He reached into their hearts today and found nothing by digby
Those who believe that the Republicans have been chastised by their losses should think again. I was reminded earlier today of the fact that the Senate couldn’t even pass the UN Treaty on disabilities.
Here’s a segment of Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell with the footage of a frail Bob Dole being dissed and rudely ignored on the Senate floor:
We used to believe that conservatives were all about respect for tradition and veneration of elders. That was probably always wrong to some extent. But this was a perfect example of just how far they’ve sunk into a nihilistic radicalism.
This was an easy one. They could have passed it easily as a tribute to their former colleague, a war veteran who served his entire life. They would have received great plaudits in the press and the voters would have been moved by their empathy and caring. One would certainly have thought that after a bruising election, they would have opted to take such an easy vote to temper their image as hard-hearted plutocrats who care nothing for the vulnerable (also known as “takers.”)
But they couldn’t do it. Anyone who thinks that the “kinder, gentler” rebranding that the GOP strategists are trying to create has a chance in hell of coming to pass needs to think again. These guys are still too far gone.
Gretchen Carlson: “The industry’s future looks dim. The United States simply hasn’t figured out how to do solar cheaply and effectively. You look at the country of Germany, it’s working out great for them… What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?”
Fox Business “reporter” Shibani Joshi: “They’re a smaller country, and they’ve got lots of sun. Right? They’ve got a lot more sun than we do. The problem is it’s a cloudy day and it’s raining, you’re not gonna have it.” Sure, California might get sun now and then “but here on the East Coast, it’s just not going to work.”
No really, that’s supposedly a reporter saying that.
The U.S. is lagging behind Germany in solar power generation, but it doesn’t have anything to do with our solar potential. In fact, the Southwest has “among the best photovoltaic resources in the world,” according to a report by GTM Research. And even the East Coast states have greater solar potential than Germany, as illustrated by this map from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
Unlike the U.S., Germany has a national solar policy, a quick, inexpensive permitting process, and a national mandate that utilities sign up rooftop installations under what’s known as a feed-in tariff–essentially a long-term contract whereby the utilities agree not just to allow the solar on their grids but also to buy the excess power from consumers.
Here in the US we prefer to concentrate all our focus on fracking. Its potentially lethal consequences give us that big thrill we love. That’s what makes us so darned exceptional.
Poor Krugman. He must be tired of trying to make people understand that austerity is the wrong prescription for the economy. But he soldiers on. Thank God. This week he takes on the situational Keynesians of the GOP who are now crying about the ill economic effects of ending taxpayer support for the nice white engineers in the defense industry:
Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing.
Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity.
One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect.
Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force.
The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact.
But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming. Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders.
I know it seems obvious to people who read Paul Krugman. But the powers that be are still determined to take this opportunity to once again declare “the era of big government is over.” But according to Dave Weigel, they’re getting clever about how they plan to deal with these defense cuts:
[D]e-coupling the cuts from taxes put Republicans back where they were in December, when they passed a “sequestration replacement” bill that replaced all the defense savings with entitlement cuts. So you’re already hearing Republicans talk about ways to delay or alter the cuts, again. I’ve heard a number of current members make the point made here by the Ghost of Past Republican Failure.
Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, who was meeting with a few of his former colleagues on Wednesday at the Capitol, says Boehner’s playbook is “sharp,” since defense spending “can always be replaced during the appropriations process, after the cuts are put into place.”
Yes. If the sequestration happens, it’s only a mere four weeks until Republicans have to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government. They can move the money around again. That takes another cannonball out of the cannon.
Another one is being whisked away right now by Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Rep. Buck McKeon, who are schlepping the Down Payment to Protect National Security Act of 2013. It would replace the first year of defense cuts with austerity hiring freezes.
Weigel says this has deficit hawks in the GOP seeing red — of course. They play their role in this drama very well.
