Month: February 2013

Your moment of zen

by digby

… sort of:

An internal investigation of FreedomWorks—the prominent conservative advocacy group and super-PAC—has focused on president Matt Kibbe’s management of the organization, his use of its resources, and a controversial book deal he signed, according to former FreedomWorks officials who have met with the private lawyers conducting the probe. One potential topic for the inquiry is a promotional video produced last year under the supervision of Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the group and a Kibbe loyalist. The video included a scene in which a female intern wearing a panda suit simulates performing oral sex on Hillary Clinton. [Author’s note: The previous sentence contains no typos.]

Read on for the gory details.

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Elizabeth the Stalwart


by digby

And here I always heard that new Senators had to be seen and not heard for at least four years before they were allowed to assert themselves in even the tiniest ways:

Maybe this is one way that women can make the difference.  If you’ve had to fight every step of the way to be seen and heard, perhaps you aren’t all that willing to STFU out of respect for the patriarchal traditions that did everything to keep you down.

Or maybe it’s just that Senator Warren is awesome.

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Ted Cruz can’t help it that his voice, his intonation, his posture at the microphone, and his overall style of speaking are so strongly reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s, who died long before Cruz was born.  

He can help it that his insinuations, without any evidence, that Chuck Hagel could be taking money — from North Korea (!), from Saudi Arabia or Iran — so clearly follow the McCarthyite model.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cruz studied McCarthy and considers him a role model. He’s certainly no dummy and is sophisticated enough to know exactly how he sounds.

Needless to say, I agree that Cruz is one to keep an eye on. Everyone seems to believe that it’s inevitable now that the GOP will make its move to the middle. But they could just as easily turn even more to the political style of newly minted Senator Ted Cruz.

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Freedom of religion for the Market Worshippers?


by digby

Perhaps we haven’t gone 100% irrational just yet:

Late last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied a for-profit company’s request for an order permitting it to ignore federal regulations requiring it to provide birth control coverage to its employees. As with many of these cases filed in other courts, the corporation argued that it should be immune to the law because the companies’ shareholders object to birth control on religious grounds. It should be noted that this is a preliminary order and that the court’s ultimate resolution of the case could be different. Nevertheless, a majority of the three judge panel concludes that “a secular, for-profit corporation, Conestoga has no free exercise rights under the First Amendment, and is not a ‘person’” for purposes of a federal law enhancing the protection available to people with religious objections to federal laws.

In a concurring opinion, Nixon-appointed Judge Leonard Garth explains why the owners of a for-profit corporation should not be able to impose their religious beliefs on the corporation’s employees:

[F]or-profit corporate entities, unlike religious non-profit organizations, do not—and cannot—legally claim a right to exercise or establish a “corporate” religion under the First Amendment or the RFRA. As the District Court noted, “[g]eneral business corporations … do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors.” Unlike religious non-profit corporations or organizations, the religious liberty relevant in the context of for-profit corporations is the liberty of its individuals, not of a profit-seeking corporate entity.

Conestoga further claims that it should be construed as holding the religious beliefs of its owners. This claim is belied by the fact that, as the District Court correctly noted, “‘[i]ncorporation’s basic purpose is to create a distinct legal entity, with legal rights, obligations, powers, and privileges different from those of the natural individuals who created it, who own it, or whom it employs’ . . . . It would be entirely inconsistent to allow the Hahns to enjoy the benefits of incorporation, while simultaneously piercing the corporate veil for the limited purpose of challenging these regulations.”

Of course they want it both ways.  And if this were to proceed in their favor, they’d be able to assert “religious liberty” in all kinds of ways while avoiding individual liability. At which point, the corporation would be a religion under the law. (Not that it isn’t in practice already …)

Who knows where this goes when it gets to the high court. But this is a good sign that the courts generally haven’t lost their marbles and decided to grant “religious freedom” to a capitalistic enterprise.

Personally, I believe that all religious freedom belongs to individuals, but that’s just me.

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QOTD: Ed Kilgore

by digby

Ed says:

“The nasty little surprise conservatives are preparing for us when we all finally get around to “tax reform” is that they will launch a major assault on the EITC, which they increasingly associate with the “lucky duckies” who don’t pay federal income taxes.”

This is what “tax reform” is going to end up looking like in the end. Perhaps some moneyed interests will temporarily lose their “tax expenditures” in exchange for scaling back all these lucky ducky incentives but only the former has full time lobbyists lining up to find new ways to get them back into the tax code.

Keep in mind that these lucky ducky tax expenditures have been the only way that liberals have been able to do much of anything for working families and the poor for the past half century. With universal, government programs off the table, this was it. And now we are going to start the march to their dismantling too.

