Month: January 2013

Vindicating Rush

by digby

Rich Lowry thinks he’s found the silver lining in all the conservative losses:

There should have been something for everyone in President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. For liberals, a full-throated call to arms. For conservatives, vindication.

Obama settled once and for all the debate over his place on the political spectrum and his political designs. He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country irrevocably to the left. In other words, Obama’s foes — if you put aside the birthers and sundry other lunatics — always had him pegged correctly.

If you listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, you got a better appreciation of Obama’s core than by reading the president’s friends and sophisticated interpreters, for whom he was either a moderate or a puzzle yet to be fully worked out.
Rush, et al., doubted that Obama could have emerged from the left-wing milieu of Hyde Park, become in short order the most liberal U.S. senator, run to Hillary Clinton’s left in the 2008 primaries and yet have been a misunderstood centrist all along. They heeded his record and his boast in 2008 about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and discounted the unifying tone of his rhetoric as transparent salesmanship.

They got him right, even as he duped the Obamacons, played the press and fooled his sympathizers. David Brooks, the brilliant and winsome New York Times columnist, has been promising the arrival of the true, pragmatic Obama for years now. In his column praising the second inaugural address, he appeared finally to give up. “Now he is liberated,” Brooks wrote. “Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display.”

So, he and his cohorts can revel in “being right” even though they are wrong. Whatever.

But never fear, it’s not as if they really have to worry. Their delusions are intact in every way.

Obama is making his play, as the newest cliché goes, to become the liberal Reagan. As soon as he won reelection, we went from the Obama administration to the Obama years, and that is no mean feat. Becoming an enduringly transformational figure like Reagan, though, is a different proposition. He will have to leave office adored. He will have to cement his legacy by winning a de facto third term. His big policies will have to work, as Reagan’s did in winning the Cold War and reviving the economy.

But know this: nobody will ever be as good enough, as kind enough and doggone it, as downright wonderful as St Ronnie of Hollywood:

For all of the ideological ambition of his second inaugural, the policy agenda was thin or unachievable. Reducing wait-times at the polls isn’t a major item. At the federal level, gay marriage is largely up to the courts. He will get much less on guns than he wants and probably nothing significant from Congress on climate change. His best chance for a breakthrough is on immigration, which divides Republicans.

The virtue of the address was making his intentions unmistakable, although Rush Limbaugh never mistook them in the first place.

This is mostly playing the refs, of course. But I’m fairly sure they believe it too. Obama made a liberal speech. Therefore everything Rush ever said about him is true.

They really are childlike aren’t they?

Of course this isn’t the first time the denizens of the National Review have paid obeisance to their bombastic Jesus:

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

They just can’t help loving that big galoot.

It’s party time again for the rich

by David Atkins

The job creators are doing fabulously well again. Everyone else? Not so much:

Those at the top are seeing their wages rebound quite strongly in the recovery. Following a 15.6 percent decline from 2007 to 2009, real annual wages of the top 1.0 percent of earners grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011.

The real annual wages of the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

Wage inequality grew substantially over 1979–2007, lessened in the 2007–2009 downturn, and began expanding again in the 2009–2011 recovery. Trends over the next few years will determine whether wage inequality returns to or exceeds the heights reached in 2007 or 2000—or simply remains far higher than at any time in the 1980s and 1990s.

Given the strong stock market recovery and wage growth at the top, the top 1.0 percent’s overall incomes (which include wages, capital gains, and other returns on financial assets) probably grew strongly in 2011, thereby increasing income inequality.

Since they’re doing so well, I would ask the “job creators” where all the jobs are. But that would be funny, and these dreary statistics don’t lend themselves to humor.

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Bo in the snow

by digby

Best first dog ever:

“The whole intent was not to kill him.  I was just trying to get this kid under control”

by digby

We need more monetary awards like this. It’s the only thing that will change this torture culture:

The University of Cincinnati will pay $2 million and suspend the use of Tasers by university police as part of a settlement with the family of a student who died after being shocked with a Taser.

The settlement, obtained Wednesday by the Enquirer, also requires UC to create a memorial for the student, to provide free tuition to his siblings and to send a letter to the family expressing regret over the incident.

The student, Everette Howard Jr., died Aug. 6, 2011, after a confrontation with a UC police officer. A coroner’s investigation could not determine the cause of death, but Howard’s family and expert witnesses blamed the shock from the Taser.

Howard’s death and the uproar that followed thrust UC into an intensifying national debate over the safety and proper use of Tasers, which incapacitate suspects by sending 50,000 volts of electricity into the body.