So, we have the president representing his patented balanced approach of chump change in exchange for big spending cuts to everything but defense, the hawks demanding a complete dismantling of government and the GOP leadership pushing some kind of plan to preserve defense spending by either staging a theatrical showdown and then putting the defense spending back in the budget or delaying cuts for a year with another 10% reduction in the entire federal workforce. (Or something else.) I’m going to take a wild guess that none of those plans will be good for the economy although the president’s insistence on putting “entitlements” on the menu means his plan is more likely to cause more of the pain in the future.
Who knows what they’re really going to end up with. But if those sequester defense cuts stick I’ll be very, very surprised. I don’t know how much people remember of the last round of base closings but it didn’t just cause an economic upheaval — it was a political nightmare. And we were in a period of peace and prosperity at the time. It’s tempting to think that the Democrats are now the hawks and the right wing is so obsessed with spending that they’re willing to slash military spending, but I think that’s a pipe dream. The Democrats with contractors and bases in their districts have always been for military spending — and the chance that a majority of the GOP agrees to cut the military is nil. Whether they will agree to pretend to cut the military in the short run (as Tom Delay suggests) is another question.
The research indicates a strong correlation between social fear and anti-immigration, pro-segregation attitudes. While those individuals with higher levels of social fear exhibited the strongest negative out-group attitudes, even the lowest amount of social phobia was related to substantially less positive out-group attitudes.
“It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative. People who are scared of novelty, uncertainty, people they don’t know, and things they don’t understand, are more supportive of policies that provide them with a sense of surety and security,” McDermott said.
“In this way, the definition of unfamiliar may shift across time and location based on experience and education, and a genetically informed fear disposition is hardly permanent or fixed,” the researchers wrote.
But this is doubtless true of humanity worldwide. There is still something particularly virulent about American conservatism, as well as the sort of conservatism that manifests as Islamism across much of the world. As with the European Middle Ages and the wars of Reformation, there’s something particularly nasty about the triple combination of fear, religion and state power. Throw in race resentment and it gets very bad indeed.
But there is something that can be done to mitigate genetic predisposition to irrational fear and conservatism:
The researchers make clear, however, that genetics plays only part of the role in influencing political preferences. Education, they found, had an equally large influence on out-group attitudes, with more highly educated people displaying more supportive attitudes toward out-groups and education having a substantial mediating influence on the correlation between parental fear and child out-group attitudes.
Education is the only way forward. It always has been.
If only politicians were this cute when they blatantly lied to our faces:
John, come here. John, can you explain to me why the sprinkles are emptied?
Well, they’re not empty. John, look at me.
They’re not empty. Did you eat those sprinkles?
No, I did not eat sprinkles. John, you have sprinkles on your face.
(John touches his face.)
Oh, no no. I did not eat sprinkles.
A look across the polling landscape on the Obama Administration’s increased reliance on drones suggests that support for the strikes is not only wide but also bipartisan.
A February 2012 Washington Post-ABC poll showed that eight in ten Americans (83 percent) approved of the Obama Administrations use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas — with a whopping 59 percent strongly approving of the practice. Support for the drone attacks was also remarkably bipartisan. Seventy six percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats approved of the policy.
In that same poll, respondents were asked whether they supported using drones to target American citizens who are suspected terrorists, the question that stands at the heart of the recent flare-up in Congress over the practice. Two thirds of people in the survey said they approved of doing so.
It’s not just Post-ABC polling that suggests the use of drones is widely popular with the American public. A September 2011 Pew poll showed that 69 percent of people said that the increased use of drones was a good thing while just 19 percent said it was a bad thing.
The reason drone strikes are popular? Because they are perceived to be effective in reducing the threat of terrorism without endangering American lives. (Polling on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has, for several years now, suggested that a majority of the public believes neither was worth fighting almost certainly due to the losses of American lives.) In a September 2011 Post-ABC poll, three-quarters of the public said drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Pakistan had been either ”very” or “somewhat” effective to reduce the threat of terrorism.
