This is what real journalism looks like
by David Atkins
Anyone who watched that just learned more about Congress and the problems with America’s system of government than “serious” people do in 3 days of reading the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal cover to cover.
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Some of my best friends are blergh
by digby
He says he didn’t say black people. Ok. What the hell did he mean? Blue people? Bland people? Blah people? No. His little white slip was showing, I’m afraid.
In any case, his whole thesis about Medicaid making people dependent so they’ll vote for Democrats is offensive whether he was referring to blacks, Blues, Blands or Blahs.
More pundit nonsense, and the real conservative divide
by David Atkins
E.J. Dionne has a Washington Post column today where he talks about the battle within conservatism as being between the visions of Santorum and Huntsman, of all things. It contains this remarkable paragraph:
If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they’d send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight. Huntsman is a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He’s a defender of science, a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejects Santorum’s neoconservative moralism, and he speaks the policy language of an upper middle class that likes its politics to focus on deficits and our future competition with China.
It would be nice if Dionne could assemble just one piece of evidence to suggest that the upper middle class is obsessed with deficits and China. He and his fellow pundits, including Thomas Friedman who clocks in today with his usual out-of-touch technocratic utopianism, might fill their days with such reveries. But most middle-class people, even those making six figures, are usually more concerned about their mortgages, their jobs and their health insurance. Instead, modernism is linked inextricably in Dionne’s mind with deficit hysteria.
The pundit class really, really wants Huntsman to be relevant because he culturally reflects their worldview. Fortunately, polling realities show Huntsman’s ethic to be as out of touch with actual voters as those of Washington pundits.
Dionne also seems to fail to grasp that whatever Santorum’s outward Spanish Inquisition moral sensibilities, his economic views are almost exactly aligned with Huntsman’s. On economics, theirs would be less a debate than a love-in.
No, the real battle within the conservative movement is between the hard-line full-on Objectivists who want their totalizing philosophy to come fully out of the closet, and elitist plutocrats who subscribe to some Objectivist views but know that they can’t fully admit it and still win elections, and that their staying rich depends on preserving at least the veneer of a middle class.
The bible-thumping crap isn’t a part of the debate, so much as a way to keep people in line and pacified once all other social supports have been removed. But that’s nothing new. That’s just the latest edition of right-wing feudalism.
No, the only real battle line here is the Romney traditionalist conservatives who will win this cycle, but are increasingly besieged by the 75% of the conservative base that rejects them (“Tokyo Rove” is Karl’s new nickname over at Free Republic) in favor of the Objectivist cult.
And given Romney’s recent lurch toward Objectivist rhetoric, it would seem that battle is already almost over.
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Looks like somebody’s a Santorum fan:
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Unless you believe, as some do, that we must get on with our impending dystopian nightmare so that we can rebuild from the rubble (sometimes known as destroying the village in order to save it) this is probably a useful group of articles. The question posed is what would happen if the Republicans win the next election:
“To say it doesn’t make any difference is to show your contempt for the general population. A lot of this is correct. The two parties are effectively two factions of one party. The business party. But the factions are somewhat different. And as I mentioned, over time, the differences show up in benefits, working conditions, wages the things that really matter to people.So yes, there’s a difference. There’s a narrow difference. And the spectrum within the political system is well to the right of public opinion. And incidentally, the public is well aware of it. So 80% of the country will say the country is I’m quoting, “run by a few big interests” looking out for themselves, not the population. You can argue about the details, but the picture is essentially correct. Nevertheless, there is some difference. You have to make a choice.If you’re in a swing state you have to ask, “is this difference enough for me to pick the lesser of two evils?” And there’s nothing wrong with picking the lesser of two evils. The cliche makes it sound like you’re doing something bad. But no, you’re doing something good if you’re picking the lesser of two evils.So, is it worth doing that or is it worth it to act to create a potential alternative. For instance should I vote Green because they’re party building and someday may be a real alternative, or should I express my disdain for the right wing orientation of both parties by not voting, say, or should I pick the lesser of two evils, thereby helping people. That’s a decision people have to make.
Every president comes into office opposed to or allied with the dominant regime of his time. FDR was opposed to the Republican regime that had dominated American politics since the nineteenth century and overthrew it; Nixon was opposed to the New Deal/Great Society regime and accommodated it; George W. Bush was allied with the Reagan regime and extended it. Bush was able to do things Reagan and Nixon never did because the liberal Democratic regime they had to contend with was dead by the time Bush was inaugurated (Reagan helped kill it, Clinton buried it).