Howard’s lawyer, Al Gerhardstein, described the $2 million settlement as “substantial” and said he hopes it causes other police departments to “be more cautious in their use of Tasers.”

Yes, that would be nice. This story is a good illustration of the problem with these things:

According to UC’s internal report, Haas encountered Howard around 2 a.m. when he responded to a call about a fight at Turner Hall. Witneses told the investigators Howard did not throw any punches in the fight and was trying to help a friend fend off attackers.

Haas encountered Howard again about an hour later when, according to UC police, Howard chased his friend’s attackers down Jefferson Avenue.

Haas said Howard walked toward him with fists clenched, shortly after he had been punching the ground. He said he worried the younger, athletic Howard might disarm him. “He was coming right at me,” Haas told the Enquirer in October.

He said one barb from his Taser hit Howard at belt level and another about midway up his chest. He said he immediately called paramedics when Howard was unresponsive after the shock.

Haas said this week that he remains on the UC police force but his police powers have been suspended. He said the internal investigation vindicated him and he is ready to return to duty, but UC officials will not allow it.

“The whole intent was not to kill him,” Haas said of Howard. “I was just trying to get this kid under control.”

I’m sure it wasn’t trying to kill. But they kill people all the time and there’s no way of knowing who it’s going to be. This is one reason why they shouldn’t be used, particularly in the willy nilly way the police are using them around the nation. They’re dangerous, often lethal and, in my opinion, they are torture weapons used for authoritarian purposes. It’s just not acceptable for an allegedly free country to be torturing and killing people on the single judgement of a police officer. All these patriots who are so worried about losing their 2nd Amendment rights ought to take a look at some of the other ones.

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Disaster in the DC circuit

by digby

So the DC circuit decided that recess appointments are only allowed between sessions of congress, not during intersession recesses. Scott Lemieux:

The opinion is an atrocity, classic “hack originalism for dummies,” relying heavily on the fact that recess appointments during nominal sessions of the Senate are a relatively recent phenomenon (although there’s precedent going back to 1867, and “[t]he last five Presidents have all made appointments during intrasession recesses of fourteen days or fewer”), without considering that the Senate systematically refusing to consider presidential nominees is also a contemporary phenomenon. The “pro forma” sessions the D.C. Circuit sees as breaking the constitutional “Recess” are intended solely to prevent the president from exercising the recess appointment power, the very check that the framers included to counteract the possibility that the Senate would obstruct the functioning of government by serially refusing to consider nominees. Separation of powers analysis that refuses to acknowledge how the government actually functions provides a clinic in the limitations of law-office history.

But while they were at it, they also reversed a decision that’s been in effect since 1823. So much for stare decisis. But then I guess David Sentelle probably knows the intent of the founders better than the court of that era, so that makes sense.

Volokh (who seems surprisingly non-plussed by this decision as well) explains:

But the court also held (or at least stated) that the recess appointment power may only be used to fill vacancies that arise during the recess of the Senate. The text of the Clause provides:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Although the first Attorney General, Edmund Randolph, read “happen” to limit the power to filling vacancies that arise during the recess of the Senate, by 1823, Attorney General William Wirt had reversed course and said it extended to vacancies that “happened to exist” during the recess. And there it has remained ever since. The D.C. Circuit’s conclusion conflicts with the Eleventh Circuit, the en banc Ninth Circuit, and the Second Circuit on this score.

I wonder why.

The point of this appears to be to hamstring the executive branch’s regulatory ability which as Lemieux archly observes, “and — what are the odds? — it just happens that the result coincides with the policy preferences of the Republican author of the opinion, who considers the 20th century regulatory state unconstitutional.”

On the other hand, there’s this inexplicable behavior:

Of course, also important here that between Obama’s strange inattention to federal judicial appointments and Republican filibusters he’s the first president in at least 50 years not to get a single nominee confirmed to the D.C. Circuit.

I don’t know what that means, but it sure does have a lot of people scratching their heads.

Oh, and this isn’t the only ridiculous decision by this circuit in recent days:

Marijuana will continue to be considered a highly dangerous drug under federal law with no accepted medical uses, after a U.S. appeals court Tuesday refused to order a change in the government’s 40-year-old drug classification schedule.

The decision keeps in place an odd legal split over marijuana, a drug deemed to be as dangerous as heroin and worse than methamphetamine by federal authorities, but one that has been legalized for medical use by voters or legislators in 20 states and the District of Columbia.

Funny, they sure do give deference to federal regulators when it comes to drugs.

All I can say to that is if pot were as lethal as heroin and meth, everyone I know would be dead by now. It’s the most absurd pile of nonsense ever perpetrated by the government. It will be remembered as right up there with believing that bleeding the patient will cure diseases.

