Month: February 2013

It’s the jerk factor, not the weight factor that’s the problem

by digby

I think this just about says it all:

I think that Chris Christie can be related to another Republican politician whose presidential ambitions, once seen as highly realistic, faded because his personality became too apparent—Rudy Giuliani.

Like Christie, Giuliani was a bombastic executive who rose to prominence as a tough-as-nails prosecutor in bare-knuckles US Attorneys’ offices. They both tended to “wear their emotions on their sleeve” as you very generously put it. Or put another way, Christie and Giuliani are both assholes.

And let’s not forget that there are a whole lot of so-called liberal Villagers who like to think of themselves as the same kind of “salt-o-the-earth” East Coast tough guys themselves. It makes them very happy to like a Republican so much and prove they aren’t progressive pansies.

This conversation was apparently spurred by comments about Christie’s weight and his reaction to them. It’s foolish for him to get angry about it. If he runs it’s going to be topic of conversation whether he likes it or not. I suspect he could turn it to his advantage if he were smart. After all, many Americans struggle with weight. But he seems to think he can bully people into not mentioning it, which just isn’t going to work. He’s a very big guy, much bigger than average, and people are going to talk about it.

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What is this “democracy” you speak of?

by digby

Meanwhile, back in the voting rights trenches, Ari Berman brings us the bad news:

In 2006, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for another twenty-five years. The legislation passed 390–33 in the House and 98–0 in the Senate. Every top Republican supported the bill. “The Voting Rights Act must continue to exist,” said House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, “and exist in its current form.” Civil rights leaders flanked George W. Bush at the signing ceremony.

Seven years later, the bipartisan consensus that supported the VRA for nearly fifty years has collapsed, and conservatives are challenging the law as never before. Last November, three days after a presidential election in which voter suppression played a starring role, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Section 5 of the VRA, which compels parts or all of sixteen states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to clear election-related changes with the federal government. The case will be heard on February 27. The lawsuit, originating in Shelby County, Alabama, is backed by leading operatives and funders in the conservative movement, along with Republican attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. Shelby County’s brief claims that “Section 5’s federalism cost is too great” and that the statute has “accomplished [its] mission.”

The current campaign against the VRA is the result of three key factors: a whiter, more Southern, more conservative GOP that has responded to demographic change by trying to suppress an increasingly diverse electorate; a twenty-five-year effort to gut the VRA by conservative intellectuals, who in recent years have received millions of dollars from top right-wing funders, including Charles Koch; and a reactionary Supreme Court that does not support remedies to racial discrimination.

The push by conservatives to repeal Section 5 comes on the heels of what NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has called “the greatest attacks on voting rights since segregation.” After the 2010 election, GOP officials approved laws in more than a dozen states to restrict the right to vote by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot—all of which disproportionately target communities of color. The states covered by Section 5 were significantly more likely to pass such laws than those that are not.

It’s getting a little bit hard to pretend we aren’t dealing with a racist, Southern GOP rump that’s determined to win by cheating, isn’t it? I just don’t know how anyone can ignore this thing anymore.

Read Berman’s long piece on this if you have the time. This one by Michael Lind is also quite interesting.

Then read this by Rick Perlstein and weep.

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Sequester in Boehner’s back pocket

by digby

If anyone’s believing the Republican kabuki dance over the sequester, particularly the part where they express dismay over its existence and blame the Democrats,  I’d suggest a bit more skepticism. This comment by John Boehner from last month should clear things up:

Mr. Boehner says he has significant Republican support, including GOP defense hawks, on his side for letting the sequester do its work. “I got that in my back pocket,” the speaker says. He is counting on the president’s liberal base putting pressure on him when cherished domestic programs face the sequester’s sharp knife. Republican willingness to support the sequester, Mr. Boehner says, is “as much leverage as we’re going to get.”

Not that this should be any surprise. And, of course, it’s not the liberal base that’s the key constituency in all this, it’s the military. That’s where they have the built-in bipartisan agreement that will allow them to put this ridiculous sequester debacle behind us. They’ll get some more entirely counter-productive austerity, I’m sure. But because it includes such draconian cuts to defense, this can will be kicked to the next phase, which the president hopes will include “entitlement cuts.”

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Post office blues

by digby

The idea that the Post Office is going the way of the dodo bird is truly depressing, for many reasons. One of the biggest is that the US mail remains one of the great equalizers in our country and is especially going to hit out-of-the-way communities and the elderly in a big way.