The long and the short of it is: before we make ahistorical comparisons about who is more liberal or conservative in relationship to whom, let’s situate the president in political time. Assess how strong or weak is the dominant regime, place the president in relation to that regime (allied or opposed), and take it from there.
(I think the mistake people made with Obama was thinking that because he was opposed to the conservative regime, which they assumed was far weaker than it actually was, he had the intention of fighting it when, in fact, he was an accomodationist. Not that the other side made it easy.)
So, movements can create the momentum to change course. But it doesn’t happen overnight or mainly through elections. I would certainly think that electing the avatars of the regime one opposes is at least as likely to extend that regime as it is to bring enlightenment through byzantine electoral rationales.
We could also try to change our winner take all system. It’s a long term project as well, but it would solve a lot of problems. One of the main reasons we always end up with a two party system instead of a more responsive, multi-party system is purely a matter of processes that can be changed. It’s a very heavy lift, but other countries have done it. Until that happens voting third party tends to have the opposite impact in terms of policy as it pushes both parties in the direction of the ultimate winner which, in the case of left wing third party runs, is the conservative alternative. (This analysis of the phenomenon is interesting even if you reject the conclusion.)
And, by the way, if you are a progressive/liberal keep in mind that whichever choice you make there are some politicians you can support without feeling as if you are accepting the lesser of two evils.
Update: the Chomsky clip is from three years ago which I’m told is hugely significant. I assumed that his point of view on this issue was well thought out and deeply held but it always possible he’s changed his mind and now believes the opposite.
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Tort Reform!
by digby
Pennsylvania reporter Will Bunch has the goods on Santorum’s corruption all the way down the line in this piece. The man is a religious radical and a right wing extremist, to be sure. He’s also a corrupt hypocrite.
Bunch’s piece is very thorough but it did leave out one of my favorite Santorunm stories. From the time he came into office, like all right wing Republicans, he railed against malpractice claims, blaming them for high medical costs and insinuating that they are mostly fraudulent wastes that benefit the Democratic party and the “trial lawyers.” They were so successful that they managed to persuade a whole bunch of Americans that, despite their own observations and personal experience, medical malpractice is a scam. They even got them to cheer wildly at the mere mention of the phrase “tort reform!” even though most of them wouldn’t know a tort from an apple pandowdy.
And yet Rick had no problem filing a malpractice claim of his own when the opportunity arose. But then, like most “values” Republicans (and Wall Street hustlers), when you look at Bunch’s bill of indictment, it’s clear that his main value is to never leave any cash on the table:
Back in 1994, when Santorum was in Congress and running for the Senate, he introduced H.R. 3918, which would have capped non-economic damages awarded by juries in medical malpractice cases at $250,000. On February 7, 2003, Senator Santorum said the $250,000 cap set in Congressman Jim Greenwood’s bill was “too low.” The next day, he told The Associated Press that he’d “been hesitant to sign on to any bill that has a cap.”
Did something happen to change Santorum from one who authored a bill capping damages for a victim’s pain and suffering into one who couldn’t even sign onto such a bill?
Yes. Reality happened to Rick. In 1999, Santorum’s wife, Karen, filed her own medical malpractice lawsuit against a chiropractor in Virginia, seeking $500,000 in non-economic damages – twice the amount allowed in her husband’s own legislation five years earlier…
Here’s how the Washington, DC newspaper Roll Call summarized part of Santorum’s testimony in the lawsuit:
“Karen Santorum, he said, ‘likes to be fit,’ but has had trouble losing weight since the birth of their two youngest children – Sarah Maria, who was born two years ago this month, and Peter, who is 2 months old – because she can’t exercise as easily as she once could.
“While Santorum described his wife as an exercise fanatic who used to engage in everything from step aerobics to jogging to lose weight after the birth of each of their first three children, the herniated disk changed all that.
“‘We have to go out and do a lot of public things. She wants to look nice, so it’s really difficult,’ Santorum told the jury.
“The Senator also said he fears his wife will be unable to help him out much with his upcoming re-election campaign because of her physical limitations and the poor self-image she has developed since her back problems changed her life and her daily routine.
“‘She has always been intricately involved in my campaigns,’ Santorum said, explaining that he and his wife ‘knocked on 20,000 doors together’ during his previous campaign.
