? Whom do consumers punish? Whom do consumers reward? On what timescale? By the time the problem is advanced enough to penetrate consumer consciousness, it will have been far, far too late for the market to change organically.

And that’s, as I’ve said before, why climate change is such a threat to the conservative enterprise. It’s not just that big energy interests would be impacted. It’s that the entire conservative model of problem solving would be rendered obsolete if the realities of climate change were accepted in our public discourse.

So absent some sort of organizational metamorphosis for human societies, business interests will continue to divide nation states against one another as politicians in the major industrialized democracies dawdle and pretend the problem will go away.

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He is his own cat

by digby

Henri the existential cat goes to le Vet

merde…

He’s taking the government back

by digby

Looks like it’s Rand week in the US Senate. From HuffPostHill:

Running in tomorrow’s Roll Call from Emma Dumain: “Sen. Rand Paul may upset a bill to give Washington, D.C., autonomy over its budget. The Kentucky Republican plans to offer amendments during tomorrow’s markup that would loosen the city’s gun restrictions. If they are adopted by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee’s conservative-leaning membership, that would threaten floor consideration of the bill, which Sen. Joe Lieberman wants to keep “clean.” “We are deeply offended by Sen. Paul’s stunning hypocrisy,” Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, said. “Congress has the power to do things around the country and Paul has repeatedly stated he’s against government taking those steps except clearly now in the District of Columbia.”

Oh my goodness. Rand is such a busy boy these days. Inserting fetal personhood into flood bills and gun bills into local budgets. Why you’d almost begin to believe that he has a “message from the Tea Party” that he’s “come to take the government back.” He’s just doing what he promised.

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The one fact that refutes economic conservatism

David Atkins

This alone, in cartoon form, should be enough to to demolish the entire foundation of economic conservatism:

Every reason we are told that austerity is needed, that people must suffer, that the rich must get richer and that policies must be more “pro-business” is predicated on a hypercompetitive world in which American corporations must force the government and their employees to make sacrifices in order to stay competitive.

Record corporate profits and record executive pay disprove that notion entirely, and with it the entire conservative economic argument.

That more Democrats don’t cite this more often is proof of the capture of our electoral system by corporate interests.

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Priorities

by digby

This is happening:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) moved this week to hold a noncontroversial flood insurance bill hostage until the Senate agrees that life begins at fertilization.

The bill, which would financially boost the National Flood Insurance Program on the cusp of hurricane season, had been expected to pass easily in the Senate. But since Paul on Monday offered an unrelated “fetal personhood” amendment, which would give legal protections to fetuses from the moment of fertilization, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is threatening to halt progress on the legislation…

The highly controversial concept of fetal personhood raised by Paul’s amendment could affect the legality of abortion, some forms of birth control, stem cell research and in vitro fertilization. His office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Luckily Harry Reid told him to go piss up a rope. But this is just ridiculous.

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QOTD: Will Wilkinson

How many floggings does it take to expect the Spanish Inquisition?

I have already been ungracious enough about this with my annoying “I told you sos” but, honestly, this is just depressing at this point. Yes, the Democrats should have expected a monumental GOP push back against health care reform. Why? Because of this, from Bill Kristol in 1993:

“Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton… and for the Democratic Party.” So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president’s strategist and pollster. If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right. Because the initiative’s inevitably destructive effect on American medical services will not be practically apparent for several years–no Carter-like gas lines, in other words–its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse–much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

They understand very clearly what’s at stake for them. And they have built a very efficient infrastructure to ensure that their goals are met and liberals’ aren’t. It’s that simple.

Anyway, as we wait for the Supremes to issue their ruling, here’s an excellent piece of advice from Rich Yeselson about next steps:

In their understandable haste to pass some kind of universal health care law, however imperfect, liberals, Democrats, and President Obama himself missed the fundamental first step: They failed to clinch the moral argument that — unlike iPads or Toyotas — health insurance is a right, an essential element for both physical health and economic well-being.

Now even if the Supreme Court sustains some or all of the law, conservatives at the federal and state level will do everything they can to delay and disrupt it — at least until the moral argument is as unassailable as stop signs on our streets.
[…]
So the moral issue must be joined in the most aggressive fashion possible. Not so much by showing empathy for the uninsured—liberals are always wonderful at showing empathy. No, by belligerently challenging conservative pundits and Republican politicians at every opportunity, reminding them how lucky they are to have health care themselves…Progressives must keep reminding conservatives, “You’ve got health insurance—do you really think you’re somehow entitled to it, yet others aren’t? For shame.”

I have my doubts about the ability to shame the modern conservatives. After all, they weren’t too upset to see people cheering and shouting “yeah!” at a presidential debate when Wolf Blitzer asked if Ron Paul’s plan was to “let them die.” But what the hell, maybe they still have a shred of decency about this sort of thing that can be activated.

But I am not letting the Democrats and the president off the hook so easily. Health care reform was in the works for decades. Universality was always the assumed goal of comprehensive health care reform until the political decision was made to make it about cost. That wasn’t done on the fly, it was a conscious choice to back away from the moral argument in favor of a technocratic financial argument. At no time did they even try to pass real universal health care.