But let’s not pretend its financial woes are the result of technological advances. It’s because the congress created rules for its pension plan that are designed to bankrupt it. This was no accident. Much like the teachers unions, postal workers are a strong Democratic constituency targeted for political reasons. (And yes, just as with ACORN, there are bunch of idiot Democrats who are helping to dig their own graves.)

Losing all those jobs will have a particularly pernicious effect on middle class racial minorities. This is from last year’s announced cutbacks:

For years, getting a government job meant security, good pay and a pathway into the middle class for many Americans, especially African-Americans and other minorities.

But with government agencies at all levels forced to slash expenses in a bid to balance budgets, that long-held promise is in danger of being broken.

The U.S. Postal Service’s announcement Monday that it plans to close 252 mail processing centers and trim 28,000 jobs to fend off possible bankruptcy is part of a growing trend of shrinking government employment opportunities. For its workforce, which is disproportionately composed of African-Americans, the news means a lot more than the prospect of slower mail delivery.

“People have raised their kids with these jobs and bought homes in the black community,” said Adrian Peeple, 42, of South Holland, who began her career as a letter carrier at Chicago’s Wicker Park station in 1995. “It’ll be a huge impact if they started laying off or cutting back on people who’ve been working here for quite a bit of their lives.”

It was one of the best pathways out of poverty:

According to Philip Rubio, author of There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality, by 1970, blacks made up one-fifth of the postal workforce and “were twice as likely to work at the post office than whites,” which paved the way for many other minorities to seek employment by the agency. The potential cuts to 20 percent of the Postal Service workforce, and the slashing of its benefit programs have left many wondering what effect it will have on those in the black community who depend on the USPS for their livelihoods.

About 39 percent of all post office workers are minorities, and 21 percent are African-Americans, according to William Burrus, the former president of the American Postal Workers Union. In July 2010, Burrus told NPR the story of how he first gained employment in the postal service when he got out of the Army, and about how lucrative these types of careers were to those in the black community who were seeking employment in the 1950s.

“I was looking for a job, and discussed it with my father, who was a product of the upward mobility of the African-American community,” Burrus said on NPR. “And I asked his advice as to would the Postal Service be a good place of employment. ‘He said, it’s your decision, son. But they don’t have strikes.’ I had to find employment. I was a painter and I was looking for something more permanent and more reliable. And I was hired from the exam and went in as a career employee in February of 1958.”

Throughout the years, many black veterans and college graduates flocked to work at the post office, particularly because of the job security these opportunities promised, and “the fact that a civil service appointment meant something, and it was a decent salary, it had other benefits, sick leave, annual leave, and it has status in the community,” Rubio told NPR in the interview with the radio network and Burrus. “Black postal workers in general were oftentimes thought of as middle-class. And, in fact, they were also very much civically engaged. And what you have are people who are well-educated and able to find a job where the hours permit them to go to school or that they can work while they’re trying to start their businesses up or start their practices up.”

While the private sector resisted integrating its workforce the government complied. In fact, the federal workforce (and many state workforces) have been instrumental in bringing racial minorities and single working women into the middle class. And I have to suspect that this is one of the reasons why certain members of the right wing hate government so much. Dealing with government bureaucracy can be cumbersome and when it has a face they already feel hostility towards I suppose it just makes them hate it all the more.

The impending closing of the Post Office is about politics, just as the attack on teachers is about politics. These are two constituencies, largely minority and female, that the right is determined to break, for obvious reasons. Any Democratic complicity in doing that, on both a moral as well as political level, is malpractice.

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Well, not entirely absent.  There is one person who keeps bringing it up over and over again:

Hi, everybody. Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. That’s more than halfway towards the $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists and elected officials from both parties say we need to stabilize our debt. 

I believe we can finish the job the same way we’ve started it – with a balanced mix of more spending cuts and more tax reform. And the overwhelming majority of the American people agree – both Democrats and Republicans.

Now, my preference – and the preference of many Members of Congress – is to do that in a balanced, comprehensive way, by making sensible changes to entitlement programs and reforming our tax code. As we speak, both the House and Senate are working towards budget proposals that I hope will lay out this kind of balanced path going forward.

That’s right. The president is the only one at the moment keeping cuts to “entitlements” in the mix. (Oh, excuse me, “sensible changes” which, in the context of deficit reduction means cuts.) He’s been explicit that his proposals in the fiscal cliff negotiations are still on the table, which means “sensibly” changing the Medicare age 67 and and “sensibly” changing to the Chained-CPI.