“Now, he says, she ‘does not have the confidence to do that.’”
On December 10, 1999, a Fairfax County, Virginia jury awarded Karen Santorum $350,000 in her malpractice lawsuit. When asked about the judgment, Santorum said:
“The court proceedings are a personal family matter. I will not be offering any further public comments, other than that I am not a party to the suit. But I am fully supportive of my wife.”
On December 14, The Associated Press published the following statement by Santorum spokesman Robert Traynham:
“Senator Santorum is of the belief that the verdict decided upon by the jury during last week’s court case of his wife is strictly a private manner. The legislative positions that Senator Santorum has taken on tort reform and health care have been consistent with the case involving Mrs. Santorum.”
On December 25, The Washington Post reported:
“Santorum spokesman Robert Traynham said the senator’s wife never asked him for his opinion of the lawsuit and Santorum never offered it. ‘The senator and his wife, believe it or not, disagree on some issues,’ Traynham said. ‘This is a case between her and her attorney and her chiropractor. It has nothing to do with Senator Santorum.’”
A few weeks later, in January 2000, the judge in Virginia set aside the jury’s award, saying the $350,000 was excessive and reducing it to $175,000.
We wish Karen Santorum only the best of health, but for Senator Santorum the question is: What happens to the millions of people outside his own family whose pain and suffering he clearly doesn’t feel?
His [senate] web site ays: “Legal reform is an important issue that I place high on the agenda in the 109th Congress, as it is crucial to curb lawsuit abuse.” His press release says: “Senator Santorum has supported 3 prior attempts to pass medical liability reform including measures targeting the plight of OB/GYN’s and emergency room doctors. Democratic opposition prevented the measures from moving forward.”
Here’s what Rick said about this in Iowa:
Rick Santorum, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, told people at a town hall meeting earlier this month in Centerville, Ia., that he would push for tort reform. He noted that while serving in Congress from Pennsylvania, he fought for tort reform on medical liability and gun manufacturing issues…
Santorum’s remarks in Centerville have brought him some criticism from Iowa trial lawyers who have cited his wife’s lawsuit. He said in an interview Thursday that his wife made the decision to sue the chiropractor and anyone who thinks his wife has to hold the same policy positions as he does is “pretty chauvinistic and insulting.”
He also said his wife’s suit was consistent with reforms he has sought. Furthermore, he said his wife sued only because she considered the chiropractor to be a “bad actor.” She wanted to expose him to prevent others from being similarly disadvantaged by his care, he said.
“I think I have been very clear. There needs to be a medical malpractice system. I just think there needs to be reasonable constraints in order for there to be proper incentives for everybody in the system to bring costs under control and to provide quality care,” Santorum said.
I just love the feminist defense coming from this guy. The slimy hypocrisy is overwhelming.
A brief followup on liberalism and pacifism
by David Atkins
One of the more pointed critiques of my post on liberalism and interventionism from a couple of days ago is that it ignores the pacifist tradition in liberal thought.
This critique is well-taken. So I’d like to address it here briefly before returning to our regularly scheduled programming, as it were.
It is certainly true that there is a proud tradition of pacifism on the left that would seem to be at odds with what I have broadly and perhaps crudely termed “interventionism,” but I would argue that the conflict is not so great as one might imagine.
There are two distinct arguments on behalf of pacifism: 1) that the use of force is morally wrong at all times; and 2) that the use of force as a solution to problems is often counterproductive, and/or worse than the original problem.
The latter argument has been at times the province of liberals and isolationist conservatives alike. This view was best summed up by Thomas Jefferson when he said: “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” Of course, Thomas Jefferson also supported the colonists’ use of martial force against Britain to establish America’s independence, so one might argue that Jefferson was being selective in his judgment here.
But the argument that war is so atrocious, so ugly, so awful and wasteful that it is only necessary under the very most extreme set of circumstances is a powerful one, and one that as a liberal I wholly agree with. Interventionism does no good if the intervention causes more harm than it removes. When it comes to the use of force, the burden of proof is on the interventionist to show that the good that might be done would outweigh the harm–and from there it is a moral judgment whether the loss of even one life is worth whatever goal is being sought. How one feels about these things can differ depending on how greatly one’s morality is shaped by Kantian moral imperatives and circumstantial utilitarian rationales.