So, most people are more than willing for the US government to target anyone hey choose “over there” as long as American military personnel aren’t in danger? That’s obviously an immoral stance that most people probably don’t actually hold. They’re assuming that we’re only killing “bad guys” — and that we know who the bad guys are because it’s incomprehensible that our leaders would target people who aren’t bad. This is a powerful delusion that’s fed daily by our political and media establishment’s insistence that we are “exceptional” — and by that we mean “good.” I don’t know how you get past the basic chauvinism implicit in that belief. It’s very deeply held.
And yet we know that many of the so-called terrorists who were sent to Guantanamo weren’t terrorists, despite the assurances by our leaders that they were “the worst of the worst.” We know that they’ve killed numerous “number two” Al Qaeda leaders. In fact, we know they’ve lied again and again. So I think the only way to persuade Americans is to use the utilitarian argument, namely that killing people in far off lands from a distance with flying robots is only saving the lives of American military personnel (and Americans in general) in the very short run. The blowback from this frightening and unaccountable warmaking is likely to be very strong.
This technology is turning all the usual “just war” theorizing on its head and it needs to be thoroughly debated, out in the open. I understand it’s almost beyond temptation for boys not to use their toys as soon as they get them, but this one’s potentially as important as the development of the atomic bomb for the way it’s changing our conception of warfare. And not in a good way. I can only imagine the hatred it’s engendering. Lord knows, we’ve seen that movie before.
Update: Any hope that the government has really learned anything from all this is belied by Brennan’s testimony today:
LEVIN: Well, you’ve read opinions as to whether or not waterboarding is torture. And I’m just asking, do you accept those opinions of the attorney general? That’s my question.
BRENNAN: Senator, I’ve read a lot of legal opinions. I read an Office of Legal Counsel opinion from the previous administration that said waterboarding could be used. So from the standpoint of that, I can’t point to a single legal document on the issue. But as far as I’m concerned, waterboarding is something that never should have been employed, and as far as I’m concerned, never will be if I have anything to do with it.
LEVIN: Is waterboarding banned by the Geneva Conventions?
BRENNAN: I believe the attorney general also has said it’s contrary and in contravention of the Geneva Convention. Again, I’m not a lawyer or a legal scholar to make the determination as to what’s in violation of an international convention.
I’m sure Brennan will be absolved of all sin for making such a difficult personal judgement. But if he cannot take a position on the legality of torture then it’s quite clear that he knows it wasn’t legal. Why do they all do this ridiculous dance? To protect US Government officials from war crimes charges. Even the president uses the strange circumlocution “the US doesn’t torture.”
Mr. President, “eventually” won’t cut it on climate
by David Atkins
While much of the political oxygen is currently being sucked up drones, guns and hand-wrining over military cuts in sequestration, the world’s most pressing and dangerous threat is being put on the back burner.
President Obama’s message to House Democrats on Thursday: Yes, acting on climate change is important. But it’s going to have to wait in line.
Obama barely touched on energy policy during his roughly 20-minute address to the Democratic caucus on Thursday, spending more time on fiscal issues, guns and immigration.
But Democratic lawmakers questioned the president about climate change during Obama’s appearance at their retreat in Lansdowne, Virginia, Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) told reporters.
Reporters were not allowed at the question-and-answer session of the president’s visit.
“He said it’s very serious, and he wants it on the agenda. But you can’t do everything at once,” said Levin, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.
“I think his message is, it’s a major, major issue. We need to address it. We need to make sure we sequence each effort so we accomplish each,” the Michigan Democrat added. “I think you know, jobs is number one, economic growth, and that’s why sequestration is so important.”
I’m not sure these people understand the stakes. There are sequential tipping points involved in climate change. Tipping points that will be avoided this decade or not at all:
As emissions grow, scientists say the world is close to reaching thresholds beyond which the effects on the global climate will be irreversible, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and loss of rainforests.
“This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London.
