Month: November 2012

Nice little right you have there …

by digby

Sure, you’ve got a constitutional right to abortion. But nobody’s guaranteeing you access to it:

Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi — has been fighting to remain open after Republican legislators, aiming to force the clinic to close, passed a restrictive regulation requiring its doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges. A Bush-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the measure in July to give the clinic’s doctors more time to apply for privileges at area hospitals, but that order expires in early January. And so far, all seven hospitals in the area have denied privileges to the doctors.

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a motion Wednesday asking a judge to stop the law from being implemented — and forcing the clinic to stop providing abortion care — before January 6, 2013. If it closes, women in Mississippi will no longer have access to abortion in the state.

This was the way it went back in Jim Crow, too. “Sure, you have civil rights in theory. But we don’t have to enforce them.” But then states have more rights than individuals do in our country so I suppose that’s just the way it goes.

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What’s still on the table in the Grand Bargain talks?

by digby

Not that anyone cares, but it seems that a vast majority of the American public think raising the Medicare eligibility age is stupid:

Greg Sargent talks about this issue in depth in this post. He says that the Republicans are refusing to name their demands on “entitlement” cuts, instead saying that the Democrats must first say what they are willing to give. That’s very cute, but it doesn’t really work that way and they know it. If the Democrats are dumb enough to do that then we are all screwed.

But don’t be surprised if they do. Greg reports that Democrats are not entertaining doing this at all but I’m sorry to say that’s just not true. On raising the medicare eligibility age, there have been some powerful Dems out there endorsing it:

Kent Conrad and Chris Van Hollen have both said it. Recently. This is from November 15, 2012

Conrad:  I wouldn’t want that to be the starting point, but as part of an overall package, that’s balanced and fair. Given that we now have exchanges to purchase insurance because of the president’s health-care reform law, it makes it much more acceptable, much more reasonable, over a long period of time to gradually increase the age given that people are living so much longer. 

This is definitely on the menu. It’s not just lame duck deficit hawks:

On Capitol Hill, it isn’t clear how strenuously Democrats will resist cutting entitlements. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) said he and others were open to changes as long as they were done in a measured way and were part of deal that included tax increases. Mr. Van Hollen also said changing Social Security and increasing the Medicare eligibility age above 65 should be part of negotiations. 

“I’m willing to consider all of these ideas as part of an overall plan,” Mr. Van Hollen said Tuesday at the Journal’s CEO Council. 

White House officials in 2011 were in advanced talks with Mr. Boehner that would have agreed to some of these changes, notably raising Medicare’s eligibility age. That is one cause of liberals’ anxiety about how the coming talks may unfold.

Indeed. Until the administration takes that off the table, I think we would be wise to be concerned about it. After all, this didn’t come out of the blue:

In what may be one of the most under-reported stories of the debt ceiling talks, Politico’s Jen Haberkorn notes that before negotiations broke down on Friday evening, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner tentatively agreed to gradually raise the Medicare eligibility age as part of a “grand bargain” to increase the nation’s borrowing limit:

Details of the plan were not yet finalized before the Obama-Boehner talks collapsed on Friday. But in general, the agreement called for very gradually increasing the eligibility age from 65 to 67 over about two decades, according to administration and Republican congressional sources.

One pathway would call for increasing the age by one month per year beginning in 2017 until it reached 66 in 2029. In 2030, it would increase two months per year until it hit 67.

The administration’s willingness to entertain the idea may have given “a controversial idea more legitimacy and high-profile support than it’s ever gotten before,” Haberkorn observes, and it is likely to rile progressives who question the wisdom of the compromise.

And that’s not the only problem. You’ve got Clyburn talking casually about changing to the Chained CPI just two days ago, which will effect programs all across the government including Social Security and Veterans benefits. If they want the Republicans to be the ones to own these cuts then maybe they should stop going on TV and offering them up.

I’m sorry to say that Obama’s 2011 offer is the baseline. He showed what he was willing to give up and the Republicans know it. Everyone knows it. The rest of this is kabuki around tax hikes, which was the sticking point in that negotiation as well. The cuts were never at issue since Obama was prepared to deliver them and Pelosi and Reid signed off:

That night, Obama prepared his party’s congressional leaders. He warned Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he might return to the position under discussion the previous Sunday — that is, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in exchange for just $800 billion in tax increases.

Would they support him?

The Democratic leaders “kind of gulped” when they heard the details, Daley recalled.