And since the Democrats have decided that the best thing we can do for Americans is temporarily extract some taxes from rich people to pay down the deficit (so that their investments will be secure)I’m not holding my breath that they’ll put up much of a fight. once again, it will depend upon the GOP being full-fledged lunatics. And I suppose that’s actually a fairly good bet.

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According to the Village, the president refuses to propose cuts to entitlements

by digby

The ultimate Villager was relieved that the president didn’t use his patented combative, in your face language to insult the poor Republicans in his State of the Union:

In days leading up to the address, White House aides had been dropping broad hints to the press that a newly combative Obama would once again stick it to Republicans. Not an olive branch, reported Politico, but a cattle prod. Instead, Obama wisely chose to use tempered, constructive language in addressing the other side. That didn’t change the atmosphere much in Washington — but give the president credit. He didn’t make it worse either. It would be good to hear the Republicans act in the same spirit.

Yeah, he’s been “sticking it to the Republicans” for years now. But luckily he “wisely” didn’t make it worse. I’m sure the Republicans will respond in kind because despite all the horrible, insulting rhetoric the President has been using against the poor little dears, they’ve always shown themselves to be so kind, caring and decent in their dealings with him.

Read the whole silly article. It’s the political establishment in a nutshell: stuck in some funhouse mirror version of reality that sees the Great Conciliator as an equal partner in Washington gridlock. They simply cannot accept the fact that their vaunted grown-ups have morphed into a monster that refuses take yes for an answer when the President offers them all that Gergen insists must be done and instead construct some completely fictional narrative in which the president is equally obstreperous and unbending. Seriously, look at this:

The biggest disappointment: For the president, this speech was probably his last opportunity to break open the impasse over federal deficits. Only a game-changing proposal had any chance of success — putting a bold offer on the table of significant changes in Medicare and Social Security along with a tax overhaul in exchange for the GOP dropping the sequester and accepting near-term investments in infrastructure and the like.

Apparently, the fact that he’s offered these things over and over again with an eagerness bordering on obsession, doesn’t count. I’m not sure what more he could do short of issuing an executive order requiring the Social Security and Medicare administrations to cut off the elderly immediately.

Not that I’m defending his addiction to offering up the social insurance programs, but it’s mind boggling that the Villagers continue to portray him as being the one who refuses to deal. But when I think about it, perhaps it’s a good thing. By failing to communicate that our popular president is the one who consistently offers to cut needed benefits for some of our most vulnerable citizens, perhaps the Democratic Party might just be lucky enough to hold on to a tiny bit of credibility with which to make an argument for their continued relevance to people who vote for them.

Hopeless, just hopeless …

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What about the children?

by digby

To hell with them. At least that’s always been the GOP approach to universal pre-school. Rick Perlstein tells the depressing tale:

The breakthrough research on the payoffs to investment in “universal pre-K” was done by a Nobel Prize-winning economist named James Heckman of the University of Chicago—and Heckman is, fundamentally, a prototypical University of Chicago economist, a neoclassicist. So it’s a “conservative,” market-based idea, right? Like cap and trade. Like the “individual mandate” in health insurance. So how could conservative Republicans object?

Right. You see where I’m going with this.

As he noted earlier in the piece, the current scheme set forth by President Obama is a prototypical “compromise” that has us creating ridiculous private-state-local “partnerships” along with “incentives” and “credits” and a bunch of other nonsensically inefficient ways to deliver a service that people need. Twenty-five years ago the Democrats threw in the towel on any kind of direct government program and adopted this clunky system as the only way to help citizens. And yet, inevitably, the Republicans still reject these scheme more often than not.  One might begin to think they are opposed to “universal” anything, no matter how it’s delivered, even if it’s for tiny children.

But the Democrats remain committed to this path in spite of the fact that it rarely works very well and that’s only in the rare case they get something passed. That, Rick says, is what’s very likely to happen with this pre-school plan.

The preschool backlash is one of the oldest stories in the history of “New Right” organizing. A bill proposing a national system of nursery schools, under the authorship of Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, was on a glide-path to passage in 1971. “Backed by Demorats, Republicans, and a highly mobilized set of interest organizations,” historian Kimberly J. Morgan has written, “the bill’s middle-class appeal made it seem like a political sure bet in the months preceding the the 1972 election season.”

The experts agreed: what could go wrong?

Then came a visitation from a new political planet: the nascent “family values” right.