What the president seems to be suggesting in his speech today is to replace the sequester with short term deficit reduction of some sort, probably along the lines of what the Senate Dems are talking about — with the promise of “entitlement” cuts and tax reform down the line. I happen to think that “tax reform” in this environment is probably going to be nothing more than kabuki — it’s very hard to see how the Republicans agree to anything that hikes taxes. (Andeven if they do, they’ll be the first things to be repealed when the GOP gets he chance.)  The “entitlement” cuts will, however, be very real.

What does all this add up to if he gets his way?  Well, he told us back in 2009:

President-elect Barack Obama will convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” in February designed to bring together a variety of voices on solving the long term problems with the economy and with a special focus on entitlements, he said during an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors this afternoon.

“We need to send a signal that we are serious,” said Obama of the summit.

Those invited to attend will include Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), ranking minority member Judd Gregg (N.H.), the conservative Democratic Blue Dog coalition and a host of outside groups with ideas on the matter, said the president-elect.

Obama’s comments came in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview that came just five days before he will be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States and become the first African American to hold that title.

Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices–particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare – should be made on his watch. “We’ve kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road,” he said.

Sound familiar?  That’s right, The “you know what”:

I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”

“Yes,” Obama said.

“And when will that get done?” I asked.

“Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?”

“And eventually sacrifice from everyone?” I asked.

“Everybody’s going to have give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin the game,” Obama said.

They re-branded “Grand Bargain” to “Balanced Approach” but it’s exactly the same thing. I don’t know why he has this Ahab-like obsession with doing those four things, but it’s clear that he still does. So far, we’ve only gotten health care reform. Thank God.  But it’s not for lack of trying on the president’s part that we haven’t “reformed entitlements” and the tax code (generally assumed to be “revenue neutral” by the way.) No matter what, he’s still out there pushing the Big Deal he announced at the beginning of his first term.

Why?  Well, I think he believes his own hype that he can solve these nettlesome funding problems for all time and leave office having transformed the way government works by doing it. Or maybe he just hasn’t bothered to reassess his assumptions over the past four years and is working on auto-pilot.  Either way his desire to “reform entitlements” has never wavered although interestingly, he never explicitly campaigned on it in either campaign. (He used “balanced approach” in the last one which is very vague.)

But it should be clear by now that this is his agenda. Pretending otherwise is foolish at this point.

And in case anyone needs to understand why he is so completely wrong about Social Security, please read this.

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More and more drones, coming to a neighborhood near you

by David Atkins

Local Ventura County Republican Assemblymember Jeff Gorell tweeted tonight about this adorable conference coming up on March 26-28 at the Hyatt Westlake in Thousand Oaks:

UAVs- A California Perspective, a Policy Symposium

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) spending is expected to almost double over the next decade, from annual worldwide expenditures of $6.6 billion to $11.4 billion, totaling more than $89 billion over the next ten years.Congress has directed the FAA to create six testing sites and a UAV certification plan by 2015. California is expected to earn one of those test sites.

Learn how you can benefit from the growth of the UAV market.

UAVs are currently in use or under consideration around the world and in U.S. unrestricted airspace for such civil and commercial uses as:

Wildfire Detection and Management
Pollution Monitoring
Event Security
Traffic Monitoring
Disaster Relief
Fisheries Management
Pipeline Monitoring & Oil and Gas Security
Meteorology – Storm Tracking
Remote Aerial Mapping
Transmission Line Inspection

And who is putting on this conference, aside from the drone manufacturers? Well, California’s high-profile Democratic Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom for one, as well as a number of other Democratic legislators including Assemblymember Steven Bradford, newly and narrowly elected Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi and Bell corruption reform advocate and Assemblymember Christina Garcia.

These aren’t bad people. But drones are big business, without even getting into law enforcement or military applications. And they’re not always a bad thing. The World Wildlife Fund recently purchased two unarmed drones to deal with poachers in wildlife preserves:

Conservation group WWF has announced plans to deploy surveillance drones to aid its efforts to protect species in the wild, as the South African government revealed that 82 rhinos had been poached there since the new year.

The green group says that by the end of the year, it will have deployed “eyes in the sky” in one country in Africa or Asia, with a second country following in 2014 as part of a $5m hi-tech push to combat the illegal wildlife trade.