By this time, Obama had become the face of the bitter debt-ceiling talks and his poll numbers were dropping. His allies on Capitol Hill cringed at his predicament but also at what he was asking them to do.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, recalled that the president and his team felt the weight of the global economy “on our shoulders.”

“Is there political benefit to coming to a big budget deal with John Boehner? Sure,” Pfeiffer said. “But every other political and message imperative was thrown out the door to prevent a disaster and do the right thing for the country. That’s why we were willing to do things we wouldn’t normally do.”

Reluctantly, Reid and Pelosi agreed to do their best to support the plan.

Everyone knows this happened as well.

It will be better if we just let the Bush tax cuts expire and reset. Unless they do, that earlier negotiation will haunt the Democrats.

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Even Newt Gingrich knows the “fiscal cliff” is a scam

by David Atkins

Deficit hysteria is an integral part of the Republican Party’s starve-the-beast economic sabotage. The idea is to spend like crazy on wars, tax cuts for the rich and boondoggles to favored corporate interests, blow the up the deficit, and then declare a crisis, demanding spending cuts that directly hurt people as human sacrifices to the Bond Lords, Confidence Fairies, and other Objectivist gods.

But when curbing deficits actually means increasing taxes on the wealthy, suddenly those who are more interested in preserving their bloated offshore bank accounts than in their ideology find that the scam doesn’t look so good after all.

One such huckster is none other than Newt Gingrich, who stopped by Simi Valley and had this to say:

Politician and author Newt Gingrich, speaking in Simi Valley on Wednesday night, said there is no pending “fiscal cliff.”

The “fiscal cliff is a fantasy. It is an excuse to panic,” said the former speaker of the House and candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Gingrich told a sold-out audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum that the fiscal cliff is a way to scare politicians into raising taxes.

“It is a device to get all of us running down the road so we accept whatever Obama wants, because otherwise we will have failed the fiscal cliff, and how can you be a patriot if you don’t do what the fiscal cliff requires?” Gingrich said.

Gingrich, of course, frames the whole deal as a con of the President’s creation to raise taxes. He’s a gasbag. But the point remains that he knows it’s a scam, and doesn’t want to see his precious wealth impacted by an artificial deficit crisis.

The only people who don’t know it’s a scam are the Very Serious People in the beltway, their ideological friends, and those disconnected 20% who depend more on the stock market for their retirement and their wealth than on their actual wages plus medicare and social security.

It may well be that going over the cliff is temporarily bad for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and might impact a few 401Ks for a while. But the Dow Jones has been doing extremely well as the rest of the country suffers. Maybe it’s time the Dow Jones investor class crowd felt a little bit of the pinch, too, rather than people on fixed incomes and those who depend on Medicaid.

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Tipnronnie trope never gets old

by digby

This exists:

I think at this point the mythic Tipnronnie crapola would make even Tip and Ronnie roll their eyes and groan with boredom.

What’s really sickening is that people are being paid huge money to hype this garbage.
And it is completely meaningless.

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Panther pee

by digby

You’ve probably already heard about his, but in case you haven’t, Glenn “don’t tease the panther” Beck is trolling for attention again:

I must say that one of my proudest moments in recent years was being featured on the back of Beck’s book as an example of a crazed leftist freak:

To think  it was just three years ago that only Bill Clinton, George Bush and Nelson Mandela were more admired than Glenn Beck. Now he’s selling his own urine.

Capitalism that works for working people, in action

by David Atkins

With all the negativity around the Grand Bargain, it’s good to see a heartwarming tale of capitalism done right for a change:

Just in time for Christmas, a retiring Minnesota grocery store owner is giving his roughly 400 employees quite a gift — ownership of his three stores.

Instead of accepting any of the multiple offers he received from large national chains to purchase his stores, Joe Lueken, 70, will transfer ownership of his two Lueken’s Village Foods in Bemidji, Minn., and another one in Wahpeton, N.D., to his employees as part of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The transfer of ownership from the Lueken family to the employees will begin on Jan. 1, and will not cost the employees any money.

The amount of shares each employee receives will be based on length of service and salary. The program is expected to pay the Lueken family off for the sale in three to five years, according to a report by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“My employees are largely responsible for any success I’ve had, and they deserve to get some of the benefits of that,” Lueken told the Star Tribune. “You can’t always take. You also have to give back.”

If the current economic models are to work long-term, employee-owned corporations are going to need to be a big part of the solution.