Now, I understand why they did it. The Republicans, after all, had been going along with a privatized health care solution based on those technocratic reasons until the day the Democrats looked like they might actually pass it. But without the moral argument, there was just not much to hold thing thing together, once the conservatives went their way (as anyone should have expected.)

Throughout the health care process I was arguing for the principle of universality. Way back when I wrote:

I never understood why universal coverage wasn’t the explicit goal of health care reform and the principle on which the whole thing rested. But it wasn’t. (Even the reform as finally passed fell quite a bit short, although it wasn’t bad.) The goals were fairness and cost savings, which isn’t quite the same thing, so the government funded portion of the bill was always the most vulnerable. I’ve always been skeptical that those provisions would be safe. And now that we are joining the global austerity crusade, I expect there will be tremendous pressure to starve this program or at the very least delay the implementation. Certainly the Republicans will do away with it the minute they get the chance. They can always be counted upon to stick it to poor people.

Undocumented workers are already out and if the funding for Medicaid is whittled away — as is happening right now — you wind up with the ACA covering less than half the currently uninsured.

The ACA was, even when fully implemented, not guaranteed universal health care (which is why I was always so irritated with the ecstatic victory dances implying it was.)There are many ways to get there, but what we should care about is that it is simple,seamless, universal and can’t be taken away. That is, after all, what we believe in, right?

Update: In fact, if the Supremes strike down the law altogether, I’d go further and come out swinging with this. What the hell? Might as well stake out a real left position this time instead of an insider strategy. It didn’t serve us well.

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Blue America chat: Aryanna Stryder

by digby

You all recall the anti-choice zealot Bart Stupak, I assume. What you may not recall is that his famous amendment to pretty much ban abortion coverage in health care policies had a Republican co-sponsor by the name of Joe Pitts. And he’s actually far worse than Stupak ever was.

Blue America is hosting an online chat at 11 PDT over at Crooks and Liars with his progressive candidate Aryanna Stryder who’s challenging him in Pennsylvania’s redrawn 16th congressional district.

Politics PA wrote about Blue America and the race today:

Blue America founder Howie Klein called Strader one of the most positive and energetic congressional candidates he’s seen running this year anywhere in the country.

“The Pennsylvania legislature made the 16th district more open to an independent-minded populist like Aryanna than it has been in the past,” he said. “If she can get her message out, she’ll have a very good chance of beating Joe Pitts the same way Matt Cartwright beat Tim Holden in the 17th. And like Matt, Aryanna is part of the next generation of dynamic, progressive leadership the country is looking for.”

Strader, 30, is U.S. Army veteran, small businesswoman and mother of two.

Blue America PAC says of itself that it, “doesn’t work in safe districts where our help isn’t needed. We look for tough races where a little encouragement, some financial help and some advice could go a long way, especially with candidates unlikely to get much help for the DCCC or the DSCC.”

And indeed, Strader will have to work hard to prove that she’s a competitive candidate – including any financial help the PAC could bring. Open Secrets, a nonprofit research group that records the use and effect of money in U.S. politics, observes that Joe Pitts has raised $793,081 so far this 2011-2012 cycle, 78 percent of it ($616,085) from PACs. Strader struggles behind with only $50,286 so far. 2 percent of her funding, a mere $1,000, has been from PACs.

She has the difficulty of being a candidate running in a district historically unfriendly to her party: the newly drawn 16th district has voted Republican 56 percent of the time on average.

However, there is hope for the Democrats; in 2008 Obama won the district 50.2 percent to 49 percent. Further fueling Democrats’ hope, as Blue America posted on Facebook Monday, Strader’s district is “newly redistricted and distinctly less red.”

In order to get the cash she needs to realize the Democrat’s hope, Strader first has to get others to see it. Strader and Blue America’s goal is to make potential donors view her campaign as viable. No matter how much they’d like to see her succeed, donors won’t risk their money unless they think there’s a good chance of returns.

Strader may find support in the many progressive activists across the country who oppose Pitts for his strong – and vocal – pro-life legislation. MOMocrats call Pitts “virulent, anti-choice”, and Blue America describes him as a “obsessed anti-Choice fanatic”.

Meanwhile, Pitts spokesman Gabe Neville sees the PAC’s endorsement as a detraction to Strader’s campaign and criticized Blue America.

“This will raise Strader a few dollars, but it will also cost her votes. ‘Blue America’ is so left-wing it brags about attacking even thoughtful Democrats like our neighbor Congressman Tim Holden,” he said.

“In their statements, Aryanna Strader and ‘Blue America’ repeatedly express their desire to fight about abortion, but not once do either of them use the words ‘jobs’ or ‘unemployment.’ That speaks volumes about how out of touch they are. Joe Pitts, on the other hand, is actively focused on creating jobs and reviving our economy through smarter government, new markets, cheaper energy, sustainable budgets, and stable tax rates.”

He also knocked her residency, noting that she moved to Chester County in July 2011 and doesn’t actually reside within the newly drawn 16th.