Allan Crawford, project leader for the WWF Google technology project, who had just returned from the Kruger national park where many of South Africa’s rhinos are being killed, told the Guardian: “It’s a very scary prospect for rangers … they could run into very heavily armed gangs of poachers, there’s usually four or five of them, sometimes with dogs. They’ve also got wild animals to contend with – one ranger was recently attacked by a lion. They’re outnumbered, and sometimes poachers have night-vision equipment. There aren’t enough resources to tackle this in South Africa at the moment. This is where the new technologies come in, to help them.”

Drones are already being used by conservationists to monitor wildlife, such as orangutan populations in Sumatra, anti-whaling activists are using them against the Japanese whaling fleet, and a charity in Kenya recently beat its target of raising $35,000 in crowdfunding for a drone to protect rhinos and other wildlife in the country’s Laikipia district. One South African rhino farmer is even planning to put 30 drones in the sky himself. But the way the three key technologies are being used by WWF is “unprecedented”, Crawford said.

A pair of drones will be used in each of the two countries selected, which the group hopes to name within weeks, with plans to ultimately be operational in four sites by 2015, with different terrains. Crawford said the software and drones, which would be operated by rangers or local law enforcement, would “generate a strategic deployment of rangers in the most cost effective way, so they can form a shield between animals and poachers.”

Like most things in life, drones are a mixed bag. They can be used for good or ill. It’s hard to argue that putting this technology in the hands of the World Wildlife Fund to help track down poachers is a bad thing. On the other hand, giving civilian law enforcement boys even more toys to potentially abuse the civilian population isn’t attractive, either.

Regardless, the handwriting on drones is on the wall. Drones are coming, and lots of them in both private and public hands. The question for civil liberties groups is what sort of restrictions can and should be demanded on their use by what groups, and what sort of restrictions are likely to be politically possible.

It will be a long struggle, but a future without domestic surveillance drones–for good and evil–won’t be one of the outcomes.

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Bugger the bankers

by digby

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Hypocrites and paragons

by digby

Today’s Fox News Special Report showed footage of Candidate Obama in 2008 hotly condemning the Bush administration’s extra-judicial terrorism policies and then the “all-stars” debated whether President Obama and all his supporters are hypocrites. It’s hard to argue that there isn’t some serious hypocrisy going on here. Unless you are Stephen “those WMD are there somewhere I swear it” Hayes who insisted that he is not a hypocrite, he’s nothing but a pansy who’s letting terrorists run free, I tell you, free! Everyone nodded solemnly.

Then former CBS and CNN Ken dollJohn Roberts said that he spoke today with former Bush advisor John Yoo and got this quote:

It should be clear by now that President Obama and his terrorism advisers are hypocrites. But I’m glad they’re hypocrites because they chose to keep the policies that have kept us safe these 11 years instead of sticking to their misguided principles. If the Obama folks ever had the good graces to thank President Bush, I am sure he would say, “you’re welcome.”

What a jerk.

Meanwhile on MSNBC, Krystal Ball proves their point. She starts off saying that she’s mostly “ok” with the drone program but thinks it needs more transparency and oversight. And then she discusses what really bothers her about the debate: the idea that we should have the same standards for all presidents. No, I’m not kidding:

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

Look, I voted for President Obama because I trust his values and his judgment and I believe his is a fundamentally responsible actor. Without gratuitously slamming ex-president Bush I think he displayed extraordinary lapses in judgement in executing his primary responsibility as commander in chief and put troops in harms way imprudently. 

President Obama would have exercised better judgment and he has exercised better judgment. The way it stands now the drone program is exclusively within the domain of the Executive. Their protocol, their judgement. So yeah, I feel a whole lot better about the program when the decider, so to speak, is President Obama. That’s not to say that again the process shouldn’t be codified, that there shouldn’t be oversight. 

But really, is our standard so low that we would only grant powers to the executive that we would trust in the hands of a man who misled the nation into a war we never should have been involved in? What would George W. Bush do? That’s our standard? We would never allow a power to the presidency that we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving to George W. Bush? I think we can raise the bar a little bit from that. 

For a little perspective lets keep in mind that the president does have the unilateral power to drop nuclear bombs and destroy the whole planet. Do you feel the same about George W. Bush having that power as President Obama? Call me a hypocrite but I sure don’t.

Glenn Greenwald’s been calling this out for years, but I defy him to find a better example of the hypocrisy that drives him so crazy. Obviously, this is a fairly common belief among those who believe the President they voted for is “good” and the one they don’t like is “bad” but it’s rare that you see anyone boldly say that they think the standard should be different for their own because well … he’s a better person. It takes a certain courage (or blindness) to come right out and admit it.