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The long march of Grover Norquist

by digby

Ezra Klein has published an interesting post today showing that regardless of whether Norquist’s pledge is “violated” he’s still won. I think he’s right and have been saying for a very long tedious time that the entire formulation of the “balanced approach” that asked for the rich to “pay a little bit more” in exchange for two to one cuts to vital programs was a fools game. 

In fact, I wrote this over a year ago:

What do you suppose would happen if the Republicans decided that forcing the Democrats to cut social security, Medicare and Medicaid (not to mention dozens of other programs)in the lead up to an important election was worth “confronting” Grover Norquist and demanding that he allow some token, temporary tax hikes or cuts in subsidies? Would he do it?


Let’s see how this might work out. Weeks of haggling and back and forth about the huge, onerous tax hikes demanded by the Democrats. Slowly, they lower their requests until it’s more of a symbolic thing, designed to “force the Republicans” to give in on Norquist’s pledge, rather than actually raise much money. The Republicans give in, Norquist “loses” and the Democrats “win,” right?

Right?

Keep in mind that Grover Norquist actually has a bigger agenda than his tax pledge:

“Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.”

“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

“We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.”

Would he give up his role as tax enforcer in order to make the Democrats enact the biggest and most unpopular cuts to the safety net in history? I don’t know. But if you don’t think it’s at least possible then you don’t really understand Norquist’s goals.

Via Brendan Nyhan:

RICK PERLSTEIN: Of course Grover Norquist wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. It’s his life’s work.

GROVER NORQUIST: No, I don’t. Don’t tell me my position, sir. I’ve written a book on the subject.

RICK PERLSTEIN: You said that you’re a Leninist and these things are thirty-year projects. These things are on the record.

GROVER NORQUIST: We’re not name-calling and I’m a Leninist? Hey, wait a minute, grow up. I’m not a Leninist. I’m an American, thank you. I fought Leninists all my life. And we crushed the Soviet Union, thank you.

RICK PERLSTEIN: Have you ever said you had Lenin as a hero?

GROVER NORQUIST: No.

RICK PERLSTEIN: He’s lying.

He was.

I would imagine that Grover thinks it’s all the more delicious that it’s being done immediately after the Democrats won a big election with a liberal coalition.

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The long grudge

by digby

I could hardly believe what I was hearing when this came up this morning:

[Senator Susan]Collins said Rice’s response to Benghazi had an “eerie echo” of the 1998 bombings of two African embassies, which occurred when Rice was an assistant secretary of state for African Affairs.

“Those bombings in 1998 resulted in the loss of life of 12 Americans as well as many other foreign nationals, and 4,000 people were injured,” Collins told reporters after her hourlong, closed-door meeting with Rice.

“And what troubles me so much is that the Benghazi attacks echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998 when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department. … She had to be aware of the general threat assessment and of the ambassadors’ request for more security.”

Right. But she could probably find something a bit more recent than that if she wants to see a great example of government officials ignoring threat assessments. September 11th, 2001 comes to mind.

Just as they convinced themselves that Whitewater was their Watergate, they think Benghazi is their 9/11 commission. I assume they persist in this endless round of idiotic payback politics because it’s just in their nature. It serves a political purpose too, of course. It’s a great distraction and destroys comity and purpose on the other side as even liberals with common sense start abandoning the field either because they buy into the “smell test” theory or figure they should cut their losses.

But in the end, I think it’s just because the right wing personality is one that holds grudges forever and always always hits back, no matter how long it takes. My observation of this phenomenon over the years leads me to believe that the most successful liberals are those who show resilience in the face of these attacks. It’s not a matter of being aggressive, it’s a matter of being tough.

As for the press, they are as easily duped as ever. To take a metaphor I’ve used many times before, they are like baby birds waiting to be fed something juicy and they gulp it down without even knowing what it is. And the result is inevitable.

This one’s dumber than usual but you have to give the Republicans credit for finding the energy for it even in the face of their epic loss. If nothing else, they’ve got moxie.

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Guess what? “Reforming entitlements” isn’t necessary

by digby

Following up on my post below, I think this piece by Jonathan Cohn is also an important addition to the growing body of work out there that shows this Fiscal cliff and Grand Bargain nonsense is focused on solving problems that are not acute and don’t have to be solved. Cohn is a health care expert and his views on how these “entitlements” work and their impact on the deficit are worth paying attention to:

Conservatives and groups like Fix the Debt have set some fairly ambitious goals for deficit reduction, at least on paper. But the long-term goal of fiscal policy should be to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio—in other words, to make sure federal debt isn’t rising out of proportion to the wealth that the nation is generating. As a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, it’s possible to achieve that goal for the next decade or so without dramatic cuts to entitlements. Stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio after the next decade would indeed require additional revenue or spending cuts, but, at this point, why not wait and see whether the Obamacare reforms do the job? It’s entirely possible they might. If they don’t, we can make further adjustments in the future, whether those involve agreeing to higher taxes, lower spending, or bigger deficits.