Some tipping points have already passed, and some more are rapidly approaching. We’ve already hit the 1C threshold. We’re absolutely going to hit the 2C threshold no matter what we do. And it would take extraordinary effort to avoid hitting the 4C threshold if we started RIGHT NOW, as in today. David Roberts as the details:
It might seem that, given the extraordinary difficulty of hitting 2 degrees C, we ought to lower our sights a bit and accept that we’re going to hit 4 degrees C. It won’t be ideal, but hitting anything lower than that is just too difficult and expensive.
It’s seductive logic. After all, to hit 4 degrees C we would “only” have to peak global emissions in 2020 and decline thereafter at the relatively leisurely rate (ha ha) of around 3.5 percent per year.
Sadly, even that cold comfort is not available to us. The thing is, if 2 degrees C is extremely dangerous, 4 degrees C is absolutely catastrophic. In fact, according to the latest science, says Anderson, “a 4 degrees C future is incompatible with an organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable.”
Yeeeah. You’ll want to read that sentence again. Then you’ll probably want to pour yourself a stiff drink.
Obviously, “incompatible with an organized global community” is what jumps out, but the last bit, “high probability of not being stable,” is equally if not more important. One of the most uncertain areas of climate science today has to do with feedbacks — processes caused by climate change that in turn accelerate (or decelerate) climate change. For instance, heat can melt the Arctic permafrost, which releases methane, which accelerates climate change, which melts more permafrost, etc.
Right now, global emissions are rising, faster and faster. Between 2000 and 2007, they rose at around 3.5 percent a year; by 2009 it was up to 5.6 percent. In 2010, we hit 5.9 percent growth, a record. We aren’t just going in the wrong direction — we’re accelerating in the wrong direction.
(Most climate modeling scenarios, e.g. the Stern Report, underplay the current rate of emissions growth, leading to sunnier-than-justified results.)
The growth of emissions is making the task ahead more and more difficult. The longer we wait to start shrinking emissions, the faster we’ll have to shrink them to stay under budget.
No, Mr. President. This can’t wait. Whether the United States keeps both or just one aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf is irrelevant next to this issue. Whether the deficit is slightly larger or smaller tomorrow is irrelevant next to this issue. Whether we use manned or unmanned aircraft to kill people who are plotting against the United States is irrleevant next to this issue. Almost everything is less-than-relevant next to this issue.
But if momentary economics is truly important, then perhaps America might want to take a Keynesian approach as Professors Krugman and Stiglitz have advocated, and spend some money to create needed jobs in moving America out of the fossil fuel economy.
What a proud liberal achievement: devastating spending caps
by digby
Thinkprogress points out something that’s been overlooked in our zeal to “win” some more big budget battles:
Even without the spending cuts included in the so-called “sequester,” America’s domestic spending levels are scheduled to hit historic lows in the coming years. That’s because the Budget Control Act, signed into law as part of the plan to raise the debt ceiling in August 2011, capped future spending levels.
Those caps will ultimately reduce spending to its lowest level as a percent of the economy since the 1970s, according to a report from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Now, we know that it doesn’t matter to anyone that poor women and children have been cut off from the WIC program that put a minimum amount of food on the table. And certainly the last thing anyone thinks about is the coming deep cuts in child care and education. It’s just a bunch of kids after all. They can always be home schooled and their parents can beg on the streets.
And the elderly can always go to thrift stores and buy a cheap used blanket when their inadequate housing and heating subsidies are cut. And really, all those disabled people who are unable to get through the maze of the SS system once huge numbers of SSA jobs have been eliminated and 35 offices have been closed will just have to get jobs.
But what about these programs?
Food safety: The Food and Drug Administration nearly doubled its inspection of food imports between 2007 and 2011, but such inspections would be reduced by 24 percent under scheduled spending caps. Food imports are skyrocketing, but the FDA inspects only 2.3 percent of them. In addition, budget cuts have jeopardized implementation of major food safety reforms.
Aviation Safety: The Federal Aviation Administraton has faced $205 million in cuts to programs meant to help update its infrastructure, even as the department is switching its monitoring system to a safer one based on satellites.