Most modern liberals, myself included, tend to believe that military force should be used exceedingly sparingly due to its negative consequences. On the other hand, it’s awfully hard to look at a situation like the Rwandan genocide and argue that the world should have done nothing to intervene and stop it, given the obvious reality that there was no version of diplomacy adequate to the task. These are value judgments that are circumstantial in nature, and reasonable people will differ on a case by case basis.
But the first argument, that the use of force is always wrong, is more problematic. It assumes that the conflict that arises from the oppression of one person by another can always be resolved through non-violent, non-forceful channels. That assumption in turn is based on the notion that people are fundamentally good toward each other, and for one reason or another learn to be bad toward each other, and that violence is caused by some sort of economic imbalance or slighted honor that can always be rectified through adequate diplomacy.
This is where certain strains of liberalism and libertarianism intersect, but are usually sidelined by more mainstream versions of liberalism and conservatism alike, which both assume that people are mostly selfish, and that intervention is required to maintain the social order. Conservatives and liberals disagree on the form of intervention: conservatives believe that wealth, patriarchy and privilege must be defended by force from the lazy, undeserving, lesser rabble who would try to take it illegitimately, while liberals believe that the historically weak and oppressed must be defended by force from the greedy, rapacious tyrants who would wring every last shred of dignity from them.
How one feels about Ron Paul–whether one is on the Right or the Left–may depend greatly on how one feels about fundamental human nature and the origins of evil and oppression. Those on the left who see oppression as a more or less learned Western capitalist construct will be likelier to support more libertarian notions; those who view oppression as an evil endemic to the human condition (and thus requiring levels of intervention) will be less likely to do so. But I think both kinds of people can come to pacifism from different directions.
And now, back to the issues of the day…
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Tough love for teens
by digby
Back in the 80s this was a Cheech and Chong movie. Today it is a Kafkaesque nightmare:
Turner has been searching for Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.
Turner searched for months for a clue.
“God just kept leading me,” she said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and do whatever God told me to do, and I found her.”
Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place – Colombia.
Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.
“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”
News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.
So ICE officials stepped in.
News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.
Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.
I honestly can’t think of many things more horrible. I guess they could have tortured her before they deported her. But not to worry. They’re looking into how this could happen so I’m sure it will be just fine:
“ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” said ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale. ” At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”
ICE officials also noted there have been instances where ICE has seen cases of individuals providing inaccurate information regarding who they are and their immigration status for ulterior motives.
This is a fourteen year old girl! Who doesn’t speak Spanish! That’s Alice in Wonderland lunacy.
Rennison Castillo is an army veteran ICE held for nine months even though he had provided documentation of his U.S. citizenship, a claim acknowledged in an apology written by U.S. Assistant Attorney Phil Lynch in October, 2010 as part of the public settlement that included as well $400,000 and Mr. Lynch’s reassurances that ICE had new procedures in place to “avoid this happening again to a fellow U.S. [c]itizen.”
If ICE is going to hold an Army vet and ignore his pleas for nine months, what chance does a 14 year old girl have of having ICE agents respect her U.S. citizenship?
Good question. In fact, there are hundreds of Americans wrongly deported each year. I’m sure that most Real Americans don’t really care because they think it could never happen to them. Let’s hope not. It’s pretty awful.
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One of the empty boys
by digby
The date was May 20, 1966. A group of students had taken over the office of Stanford President Wallace Sterling, protesting against the institution of a test that was among the first steps toward the Vietnam-era draft.
Carey Coulter, a conservative and anti-Communist student who had spent time as a civilian in Vietnam, was outraged and organized a counter-protest.
“We were there to get an education and these people holding the Administration hostage was antithetical to that,” he recalled to BuzzFeed in his first interview about the day.
As the roughly 150 counter-protesters held signs and chatted with passing students, a tall, neatly-dressed 19-year old Coulter had never seen before approached him.
“He walked up to me and said that he had some experience with the press, and that he would handle the press for me if I wanted him to,” Coulter recalled. “I said fine, because I was busy running the demonstration.”
“He just saw the demonstration, was sympathetic to it obviously, and came up,” Coulter said. He added that Romney hadn’t made the sign he’s carrying in the photograph.
Romney hadn’t organized the protest, and wasn’t part of Coulter’s later efforts to beat back a growing student anti-war movement.