I actually feel worse about President Obama seizing this power and using it because I voted for him and feel more responsible for it. (And no I don’t actually feel any better that President Obama has the nuclear football — I don’t think anyone should have it.)  Of course we should never allow a power to the presidency that we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving to George W. Bush! I realize that she believes Barack Obama can do no wrong, but does she not understand that whoever is elected after him might not be such a paragon? Or does she simply believe that when a Republican is in office we can just “take away” the power until someone she likes gets into office?

Personally, I think all presidents have too much power over life and death in this American Empire. But I really don’t trust presidents who create new powers to torture, kidnap and kill civilians with no due process and no accountability out of whole cloth. Bush did all that. As far as we know, Obama isn’t doing the torturing and kidnapping, but eliminating two out of three is hardly virtuous. And he’s doing exactly what Bush did by issuing secret memos giving him extra-judicial powers, this time to draw up lists of humans to be targeted by drone planes — and he gave himself the power to order the murder of American citizens with no due process at all. That’s new. Very new. I think if anyone had blind faith in the president’s judgment that fact should make them take their blinders off.

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Bill Clinton channels Paul Krugman

by David Atkins

I will never fully forgive the Clintons for foisting bank deregulation, NAFTA, the DLC, Alan Greenspan, Dow Jones worship, and a host of other ills on the country. But this is still a welcome change of pace:

The debt problem can’t be solved right now by conventional austerity measures, and that’s why Paul Krugman is right when he keeps talking about all these — everybody that’s tried austerity in a time of no growth has wound up cutting revenues even more than they cut spending because you just get into the downward spiral and drag the country back into recession.

Think Progress has the familiar data:

European countries that have attempted to spur growth by rapidly reducing their deficits have failed to accomplish either goal and have instead driven their economies back into recession. The United Kingdom’s deficit has hardly gotten smaller despite its austerity efforts and the country is on the verge of a triple-dip recession. Greece and Spain both have unemployment rates above 25 percent. Even Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is on the brink of another recession. The Eurozone as a whole slipped back into recession in November and its unemployment rate is at record highs.

Still, politicians in the United States have failed to heed Europe’s warnings, pursuing deficit reduction instead of job growth. Republicans blocked the American Jobs Act, which economists estimated would have spurred growth and created more than a million jobs, and have instead pursued damaging budget cuts that would have the opposite effect even amid evidence that the original American push for stimulus worked better than the European approach.

The cynic in me thinks we’ll probably see a bigger embrace of Keynesianism now that it’s precious military spending on the line. Even Republicans realize austerity is bad when it comes to the only kind of government spending they love.

Still, it’s nice to see Bill Clinton explicitly restate the reality that austerity during a recession and weak recovery is wrong and that Krugman is right. President Obama could easily make the same case with no political repercussions. Now would be the perfect time.

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“We’re from the Tea party and we’ve come to take our country back … zzzz”

by digby

The Tea Party lives. Bless their hearts. And they are turning to their One True North, the man who represents everything they believe in to deliver their message to the people. Well, except for the drug stuff. And the ending of Social Security, Medicare and the American empire stuff. But when it comes to taxes, he’s their guy:

Tea party leaders are turning to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, to deliver their message following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, a speech that will compete with the official Republican response.

Paul will make his remarks soon after Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, wraps up the GOP response Tuesday night, a Paul spokeswoman confirms to CNN.

“We are giving a voice to the tea party movement when the mainstream media and the Republican establishment wants to write us off as dead,” said Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. This is the third year in a row that Kremer’s organization has sponsored the tea party response.
[…]
Paul will deliver his remarks before an audience at the National Press Club, which is located just a stones throw away from the White House.

“We expect many of our supporters and many of Rand Paul’s supporters, freedom loving, liberty loving Americans to be there because this is our time to be heard,” Kremer said. “We are proud that Marco Rubio is giving the official Republican Party response because he is a tea party conservative and one of our own. But the Republican Party doesn’t necessarily speak for all conservatives and the tea party movement has its own voice and this is our chance to be heard.”

I’d say it was kind of cute except that they’ve shown they have some real teeth. If the Kochs and other Big Money Boys turn off the spigot they could be less successful in Senate races in the future, but they’ll still be able to deliver in the House. And it sounds like they’re going to be able to tap into that rich vein of right wing victimization to keep their movement going for a while. There’s nothing quite as powerful to these folks as the idea that they’re being persecuted from all sides.

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