Month: July 2012

New Blue America campaign against GOP dirtbags

by digby

Howie explains it here:

Blue America took off after 8 GOP dirtbags right after Boehner’s 31st pointless House vote to repeal health care reform. We launched a Facebook campaign targeting 18-26 year olds who live in districts represented by Paul Ryan (WI-1), Tom Reed (NY-23), Frank Guinta (NH-1) Charlie Bass (NH-2), Sandy Adams and John Mica (both in FL-7), Buck McKeon (CA-25) and nasty little Patrick McHenry (NC-10).

All 8 of them voted (again) to repeal– with no plans whatsoever to replace– the Affordable Care Act. That would immediately throw every 18-26 year old off their parents’ health insurance plan, something that the vast majority of Democrats, independents and even Republicans think is a grave mistake. But all 8 of these congressmembers are blind ideologues who walk in lockstep with the GOP’s obstructionist and ruthlessly partisan leadership, Boehner and Cantor.

All 8 also have progressive opponents who want to help fix what’s wrong with the ACA– while keeping all the good stuff (like students getting to stay on their parents’ plans and like Big Insurance not being allowed to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.) Wednesday we talk about a plan by McKeon’s opponent, Dr. Lee Rogers, who has come up with some simple, straightforward fixes to the ACA that should be able to get support from both parties.

The ad campaign is simple too. All Facebook users in the offending Republicans’ districts will have an opportunity to click on a button that takes them to a Facebook page that urges them to register to vote (and makes it easy to do) and to flunk out their congressman on November 6th.

Click over to Howie’s site for more info. And as he says:

$5 or $10 goes a surprisingly long way on Facebook. Help Blue America flunk out these reactionary jerks here on a special ActBlue page for dirtbags.

Well if a Democrat says it …

by digby

Here’s a blockbuster that pretty much closes the book on the Romney Bain story:

[I]s there anything other than the SEC filings to suggest a hands-on Romney role at Bain post-February 1999?No is the word from four sources who communicated with CNN on Thursday — all of whom have firsthand knowledge of Bain’s operations at the time in question. Three of the four are Democrats, and two of the four are active Obama supporters in Campaign 2012.

Only one, Bain Managing Director Steve Pagliuca, would talk on the record. The others spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing either Bain’s low-key culture or the desire not to anger friends in the Obama campaign.

Pagliuca, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2010, told CNN: “Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to run the Olympics and has had absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies since the day of his departure.”

Well that tears it. Four Democrats and Obama supporter have spoken. Why on earth would they step forward if it weren’t true?

Yeah, right.

In fairness, John King (who wrote this piece) does admit in paragraph 17:

To be clear, all four of the sources voiced professional loyalty and personal respect for Romney. And all four have a vested interest in defending the work of Bain. But they were consistent in describing Romney’s departure as abrupt and in saying they could not recall him around the office in the months that followed.

Call me crazy but I don’t think the “consistency” of their accounts is all that meaningful in this case. There has been a teensy bit of discussion about all this in the news. I’d guess there might be some whispers at the Bain water cooler too.

Look, there’s good reason to wonder about this. Mitt filed reports with the SEC as sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president long after he had supposedly “retired” or “taken a leave of absence” or whatever it was. Whether he showed up at the office every day doesn’t really matter, the company was still legally his. And therefore, whatever happened at that company he was still legally responsible for.

Look at it this way, guys like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling also tried to say they didn’t know what was going on and Enron and couldn’t be held responsible for details. The law disagreed. That’s not to say that Bain did anything illegal during that period, but the underlying principle is the same. If your name is on the legal paperwork, you’re responsible.

It would be interesting to know what job title Mitt put on this income tax returns those years but he won’t release them. Maybe that’s part of the reason why.

h/t conservativeslayer in comments

Rasmussen: taxing the wealthy remains popular as always

by David Atkins

Not that it’s any surprise, but the confirmation from even a laughably biased conservative pollster is nice:

Most voters favor temporarily extending the so-called Bush tax cuts for those who earn less than $250,000 a year but are less enthusiastic about continuing those tax cuts permanently for all Americans.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely U.S. Voters agree with President Obama’s plan to extend the tax cuts for a year for those who make less than $250,000 annually. Just 20% oppose this temporary extension, and 13% are undecided.