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QOTD: Bobby Jindal

by David Atkins

One of the GOP’s Great Brown Hopes, Bobby Jindal, has some advice for Republicans:

During his recent address, Jindal argued that the GOP doesn’t need to change its values, but “might need to change just about everything else we are doing.”

Racism, misogyny, theocracy, jingoism, Objectivism and economic royalism are all OK. I’m sure they’ll be fine if they just microtarget better, rig the electoral college and figure out ways to stonewall questions about rape.

No problem.

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Another conservative reveals the inherent bigotry of his philosophy

by digby

You’ve got to love Soledad O’Brien:

P

rofessor Kingsley Browne, author of “Co-Ed Combat,” argued that the military’s physical standards would have to be lowered to accommodate women because there is “very little overlap in physical capacity between men and women.” O’Brien asked him if he agreed with a 1941 quote blasting military integration from Colonel Eugene Householder without revealing its context:

O’BRIEN: I’m going to read a little bit from this colonel who said this: ‘The army is not a sociological laboratory; to be effective it must be organized and trained according to the principles which will ensure success…Experiments are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.’

BROWNE: I think that that’s true. I don’t think it’s true with respect to ultimate defeat of the United States in a war. I think what’s likely to occur though is the defeat of the United States in small battles, which means people are going to die. […]

O’BRIEN: That was from a guy in 1941. And that argument was about not allowing black people in the military. That was his exact argument of why blacks should not be allowed in the military, because it’s a danger to efficiency and discipline and morale and will result in ultimate defeat.

As Think Progress points out:

Though African American soldiers served in every military campaign since the Revolutionary War, units were only integrated after World War II by executive order. During integration, black soldiers endured racist arguments that they were fundamentally different and incompatible with white soldiers.

Similarly, women have held combat roles for decades. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 292,000 women served in combat zones, and 152 were killed in action. A survey of NATO allies who allow women in combat roles found no issues with unit cohesion and noted that women tended to perform better than their male colleagues in intelligent-gathering roles.

And I’m fairly sure that throughout human history women have fought alongside men. It’s not as though when the Visigoths invaded that the women just huddled in a corner while the menfolk battled. Women had to fight for their lives too.

Moreover, as much as these guys keep talking about “hand to hand” combat, I’m going to guess that doesn’t happen very often these days. Modern warfare is about modern weapons and I’d have to guess that women are just as good at killing from a distance as the men are. It’s just unfortunate that we’re doing it at all. But that’s a different issue.

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The Centrist counter-attack

by digby

So, Third Way found a couple of moderate Democrats and decided they represent all the hopes and dreams of the American People. It’s just a coincidence that they happen to reflect the agenda of Third Way:

The Driscolls aren’t just among a tiny slice of swing voters — they represent millions of moderate and independent voters across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and throughout America. Most important for the president and Democrats in Congress, they represent the base of the Democratic Party.

Yes, they said that. And guess what they want more than anything in the whole wide world:

In post-election polling by Third Way, and confirmed by national exit polls, the plurality of those who pulled the lever for President Barack Obama were not liberals but self-described moderates. In fact, 56 percent of those who voted for the president defined their own ideology as either moderate or conservative. A supermajority of Obama voters said they wanted the president to be more moderate or conservative in his second term compared with his first. And overwhelmingly, they wanted the president and members of Congress from both parties to compromise rather than stand their ground. In fact, the most unanimously supported statement in the post-election poll of 800 Obama voters was this: “Democrats and Republicans both need to make real compromises to come to an agreement on fixing the deficit.” A full 96 percent agreed with that statement.

Just like Bob and Evelyn, these voters worry about our nation’s fiscal situation — 7 in 10 said the federal deficit was a major problem — and they think we need to fix it in a balanced way. Eighty-two percent thought both spending cuts and tax increases should be involved (only 5 percent chose raising taxes alone). They want Social Security and Medicare to be protected, but they also think the programs have major financial problems that need to be fixed. Eight in 10 Obama voters say it would be better for the future of the country if Congress and the president made changes to Social Security and Medicare — only 19 percent say it would be better to leave them alone. They want to see Congress and the president work together across the aisle to put these programs on a sustainable path, so that the protections will be there for themselves and future generations.

The New Democrat Coalition and Third Way believe we should heed the advice from Bob, Evelyn and so many moderate voters like them and use the 113th Congress to address our nation’s problems with pragmatism, balance and a willingness to compromise to get things done. That means getting our fiscal house in order by increasing revenue, but also ensuring that crucial programs like Social Security and Medicare are on a path that is affordable and sustainable for the long term.