“I don’t recall ever seeing him again,” Coulter said of Romney, who spent just a year at Stanford and enrolled after his mission in France at Brigham Young University[…]
Greenwald did the job on Romney’s Vietnam non-experience back in 2007. I particularly liked this Boston Globe quote he refers to:
Mr. Romney, though, said that he sometimes had wished he were in Vietnam instead of France. “There were surely times on my mission when I was having a particularly difficult time accomplishing very little when I would have longed for the chance to be serving in the military,” he said in an interview, “but that was not to be.”
He was prevented from serving because he was a “minister of religion” you see. Such a pity.
Not that I particularly want to revisit the Vietnam wars, but this does remind me of a piece I wrote about fellows like Romney back in the day. It’s long, this is just an excerpt:
The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60’s male leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin — he was both virile and heroic.
The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle. There was an actual bloody fight going on in Vietnam, after all. Plenty of young men volunteered and plenty more were drafted. And despite the fact that it may be illogical on some level to say that if you support a war you must fight it, certainly if your self-image is that of a warrior, tradition requires that you put yourself in the line of fire to prove your courage if the opportunity presents itself. You simply cannot be a warrior if you are not willing to fight. This, I think, is deeply understood by people at a primitive level and all cultures have some version of it deeply embedded in the DNA. It’s not just the willingness to die it also involves the willingness to kill. Men who went to Vietnam and faced their fears of killing and dying, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, put themselves to this test.
And then there were the chickenhawks. They were neither part of the revolution nor did they take the obvious step of volunteering to fight the war they supported. In fact, due to the draft, they allowed others to fight and die in their place despite the fact that they believed heartily that the best response to communism was to aggressively fight it “over there” so we wouldn’t have to fight it here. These were empty boys, unwilling to put themselves on the line at the moment of truth, yet they held the masculine virtues as the highest form of human experience and have portrayed themselves ever since as tough, uncompromising manly men while portraying liberals as weak and effeminate.
Now it must be pointed out that there were many men, and many more women, who didn’t buy into any of this “manhood” stuff and felt no need to join in tribal rituals or bloody wars to prove anything. Most of those men, however, didn’t aspire to political leadership. Among the revolutionaries, the warriors and the chickenhawks, there were many who did. Indeed, these manhood rituals are more often than not a requirement for leadership. (Perhaps having more women in power will finally change that.)
The only political aspirants among those three groups who failed to meet the test of their generation were the chickenhawks. And our problem today is that they are the ones in charge of the government as we face a national security threat. These unfulfilled men still have something to prove.
It’s a little psycho-babbly, I admit. But I still think there’s something to this. The political leadership that emerged from the Vietnam generation are peculiar in this way, no doubt about it.
And, by the way, late boomer Barack Obama, despite his protestations to contrary, grew up in a culture immersed in all this, so he hasn’t escaped it. I don’t think he’s operating from this same logic, however. If he’s trying to prove something, I don’t think it stems from this particular pathology.
Romney, on the other hand, is one of those guys, with all the baggage that comes with it. Look at that picture.
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The Deconstructed Sex Candidate
by digby
Santorum thinks that people have kids for the money. Seriously. You may have thought that the baby boom happened because people had just gone through 15 years of depression and world war but it was really for the tax deduction.
“A President Rick Santorum will start an ongoing national discussion about family, marriage and fatherhood”
Oh joy. I wrote about his anti-birth control stance yesterday, but the whole comment wasn’t transcribed. Now that I listened to the whole thing it’s worse than I thought:
One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is what I think is the danger of contraception. The whole sexual libertine idea that many in the Christian faith have said, well, it’s ok, contraception’s ok. But it’s not ok.
It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. It is supposed to be within marriage. It is supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal and also unitive but also procreative and that’s the perfect way that sexual union should happen. When you take any part of that out, we diminish the act.
If you can take one part out, if it’s not for the purpose of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons you diminish this very special bond between men and women. So why can’t you take other parts of it out? It becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure…
I’m not runnning for preacher, I’m not running for pastor. But these are important public policy issues. These have profound impact on the health of our society. I’m not talking about moral health, although clearly moral health, but I’m talking economic health, I’m talking about out of wedlock birth rates, sexually transmitted diseases.
These are profound issues that we only like to talk about from a scientific point of view. Well that’s one point of view, but we also need to have the courage to talk about the moral aspects of it and the purpose and rationale for why we do what we do.
Yeah, he’s right. we need to talk about all that. And Santorum is just the guy to lead that conversation.
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