Without a subscription, the House of Ras won’t say publicly won’t say publicly what the numbers are like for keeping the Bush tax cuts for millionaires. Something tells me that’s not an accident, particularly in light of this:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% of Adults nationwide believe most wealthy people in this country pay less than their fair share in taxes. One in four (25%) believe wealthy Americans generally do pay their fair share, while 13% think they pay more than their fair share.

Again, that’s Rasmussen, whose polling has a heavy GOP skew.

Liberals often decry the American public as too ill-informed to make good choices, and the establishment left as too incompetent at framing issues. But oftentimes it’s not that we’re losing the argument. On this subject, we’ve won the argument. It’s simply that the government for a variety of reasons isn’t responsive to the wishes of the public.

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Crude and simplistic pony building

by digby

Like Atrios, I find this column by Jeffrey Sachs to pretty much be condescending gibberish about pony building. It would seem that nobody, especially Paul Krugman, is being properly serious about the economy because he’s relying on musty old Keynesianism when what we need are Big New … somethings. It goes like this:

Blah, blah, blah, we are in the age of the Anthropocene blah, blah …we need a long-term financial outlook and new approaches to pensions and healthcare delivery blah blah blah …well-designed public investments (eg in infrastructure) can unlock significant private investments as well blah, blah …new economic strategies to overhaul broken systems of finance, labour markets, taxation, ecological management, budget management and investment incentives blah, blah …long-term, structural, sensitive to inequalities of skills and education blah, blah blah…

Nothing controversial there, of course (although there’s quite a bit about the debt, so not altogether true) but none of it addresses the current crisis, which is what the allegedly “crude” and simple-minded Keynesians are trying to do.

As Atrios says:

Keynesian demand management really just says there are times when things won’t right themselves automatically in a timely fashion, that government should step in to boost demand. It isn’t about stealing from the rich to buy Cadillacs for strapping young bucks, or just how many SUPERTRAINS should be built, it just says there are times when the government, using fiscal and/or monetary policy, can actually improve the economy by boosting demand. That this is even controversial is mindboggling.

But I think Sachs is really saying that we should throw out all those old ideas because everything’s different now! Why, back in the 30s they didn’t even have cell phones!

It reminds me of this old Joe Klein chestnut from a few years back:

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

I’ve never been sure what he thought he was babbling about but whatever it was, I think the problem was fixed by offering direct deposit.

This idea that because the world is different today means that we have to reinvent the wheel is daft. Yes, there are new problems to be solved. But old problems often reassert themselves and if we have the answer it’s “crude and simplistic” to pretend that it won’t work just because it was discovered long ago. Lord help us if all the other sciences decide to follow this route.

Update: Krugman responds. The last line is a classic.

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South Carolina has better things to spend its money on than people

by digby

South Carolina’s director of Health and Human Services explains why South Carolina isn’t going to accept the Medicaid expansion:

I’m afraid that many of those concerned with social justice have been bamboozled by the idea that health = health services = health insurance promoted by those who politically or financially benefit from continual increases in health care spending. It is not such a straightforward equation. The social determinants of health model suggests that somewhere between 80-90% of health and well-being of individuals and their communities are driven by factors such as income, education, race, social support systems, genetics, personal choices and environmental conditions. Health services make up the remaining balance.

Yet in last year’s Institute of Medicine roundtable summary, “The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes,” participants lamented that out-of-control health care spending is destabilizing the health care system, depressing growth in national wages and employment, and forcing states to divert money from other important programs such as education. Thus we have a vicious cycle where out-of-control spending on the 10-20% displaces potentially more effective spending on the 80-90%.