I’m sure they do. They feel their moment is slipping away and they have to act fast to shore up the Villager and elite wonk belief that the country is really conservative. It’s getting tougher to do that what with all the losing and all.

I haven’t seen the polling that allegedly supports this. But let’s just say I’m skeptical that the Democrats just won a big election and that it means they voted for the Republican agenda. But I could be wrong.

In case you’re wondering who the members of the New Democrat Coalition are, here’s a list. It includes some of your favorite “progressives.” I think it’s probably important to note (as Howie Klein has been doing relentlessly for months) that while everyone is celebrating the fact that the Blue Dogs have been fairly well run out of congress, the New Dems are growing. It turns out that the Blue Dogs have merely changed their ID collars.

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Is deficit fever breaking?

by digby

Krugman has an uncharacteristically optimistic column this morning, positing that deficit fever has finally broken and that we managed to avoid killing the patient:

Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisis — if we don’t slash the deficit now now now, we’ll turn into Greece, Greece, I tell you. It is, for example, almost two years since Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles declared that we should expect a fiscal crisis within, um, two years.

But that crisis keeps not happening. The still-depressed economy has kept interest rates at near-record lows despite large government borrowing, just as Keynesian economists predicted all along. So the credibility of the scolds has taken an understandable, and well-deserved, hit.

Second, both deficits and public spending as a share of G.D.P. have started to decline — again, just as those who never bought into the deficit hysteria predicted all along.

The truth is that the budget deficits of the past four years were mainly a temporary consequence of the financial crisis, which sent the economy into a tailspin — and which, therefore, led both to low tax receipts and to a rise in unemployment benefits and other government expenses. It should have been obvious that the deficit would come down as the economy recovered. But this point was hard to get across until deficit reduction started appearing in the data.

Now, I would guess that the Democratic Party apologists will take credit for being prescient and holding off austerity measures until the worst of the crisis had passed, but that will be the wrong interpretation. They were saved by the lunatic Tea Party.

And it’s not over yet. We still have to overcome the pending showdowns over the sequester and the debt ceiling and ensure that our Democratic allies don’t see this as their last opportunity for a while to “fix” entitlements. This desire to destroy the village in order to save it runs very deep in the psyche of the technocratic centrists, so I’m not going to feel fully secure until the crisis has fully passed.

One thing to watch out for is the new rationale that says we must cut the “entitlements” in order to spare other discretionary programs. No, we don’t really have to do that. There is plenty of fat in the pentagon, growth is still sluggish and taxes are still low. This is a very wealthy country and we can afford to have a decent, humane safety net as well as needed government services. “Trade-offs” that burden average and poor citizens in order to spare the wealthy and the war machine are simply unacceptable. Just say no.

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“Restructuring” the GOP: the fight for the soul of the party

by digby

So Reince Priubus is going to “restructure” the GOP:

To hear Priebus tell it, the goal is two-tiered: restructure the party on a tactical level to match the sophisticated and data-driven efforts of the Obama campaign, and create a communications plan to sell the GOP’s message to voters it failed to connect with in 2012.

So, they need to build the Obama campaign infrastructure. (Sadly, if things go the way they’ve been going with other political operations built by progressives, they’ll probably sell it to them…) And they need to get more voters. Considering how well they do with whites already, they’re going to have to figure out how to get some of those minority voters. So they’re going to create GOP ACORN. (Which proves once again just how lame it was that the Democrats let that pissant James O’Keefe destroy theirs.)

Priebus said a glaring organizational flaw for Republicans is that there have been no long-term investments made in human capital to help sell the GOP message on a neighborhood to neighborhood level.

It’s more than just having an outreach director in a state — it’s having dedicated, full-time staffers on a grass-roots level to run “voter registration, hold community events, go to swearing-in ceremonies … having real job descriptions for lots and lots of people on a yearlong basis in communities that move the dial.”

The party’s standing among Hispanics emerged as a damaging sore spot last year for national Republicans, who were forced to answer for hard-line immigration positions from prominent conservative figures, including their own presidential nominee.

Obama won with 71% of the Hispanic vote, according to CNN national exit polls.

“I think you are seeing a lot of movement from our party on these issues,” said Priebus, who said outreach has already begun. “A lot of it, I tell you, was tone. You know, it wasn’t necessarily the policy on immigration, it was what is coming out of your mouth.”

And, naturally, he blames it on that loser Romney:

He specifically mentioned a comment by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who suggested illegal immigrants might “self-deport” and leave the country willingly.

“When you talk about stuff of self-deportation, it is probably not the best place to start,” Priebus said.