A young University of South Carolina graduate named Connie Marshner accepted a job in 1971 on Capitol Hill as a secretary for Young Americans for Freedom. Quietly, on her off hours, according to historian Leo Ribuffo, she transformed herself into an expert on a bill she decided was the quintessential example of the “therapeutic state invading the home.” Wrote Ribuffo, “Marshner established a letterhead organization and sent out mailings denouncing Mondales bill to local church women. To her own surprise this small effort prompted hundreds of thousands of letters to the White House.” Nixon vetoed the bill—with a speech that precisely tracked the nascent religious right rhetoric on the family: its good intentions, he said, were “overshadowed by the fiscal irresponsibility, administrative unworkability, and family-weakening implications of the system it envisions…our response to this challenge must be…consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.”

Civilization having been preserved—for the time being—Mashner claimed credit, began making the mobilization of “little clusters of mainly…evangelical, fundamentalist Mom’s groups” her life’s work, then got a job as head the new Heritage Foundation’s education department, and was soon in Kanawha County, helping organize the textbook wars there.

Mondale’s plans and Obama’s are as different as night and day: the 1971 law really did establish federal daycare centers; the Obama legislation will surely push some byzantine scheme to distance the federal money from the local implementation as much as humanly possible, insulating it from any conceivable charge he has in mind Maoist-style mind-control camps for three year olds. So, home free, right? Well, if you believe that, I’ve got an Obama death panel to sell you right here. And a contraption exemption for religious employers.

This is a fool’s game, which some of us recognized back in the mid 90s when Clinton was working the whole thing hard and basically got nowhere. It’s not about government per se. It’s about government competing with the religious domination of the private sphere (and, by extension, the patriarchal domination of the family and the work-place.) But I’m going to guess that the president and other establishment Democrats have become committed to this nonsense on the merits. After all, Barack Obama seemed to genuinely believe in it during the campaign of 2008:

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Until liberals really understand what this is really about (which they can easily do by reading Perlstein and Corey Robin) all their attempts to make government insure fundamental opportunity and security to its people will be met with resistance from the right, no matter how “entrepreneurial” and “dynamic” the plan. That’s because it’s a threat to what they see as the natural order and they will not give that up without a fight.

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Faded Empire

by digby

Robert Wright recently left his blog at The Atlantic to write a book about Buddhism. I will miss it. He’s probably my favorite public intellectual (if one can have favorites in such a strange category.) Anyway, he characteristically wrote something truly profound in his last post, which is worth reading in its entirety. This piece however is so important, I wanted to excerpt it for the record on this blog:

[1] The world’s biggest single problem is the failure of people or groups to look at things from the point of view of other people or groups–i.e. to put themselves in the shoes of “the other.” I’m not talking about empathy in the sense of literally sharing people’s emotions–feeling their pain, etc. I’m just talking about the ability to comprehend and appreciate the perspective of the other. So, for Americans, that might mean grasping that if you lived in a country occupied by American troops, or visited by American drone strikes, you might not share the assumption of many Americans that these deployments of force are well-intentioned and for the greater good. You might even get bitterly resentful. You might even start hating America.

[2] Grass-roots hatred is a much greater threat to the United States–and to nations in general, and hence to world peace and stability–than it used to be. The reasons are in large part technological, and there are two main manifestations: (1) technology has made it easier for grass-roots hatred to morph into the organized deployment (by non-state actors) of massively lethal force; (2) technology has eroded authoritarian power, rendering governments more responsive to popular will, hence making their policies more reflective of grass roots sentiment in their countries. The upshot of these two factors is that public sentiment toward America abroad matters much more (to America’s national security) than it did a few decades ago.

[3] If the United States doesn’t use its inevitably fading dominance to build a world in which the rule of law is respected, and in which global norms are strong, the United States (and the world) will suffer for it. So when, for example, we do things to other nations that we ourselves have defined as acts of war (like cybersabotage), that is not, in the long run, making us or our allies safer. The same goes for when we invade countries, or bomb them, in clear violation of international law. And at some point we have to get serious about building a truly comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation regime–one that we expect our friends, not just our enemies, to be members-in-good-standing of.

You might ask: If I’m so concerned about international affairs, why am I writing a book about Buddhism? Of course, you might not ask that. But just in case:

Part of the answer is that, though writing in this space has led me to emphasize my concerns about policy and politics, they aren’t my only concerns. But another part of the answer is this:

If you look at the three challenges I’ve just identified in italics, you’ll see that the second two wouldn’t be so challenging if the first challenge was met. It’s because Americans don’t put themselves in the shoes of non-Americans that they (with the best of intentions) support policies that generate hatred of America and (without even realizing it) act as if rules are things that should be obeyed by everyone except America and its allies. (I don’t mean to suggest that Americans are the only people who make these mistakes. It’s just that I’m an American writing mainly for Americans, so I focus on American policies.) So if we could address the first challenge in a big way–if we could get much better at seeing the world from the point of view of others–that would go a long way toward saving the world from the grim fate that otherwise may await it. And, without going into a lot of detail, I’d just say that (1) the Buddhist view of the mind helps illuminate this challenge, as does modern psychology, and I’m interested in seeing how the challenge looks from these two vantage points; and (2) Buddhist meditative practice, in which I’ve dabbled, can be effective in addressing the challenge.