So there are valid arguments for why this expansion decision should ultimately rest with the states. For one, the Court determined it was unconstitutional otherwise. But just as importantly, because states are different. South Carolina is not Massachusetts or Vermont no matter how desperately the think tank crowd would want it to be. We have wildly different rates of poverty, educational attainment, racial mix and economic bases which are the primary drivers of health. Massachusetts was 93% insured prior to their reforms because of their wealth; they weren’t wealthy because they were 93% insured.

I think it’s fair for South Carolina and other states to want to debate catching-up on much needed investments and policy to increase per capita income and education levels before setting in concrete that health care services are the number one spending priority. And in South Carolina we are doing a pretty good job when you look at our recent economic wins – Boeing, GE, BMW, Bridgestone, and Google to name a few.

Let me translate that for you: South Carolina has a lot of poor blacks and we don’t think we should be spending any more money on them when we have companies like Boeing and GE who want to come here so they don’t have to pay taxes and they can lots of cheap labor. These corporations are unlikely to be hiring a lot of poor blacks but we can’t be worried about all that because the real problem is that these unhealthy people are are stupid, poor, undisciplined and live in filth so it’s really nobody’s fault but their own. Plus, we are exceptional.

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Riddle Me This

by tristero

BP during the oil spill was more popular. More Americans prefer that the US go communist. Lawyers and Hugo Chavez are more popular, and so was Nixon during Watergate!

Can you guess what it is? No? Click here. Then read all of Ezra Klein’s amazing piece.

Catholics bringing sexy back

Our glorious drug war

by David Atkins

Via the ACLU:

Texans can sleep more soundly at night knowing that Elisa Castillo, a grandmother and nonviolent first-time drug offender, is serving a life without parole sentence in Fort Worth. Yes, you read that right — the latest casualty of our War on Drugs is a grandmother who never even touched the drugs that sent her to prison. Though she may not look like public enemy No. 1, our persistently illogical criminal justice system has determined that this harsh punishment fits her crime. The truth, though, is that her fate was sealed, in large part because she didn’t have a card to play when negotiating her sentence.

Convicted in a drug-smuggling conspiracy, 56-year-old Castillo maintains that she didn’t know she was being used as a pawn in a cocaine trafficking operation between Mexico and Houston. Given her alleged role as a low-level player in the conspiracy, it makes sense that she was not privy to — and therefore could not provide — any valuable information to federal agents that could lead to the arrest and prosecution of the leaders or other high level members of the alleged conspiracy. Since she was of no help to the government, Castillo received the harshest sentence of the approximately 68 people involved in the scheme, despite being a first-time offender who never saw the drugs she was accused of trafficking.

It is well known that state and federal sentencing schemes allow for reduced punishment when offenders are able to provide information that leads to the prosecution of others. As former federal prosecutor Mark W. White III explained, “Information is a cooperating defendant’s stock in trade, and if you don’t have any…the chances are you won’t get a good deal.” But at what cost are these bargains made? There are clear incentives for law enforcement officials to seek information from criminal suspects when possible. But this system of trading information for reduced time often means that those at the bottom of the chain end up suffering consequences that are disproportionate to their crimes. As such, Castillo was effectively left to die in prison because of what she did not know.

Even if she did know what was going on, life in prison for a grandmotherly first-time offender who never touched the drugs and wasn’t any sort of criminal mastermind is insane. It’s the mark of a sick, twisted society.

Buy hey, look on the bright side: at least in prison she’ll be guaranteed access to healthcare, unlike many “free” people in Texas who happen to be poor.

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Can they possibly all be held accountable?

by digby

This Freeh report (pdf) on the Penn State pedophile scandal is brutal. I wonder how many more of our revered institutions will one day be characterized in this way:

The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims. . . .

Seriously, how many of these have we heard about the Catholic Church over the past few years. WTH?