Feeling really, really safe and secure are we? Do all the individualistic libertarian types have access to their own food inspection and airline safety? I doubt it. But there is a silver lining. When our food supply is tainted and airplanes fall out of the sky, they can blame it on the Big Bad Gummint which can’t do anything right.
I don’t know where this ends, but I have a sneaking suspicion there will be a whole lot of suffering that could have been prevented before it does.
Begging to be grow-ups: how the Democrats are destroying their own legacy
by digby
Greg Sargent reports that the democrats in the Senate are arguing among themselves as to whether to open the sequester negotiations with an offer of “a balanced approach” that includes more spending cuts along with some phony “revenue” or just open with the phony revenue:
“Democrats plan to bring a balanced plan that includes revenue and cuts to the table to avoid sequestration,” a Senate leadership aide tells me.
I couldn’t determine how much in cuts is being discussed, or where they would come from, but the aide noted that Dems have offered spending cuts “in every fiscal negotiation.” The aide said Dems were eying a possible one-to-one mix of cuts to revenues, or perhaps somewhat more in revenues, to stake out a stronger negotiating position.
There’s disagreement among Dems about how to proceed. The aide tells me that progressive Senators want a revenue-only offer but that Dem leaders disagree. “There has been significant pressure within the Democratic caucus to offer a revenue-only approach, but leaders have concluded that they must continue with the balanced approach that the American people have called for,” the aide says. “This is about being the adult in the room and offering a plan that can actually pass Congress.”
The President has already screwed the pooch on this with his statement that the Fiscal Cliff deal he offered is still on the table so there’s really no point in pretending that the Democrats won’t be offering up more cuts. Still, it could be useful if they at least tried to bluff a little bit before caving. It might not end up being quite as bad as it otherwise would be. (Of course, that means that Cokie and Ruth Marcus might not give them plaudits for being grown-ups and that would be the worst thing that could possibly happen.)
This could annoy some on the left who may worry there’s no percentage in offering cuts, since it will only allow Republicans to deride them as unserious and ask for still more, shifting the debate in their direction. But the White House is already on record saying it supports averting the sequester through a mix of revenues and cuts, so not even Obama could support an approach that only includes revenues.
What’s more, despite the left’s criticism in the past of offering cuts up front as part of an “adult in the room” strategy, this has arguably worked to some degree. During the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling fights, Republicans ended up caving specifically because it became overwhelmingly obvious to the public that they were the intransigent party standing in the way of compromise — the political risk of taking the blame for taxes going up on everyone, and then default, simply became too great.
The only problem with that is this, which Greg posted yesterday:
As a liberal, it’s hard for me to see how that translates into a big Republican cave. The Republicans always seek bigger cuts and then John Boehner clutches his pearls for a little while and then they “settle” for less. (Simply allowing tax rates for those making half a million dollars a year to revert to their 2001 levels is not exactly a major sacrifice.) The Democrats then take a huge victory lap for “forcing” them to cave. The Republicans seem to understand that impressing the Villagers is of less importance than achieving their most cherished policy goals, which is to shrink government. (After all, it’s only a matter of time before they are accorded “grown-up” status again, for whatever that’s worth.) The results illustrated above show exactly who’s winning and it sure isn’t anyone who cares about the health of the economy or the ability of government to deliver needed services to its people.
After this happens over and over again, one can only conclude that cutting trillions in government spending in an epic recession is the preferred policy of both parties. And it’s a terrible policy. It’s also a long term catastrophic error on the part of the Democrats to enthusiastically take credit for deficit reduction at exactly the wrong moment. They are cementing conservative economic ideology at their own expense. It’s political malpractice. When those chickens come home to roost it won’t be the liberals who are to blame (although I’m sure they’ll be blamed anyway.) It will be the “grown-ups” who fully bought in (or were too weak to resist) the economic ideology that destroyed the middle class.