I am not a religious person, but I can certainly see how Buddhist meditative practices might be of help in sorting out this problem.

I find that as I get older, this simple insight about the necessity of seeing things from the other point of view is key. And Americans, of all the people on earth, seem to have no sense of it at all, and we are the global behemoth that dominates the world. That is a very, very bad combination. A small country can afford to be insular if it chooses. It will only hurt itself. But a large country with such an attitude is bound to make powerful enemies — and antagonize its allies.

I think George W. Bush expressed the typical American view of its own “exceptional” nature: “I don’t know why they hate us. We’re so good.” Except, of course, we aren’t. We’re a typical nation that is both good and bad but we have so much power and so much wealth and we are so thoughtless to the long term effects of our behavior that everyone in the world now has their eye upon us and judges us with a profound lack of trust. As we would do in their shoes.

I don’t think we are so “exceptional” that we will not pay a dear price for being so self-absorbed that as our empire faded, we didn’t care — or even know — how we looked to the rest of the world. As Wright warns, we are asking for trouble by doing this. Big Trouble.

If the United States doesn’t use its inevitably fading dominance to build a world in which the rule of law is respected, and in which global norms are strong, the United States (and the world) will suffer for it.

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A short, progressive little Valentine’s Day game

by David Atkins

As a break from your standard political fare, enjoy a short little progressive Valentine’s Day themed puzzle game from Krang Games. It’ll only take five minutes of your time, challenge your brain a bit and warm your heart. You won’t regret it a bit.

There’s love enough in this world for everyone.

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No, drone “pilots” are not heroes, they’re office workers

by digby

Ok, now we’re getting downright ridiculous:

They fight the war from computer consoles and video screens.

But the troops that launch the drone strikes and direct the cyberattacks that can kill or disable an enemy may never set foot in the combat zone. Now their battlefield contributions may be recognized.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that for the first time the Pentagon is creating a medal that can be awarded to troops who have a direct impact on combat operations, but do it from afar.

“I’ve seen firsthand how modern tools, like remotely piloted platforms and cyber systems, have changed the way wars are fought,” Panetta said. “And they’ve given our men and women the ability to engage the enemy and change the course of battle, even from afar.”

The work they do “does contribute to the success of combat operations, particularly when they remove the enemy from the field of battle, even if those actions are physically removed from the fight,” he said.

The new blue, red and white-ribboned Distinguished Warfare Medal will be awarded to individuals for “extraordinary achievement” related to a military operation that occurred after Sept. 11, 2001. But unlike other combat medals, it does not require the recipient risk his or her life to get it.

Officials said the new medal will be the first combat-related award to be created since the Bronze Star in 1944.

A recognition of the evolving 21st Century warfare, the medal will be considered a bit higher in ranking than the Bronze Star, but is lower than the Silver Star, defense officials said.

The Bronze Star is the fourth highest combat decoration and rewards meritorious service in battle, while the Silver Star is the third highest combat award given for bravery. Several other awards, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, are also ranked higher, but are not awarded for combat..

Higher ranking than the Bronze star?!!! I’m sorry but those who kill people from a remote location, don’t get to be called heroes and there should be no special medals bestowed upon them. What’s it for, valiantly staying at the console even when they really had to take a pee? There’s nothing brave about manning computer screens to target and kill humans thousands of miles away. And it certainly degrades the very real bravery shown by those who risk their lives on the real battlefield.

The whole rationale for using these machines in this way is that it keeps Americans from being in harms way. That’s the bargain everyone seems so keen on. So, if you kill people in the line of duty from the safety of a comfortable chair, the best you can say for it is that it’s your job. Which you get to go home from every night. Where you can sit on your comfortable couch and play video games doing substantially the same thing. That’s should be enough reward for any soldier.

One of the most salient arguments against drone warfare is that it makes it much too easy for a nation to kill people in far off places with little immediate risk to its own. It changes the equation for the Commander in Chief significantly since that risk is one of the main considerations against any war. Now they not only want to take the danger out of warfare, they want to bestow the mantle of bravery on those who operate the computers.

It’s actually rather insane when you think about it.

Update: I wrote about America’s fetish for military heroism before in this piece at MoJo.
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