Still, Priebus said he believes that Republicans, not Democrats, better represent the ideals and goals of all voters, including minorities who turned out in droves to re-elect the president.

Good luck with all that. I’m afraid he needs to look at his electoral base and ask himself why some moneyed robot felt the need to pander that hard. It’s not like he actually believed in any of it. He was running for President, for Pete’s sake!

Anyway, that’s not really what this is about:

It’s an overwhelming task and it’s going to cost money, lots of money.

“I’ve been meeting with donors since the election in November,” Priebus said. “I would say I am pleasantly surprised how quickly the donors who have given so much are ready to build a party that is a year-round operation.”

Hey no need to let a little lost election stand in the way of your graft, right? There’s money to be made.

I hope they’ll be able to move left on immigration because it might just make the Democrats move left too. (Or, it might make the Democrats move right, just out of habit.) But it’s going to be interesting to see how their base takes it. These are the issues that really get them going. All the stuff about taxes and big gummint are only as powerful as their attachment to government benefits and privileges being extended to people they don’t like. They’ve got some work to do to change that.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches:

The thrills — and opportunities for heroics — seem greatest when disaster is at hand. Or at least that’s how Mike Needham likes to look at it.

The 31-year-old chief executive of Heritage Action — the lobbying arm of the storied Heritage Foundation — senses victory where others see defeat.

Sure, you could interpret the passage of the Jan 1. fiscal cliff deal as a crushing loss for conservatives, who were pained to see Republicans vote for their first tax increase in more than two decades. But flip the script, Needham urges, and you’ll see that only 85 House Republicans supported the deal; 151 of them voted against it.
“That’s a whole lot of Republicans who kept their purity on the tax issue,” Needham explains. He’s as confident as ever that his group will compel conservatives to hold firm in the next stage of the fiscal fight. Needham will have a partner in former senator Jim DeMint, the conservative firebrand from South Carolina who’s set to become president of the Heritage Foundation in April.

As with DeMint, there’s little that animates Heritage Action more than being in the opposition, where an honorable defeat will always trump a watered-down compromise. Needham’s group has a distinct way to convince itself and others of its rectitude: reams of data and research from the most visible and well-funded think tank on the right. A willingness to go to the brink doesn’t hurt, either.

While some of its compatriots have reconsidered their hardline stances since President Obama’s reelection — even Grover Norquist gave the GOP a hall pass on the fiscal cliff’s tax hike — Heritage Action has retrenched. On Wednesday, House Republicans backed down from the debt-ceiling standoff and voted to suspend it for three months without offsetting spending cuts. But Heritage Action has already settled on the next crisis point to use as leverage: rallying, cajoling, and shaming lawmakers to commit to a budget that balances within 10 years. And here, in part, is why Heritage Action calls itself the “new fangs” on the Heritage “beast”: It has no qualms about holding conservative members accountable to their promises — even if it risks a government shutdown.

(Read the whole thing. It explains why Tea Partier Jim DeMint decided to jump there.)

So, the upshot is that this should be a lot of fun. The right wingers are locked in a battle between the hardcore activists and the Party apparatchiks who want to figure out a way to win. I suppose it was ever thus with a party that becomes extreme.

The wildcard is the billionaire funders. Will they stick with the Party? Who knows? But they certainly do have plenty of money to cover their bases either way:
There has been some discussion over the last year or so that the growth of income inequality—especially the trends favoring the top 1.0 percent—had been reversed in the recent downturn and, therefore, policymakers need not focus on the overall increase in income inequality since the late 1970s.

Newly available data on the labor earnings of the very highest earners are the first indicators available for 2011 enabling a determination as to whether this is indeed the case…

Key findings include:

Those at the top are seeing their wages rebound quite strongly in the recovery.

Following a 15.6 percent decline from 2007 to 2009, real annual wages of the top 1.0 percent of earners grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011.

The real annual wages of the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

Wage inequality grew substantially over 1979–2007, lessened in the 2007–2009 downturn, and began expanding again in the 2009–2011 recovery. Trends over the next few years will determine whether wage inequality returns to or exceeds the heights reached in 2007 or 2000—or simply remains far higher than at any time in the 1980s and 1990s.

Given the strong stock market recovery and wage growth at the top, the top 1.0 percent’s overall incomes (which include wages, capital gains, and other returns on financial assets) probably grew strongly in 2011, thereby increasing income inequality.

They can pretty much do what they want. And I, for one, will enjoy watching the billionaires fight it out for the soul of the GOP with the tea partiers and establishment clones as the gladiators. Bread and circuses — without the bread.

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