And though the district is less Republican after the redraw, it has only gone from a Cook PVI of R+8 down to R+6. For example, Lois Herr ran in the previously drawn district in 2010, 2006 and 2004. She lost by margins outside a slight change in PVI (30.8 percent, 17 percent and 29.9 percent, respectively).

Tuesday at 2pm EST Strader will live-blog with Blue America members at CrooksandLiars.com for an hour. Blue America is also asking for contributions to Strader’s campaign through a public Act Blue page, and notes that the PAC’s average contribution falls around $45.

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“Bad Spirit” invited to the Vatican

by digby

So the Catholic hierarchy decided it needs some professional PR help, what with all the bad press it’s had what with the pedophilia, nun-hating and other throwback policies and the like. Adele Stan reports that they’ve decided to hire a professional:

This weekend the Vatican announced its hire of Fox News correspondent Greg Burke for the newly created role of communications strategist…

Burke’s authoritarian bona fides hardly end with Fox News. He’s also a member of Opus Dei, the secretive, misogynist, elitist Catholic cult embraced by the late Pope John Paul II. And he’s not just a member, he’s a special member — a “numerary,” a position described by the Religion News Service as “a celibate layman who lives at an Opus Dei center…” The Opus Dei domicile at which Burke resides is in Rome.

Both men and women can bear the title of numeracy, but men enjoy a privileged position in their sex-segregated housing, where they are served by the women. A 1995 article in the Jesuit magazine, America, described the life of the female Opus Dei numerary this way:

According to two former numeraries, women numeraries are required to clean the men’s centers and cook for them. When the women arrive to clean, they explained, the men vacate so as not to come in contact with the women. I asked Bill Schmitt if women had a problem with this. “No. Not at all.” It is a paid work of the “family” of Opus Dei and is seen as an apostolate. The women more often than not hire others to do the cooking and cleaning. “They like doing it. It’s not forced on them. It’s one thing that’s open to them if they want to do it. They don’t have to do it.”

“That’s totally wrong,” said [former numerary] Ann Schweninger when she heard that last statement. “I had no choice. When in Opus Dei you’re asked, you’re being told.” According to Ms. Schweninger, it is “bad spirit” to refuse. Women are told that it is important to have a love for things of the home and domestic duties. “And since that’s part of the spirit of Opus Dei, to refuse to do that when you’re asked is bad spirit. So nobody refuses.”

It’s hard to imagine Greg Burke finding a way to sell that mentality to the media as a good thing — never mind the fact that Opus Dei members are devoted to “mortification of the flesh” by wearing cilices, metal chains with spikey prongs that the wearer fastens tightly to the thigh, prongs to flesh.

This is the really funny part. You’ll recall that I wrote last week about the high level cardinal who said that everyone was believing in Dan Brown conspiracy theories (which were the work of the Devil)?

With an apparent lack of self-awareness, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone “accused the media of trying ‘to imitate Dan Brown’ in their coverage of the VatiLeaks scandal,” according to Reuters. In Brown’s conspiracy thriller, The DaVinci Code, Opus Dei is a major player in a Vatican conspiracy. In hiring Burke, it’s almost as if the Vatican was looking to feed the fantastic conspiracies of Brown and his fellow travelers. You could call that an epic PR fail.

I always thought that Dan Brown stuff was nuts. But maybe not …

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Republicans love Obamacare

by David Atkins

Greg Sargent has a cheeky and dismaying post about the Affordable Care Act over at The Plum Line:

What’s particularly interesting about this poll is that solid majorities of Republicans favor most of the law’s main provisions, too.

I asked Ipsos to send over a partisan breakdown of the data. Key points:

* Eighty percent of Republicans favor “creating an insurance pool where small businesses and uninsured have access to insurance exchanges to take advantage of large group pricing benefits.” That’s backed by 75 percent of independents.

* Fifty-seven percent of Republicans support “providing subsidies on a sliding scale to aid individuals and families who cannot afford health insurance.” That’s backed by 67 percent of independents.

* Fifty-four percent of Republicans favor “requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance for their employers.” That’s backed by 75 percent of independents.

* Fifty two percent of Republicans favor “allowing children to stay on parents insurance until age 26.” That’s backed by 69 percent of independents.

* Seventy eight percent of Republicans support “banning insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions; 86 percent of Republicans favor “banning insurance companies from cancelling policies because a person becomes ill.” Those are backed by 82 percent of independents and 87 percent of independents.

* One provision that isn’t backed by a majority of Republicans: The one “expanding Medicaid to families with incomes less than $30,000 per year.”

“Most Republicans want to have good health coverage,” Ipsos research director Chris Jackson tells me. “They just don’t necessarily like what it is Obama is doing.”

The other thing Republicans don’t like is the mandate, of course. Not that Tea Partiers in California are in mass revolt over every driver in the state being required to have car insurance.

Basically, Republicans are uninformed, angry people who would totally like most of what’s in the Affordable Care Act, except for the fact that Democrats passed it. So I guess the 2010 election was a mandate…for something or other.

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