I can’t say it any better than Peterr at FDL says it here:

In the days ahead, hands will be wrung and chests will be beaten. But if you’re looking for signs of a culture that lacks accountability, watch and listen for the widespread and abundant use of the passive voice. “Mistakes were made. . . . Policies were not followed . . . ” Yes, mistakes were made — and they were made by real people. Yes, policies were not followed — they were not followed by real people. Unless and until the climate of non-accountability disappears, abusers will continue their abusive ways.

Child abusers will do it, and the price will be paid by children, their families, and their communities.

Unscrupulous mine owners will do it, and the price will be paid by their workers, their families, and their communities.

Mortgage and financial industry abusers will do it, and the price will be paid by homeowners, their families, their communities, as well as investors and the broader economy as a whole.

The energy industry will do it, as will the health insurance industry, the military, and anyone else who puts protecting their own power ahead of doing what’s right. The MOTUs of all stripes will continue in their ways, unless and until accountability comes raining in on their parades.

Bill Black regularly bemoans “regulatory capture,” by which he means that the ostensible overseers have become the partners and servants of those they are supposed to be watching over. Penn State is learning the hard way about what happens when accountability returns home after a long absence. Good.

Now if only the SEC, the Fed, the DOJ, the bishops and cardinals of Roman Catholic church, and others in authority would learn that same lesson, because there’s an urgent need for climate change when it comes to accountability that stretches well beyond University Park, Pennsylvania.

I’m honestly not sure if “accountability” is the way to think about this. Look at the Catholic hierarchy. Are they humbled? I don’t think so. Did Enron teach anyone anything? It doesn’tlook like it. Abramoff et al? This goes deeper than just getting away with it and having to be brought to account. That doesn’t seem to matter all that much in the greater scheme of things.

The Village media now permanently lives in bizarroworld

by digby

I have been taking a little break from cable news the last few weeks and tuned in today to see it’s even worse than usual. This segment between Andrea Mitchell and Steven Rattner captures the ongoing state of decay. The first three minutes are unremarkable twaddle about Romney and Bain but at about 3:30, Mitchell hits her stride:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here we have it:

Mitchell: I want to ask you about the fiscal cliff and what we face because you have been such a persuasive proponenet of doing something and taking a tough decision.

This is a conversation between some players you know very well, Warren Buffet and Simpson and Bowles on “Squawk Box.”

Buffet: The US economy is doing better than virtually any other large economy in the world. The US has come back a long way, with the exception of housing, from where it was a few years ago.[cut] I still think housing should come back significantly to move us generally upward.
[cut]
Bowles: I think if I had to take the probability, I’d say the chances are we’re going over the fiscal cliff.

Host: And why do you think the odds are that we do go over the fiscal cliff?

Bowles: Because it’s politically painful

Simpson: You’ll get beat..

Buffet: It’s not going to get less painful in the future..[end video]

Mitchell: This of course at Herb Allen’s annual retreat, the summer camp for rich people, I think.

Rattner: and moguls

Mitchell: Let’s talk about this.. there’s no indication from either camp that anybody wants to speak truth to the American people in this campaign.

We’re arguing about Bain Capital! We’re arguing about a lot of other things which are big issues. But what about what we’re about to face in the fall after the election?

Rattner: Well you’re right. The solutions to the fiscal cliff are painful and they involve sacrifice on all sides so it’s not surprising that when you’re running a political campaign it isn’t your first choice to deal with a very substative policy.

Mitchell: Walter Mondale proved that in 1984…

Rattner: Walter Mondale on the tax issue. But the fact is this deadline is coming. I’m not quite as pessimistic as Erskine is because it’s so insane to go over the fiscal cliff that I have to believe that at the end of the day people will somehow avoid that.

But what’s starting to happen, you’re starting to see in the markets, I think, nervousness about this. People are starting to focus on it. There’s something called the fear index, there are some other indices around that are suggesting now that this is something now that is getting through to the investor community that we have a problem.

Mitchell: And just one other point. There is some conversation on the Hill. There was a Politico story yesterday that McCain, Lindsay Graham, and other big players, John Kerry, are talking about taxes.