No, that’s not an appealing option. But neither is cutting benefits now. Jared Bernstein, the former Obama Administration economist now at the CBPP, put it well on his blog: “Now’s the time to watch and evaluate, not to reduce access to what is a highly efficient, effective form of health coverage for the nation’s seniors.” The advocates for deep entitlement reductions don’t seem to realize that the people on Medicare and Medicaid need the protection those programs provide—and that, without those programs, they’d suffer. Given the very significant chance we can reduce health care spending without reducing benefits, we have an obligation to try. It’s the compassionate thing to do. And the smart thing, too.

So, again. We have a jobs crisis in the short term, which will likely be extended or made worse by this focus on the deficit. And legislation now to avert projected long term deficits are not necessary and may be counter-productive. moreover, the bond vigilantes and confidence fairy have been missing in action throughout the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, so that rationale is inoperative.

No, the only reason to do this is to use the temporary deficits caused by bad wars, stupid tax cuts and an epic economic downturn as an excuse to destroy vital programs that Americans rely upon. That’s a very bad reason. And it is likely to cause even more economic distress in both the short and long term. Just say no.

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If politicians wanted to solve real problems instead of phony ones …

by digby

Celebrated silent film star and Huffington Post pundit C.A. Rotwang explains the foibles of the so-called fiscal cliff and properly defines the leftmost side of the current argument as centrist. This strikes me a particularly relevant:

I have just elaborated a serious, centrist view of the budget. Now you could argue that a centrist approach is necessitated by the political reality of the House of Representatives — it is controlled by moonbats. But if you combine centrism and moonbattery, you get half of each, and who needs that? Obama’s initial negotiating position is as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes. Worse, support for Obama tends to morph into acceptance of his policies as a matter of principle, rather than the least-bad of available choices.

That is unfortunately, too true. Obama the alleged socialist has an amazing talent for making centrist policies the new liberal true north, which is the saddest political consequence. It’s like swimming upstream.

But Rotwang offers up a different vision that is hardly ever spoken of:

What about a progressive view?

A progressive view starts with the recognition that the current tax system, with revenues of less than 16 percent of GDP, is appropriate to the Federal budget of the 1950s. At minimum we ought to be looking at getting the share of GDP back up to 21 percent, as in the Clinton years. Unfortunately, this will require Clinton-era tax rates on households below the current, more conservative Administration’s (roll that around in your head for a second) fabled $250,000 a year income.

One of Obama’s two original sins (the other being the celebrated “pivot” from Iraq to Afghanistan) was promising a slim revenue system. (With ACA he violated this pledge, since low-income persons will be required to buy health insurance, which the Supreme Court classifies as a tax, but I digress.)

The proper progressive object of higher taxes is higher social spending: public investment, aid to state and local governments, and expansion of social insurance. Remember the poor? Remember New Orleans? Remember Long Island and the Jersey shore?

On the spending side, rather than balanced spending cuts, the object is a transfer of resources from defense to not-defense. Here again the reductionist, arithmetic view is a distraction. The real question is not how to achieve some kind of “fair” cut out of defense. It is, what are we doing, and why? We are presently defending Europe from nobody, and defending the rich nations of South Korea and Japan from the impoverished nation of North Korea. We have an empire of bases dedicated not to defense but to meddling in the affairs of all the world. Now is the time for a peace dividend. An army of assassins to go after the truly deserving bad guys would be very cheap, compared to the current Pentagon money pit.

That’s a progressive budget view. Support for the president’s pragmatic, debatable negotiating tactics should not ratify fundamentally illiberal principles. There was a great candidate who talked a progressive game in 2008… oh wait.

Never mind.

I do cut Obama a little bit slack on the “revenue” side. Raising taxes on everyone would be counterproductive at this point in the economic cycle. Better to get some tip money from the rich and borrow cheap money for a while until the economy is rolling. (Of course, once that happens, the “it’s your muneeee!” circus will be back in town.) But yes, there’s no reason that the current low Bush tax rates should ever be written in stone by progressives. I say we just keep extending the middle class “cuts” until such time as they can expire without economic consequences. Once they’re extended forever, it will be a huge lift to raise them again. And they do need to be higher at some point.

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