Rattner: I think there are a lot of conversations going on on the Hill among the responsible poeple, including the people you just mentioned, who recognize that going over the cliff is crazy. But it’s kind of like a little foreplay, I don’t think they’re down to anything seroius. But the other thing is that the special interests like the defense industry are starting to use thier muscle to get what they want out of this so I tihnk the games have begun.

He also said this:

“Imagine if you’re sitting in France or Germany or London and see us fooling around with the debt limit and say, ‘We may not want to let the government borrow another penny,'” said Steven Rattner, an investment banker who headed Treasury’s auto industry task force. “There’s going to be a lot of market dislocation, a lot of volatility and lot of worrying.”

Oh wait. That was last year, during “Armageddon.” How did his prediction hold up anyway?

Right.

But let’s look at the whole discussion. First, Mitchell superciliously asserts that the campaigns are refusing to be “honest with the American people” about the painful sacrifices “we” are going to be required to make. (We’re talking about that silly Bain capital when we should be pimping Social Security and Medicare cuts 24/7!) This is one of her (and Luke Russert’s) favorite tropes. Since she is a multi-millionaire TV celebrity I have a hard time imagining that having her social security slashed or having a slightly higher tax rate is going to have much impact on her financial security. But hey, it’s the thought that counts.

Then we have these multi-millionaires — one a Wall Street master of the universe himself, the other married to the Oracle of Greenspan, implying they aren’t part of the Herb Allen financial elite that includes the likes of Buffet, Bowles and Simpson, which is fatuous in the extreme.

Finally, there’s the whole notion that this fiscal cliff is anything more than yet another artificial, arbitrary self-imposed deadline that can easily become yet another artificial, arbitrary, self-imposed deadline. The good news is that these people have cried wolf so often on this debt nonsense that nobody’s listening anymore.

We have a weak economy with high unemployment. The rest of the world is shaky. Now is not the time to be asking for more “sacrifice” from the American people in order to solve a problem that is not urgently important. How do we know it’s not urgently important? This:

The Financial Times reports that there was record demand for 10-year Treasurys this week. “The $21 [billion] sale of 10-year paper sold at a yield of 1.459 per cent, the lowest ever in an auction.” William O’Donnell, a strategist at RBS Securities, told the FT that “we were expecting good auction results but this one has left me speechless.”

Remember: Low yields means we’re getting the money for a cheap. It means the market thinks we’re a safe bet. And it means we have the opportunity to get capital for almost nothing and invest it productively…

The market will literally pay us a small premium to take their money and keep it safe for them for five, seven or 10 years. We could use that money to rebuild our roads and water filtration systems. We could use that money to cut taxes for any business that adds to its payrolls. We could use that to hire back the 600,000 state and local workers we’ve laid off in the last few years.

Or, as Larry Summers has written, we could simply accelerate payments we know we’ll need to make anyway. We could move up maintenance projects, replace our military equipment or buy space we’re currently leasing. All of that would leave the government in a better fiscal position going forward, not to mention help the economy.

The fact that we’re not doing any of this isn’t just a lost opportunity. It’s financial mismanagement on an epic scale.

That’s Ezra Klein saying that, by the way, not some lefty radical.

Mitchell wasn’t wrong when she said the campaigns weren’t being honest with the American people. That’s true, they aren’t. But then neither is she. And frankly, the campaigns aren’t as bad as these Villagers are by ginning up a phony crisis in order to slash the safety net at a time when the nation should be borrowing cheaply and spending more. It’s oppositeland.

But there’s no reason to think they won’t flog this horse as much as they can and no guarantee that the politicians won’t respond and make some reprehensible deal to close a couple of loopholes in exchange for deep cuts to the safety net. That seems to be the working assumption. They’ve put a lot of energy into creating this phony crisis. They are very reluctant to let it go until they have what they want.

And by the way — letting the tax cuts for those over 250k expire in exchange for cuts for average people isn’t adequate either. No cuts. They’re not necessary at the moment. Put people back to work, then we’ll talk.

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