Month: February 2013

They want to kill the New Deal just as much as we want to save it.

by digby

It’s lately become a truism of sorts in progressive circles that conservatives don’t really care about anything but keeping taxes low for rich people. I agree that it is a prime directive, but I’m not convinced that it’s the only thing they care about. They have a very deep antipathy toward government for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they believe it takes their money and gives it to people they dislike. (The fact that they benefit as well is irrelevant — they believe they deserve it, those “others” don’t.)

Anyway, I think Ed Kilgore is right on the money about this:

The problem here isn’t so much that conservatives value “entitlement reform” less than they claim (vis a vis holding the line on taxes for the wealthy): it’s that conservatives only consider major benefit cuts and structural changes in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security “entitlement reform.” When the administration talks about major long-term reductions in Medicare and Medicaid spending via major government-driven changes in how health care is delivered and how much is paid, conservatives go “la-la-la-la can’t hear you.”

For some perhaps that’s because they don’t believe government can actually execute cost containment via its purchasing power without major reductions in the quality of care. But for others it’s because the point isn’t to save money, it’s to shrink government, and the “immoral” dependence on it that middle-class entitlements symbolize.

There’s an interesting middle ground of proposals that cut benefits but don’t change the basic structure of the entitlements. They include ideas like “chained CPI,” adjustments in the retirement age, and greater means-testing that the president has hinted he might accept in a really “grand” bargain. I get the impression conservatives are a bit conflicted on the value of these kind of benefit cuts: they’re not the sort of root-and-branch change or wholesale privatization they want, but have the value of “breaking the seal” on entitlement reform and giving bipartisan cover to much more radical proposals from the Right.

The bottom line, though, is that your average conservative is as focused on breaking down the New Deal/Great Society safety net as your average progressive is in maintaining it more or less exactly as it is. In this struggle, money is a talking point, but not the actual center of the argument.

Wondering about how this fits into their historical patterns, I asked Rick Perlstein about it the other day. He agreed with Kilgore that they are confused and I think that’s right. They are being offered things they should, by all rights, be thrilled to take. But they are afraid that by taking the president up on his offers to “reform entitlements” they’ll lose the bigger argument. They’re probably wrong about that — degrading the social insurance programs will make them less reliable and less popular. But they aren’t willing to take that risk. And I, for one, am grateful.

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The era of budget battles is upon us (unfortunately) 

by digby

This article in Roll Call about the state of play on the sequester in the House GOP sounds about right.  It’s a mess.But regardless, let’s just say I remain skeptical that politicians of either party will allow draconian defense cuts to really kick in. How they get to an agreement on that is the real question in my mind.

If the Republicans were really wily they’d be squeezing the Dems for cuts to the “entitlements” which the president is clearly eager to do.  But that doesn’t seem to be their game.  They just want to cut the hell out of “stuff” other than Social Security and medicare, which their base depends upon. Or maybe they just want to create drama around the budget and prove to their Limbaugh addled voters that they are true believers. Whatever the case, the hardcores are still saying their terms are huge cuts, no revenues.

The real question is whether Boehner, Cantor, Ryan and the rest of the nominally sane leadership are willing to bite the very wealthy defense contractor hand that feeds them. If the President and the Democrats were willing to do the same — as well as risk being tarred as unpatriotic and hating the troops — they could put these folks in a very uncomfortable position and force Boehner to break the Hastert rule again and pass something with mostly Democratic votes. (This time he really could be putting his speakership at risk, but it’s not as if he wouldn’t be well taken care of.)

If there’s a weak link in that scenario, I’m afraid it’s the Democrats who I think are unlikely to push this far enough to force a repeal of the sequester, which is really the only way out. Moreover, I’m not sure the administration really wants that.  They still seem to think it’s important to be seen as raging deficit hawks. But it really is the only sane answer to this problem. The sequester was a delaying tactic to get both parties out of a logjam and through the election.  They need to end the fiction and move along.  After all  it’s not as if they can’t play this game again if they choose — there’s always a budget, debt ceiling, appropriations etc they can take to the brink and I’m going to guess that until this economy improves and/or the Republicans purge themselves of their lunacy, that’s exactly how it’s going to go.

The Democrats need to stop thinking they can reach some perfect deal that will allow them to “put it behind them” so they can focus on other issues.  It’s just not going to happen any time soon. This is the fundamental political fight of our time. Whatever bipartisan consensus ever existed is gone and we are engaged in an intense battle about the role of the federal government in American life. They need to win one campaign at a time and prepare for the next one. It’s going to be a slog.

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David Brooks tells three whoppers in 10 seconds

by David Atkins

Fresh off his humiliation by Ezra Klein, Villager-par-excellence David Brooks doubled down on NPR yesterday. Speaking of sequestration, Brooks said:

In fact, it cuts in the worst of all possible ways. It doesn’t cut the things that are actually leading the long-term debt problem, like Medicare and Social Security. It cuts the things people actually like, like National Institutes of Health and stuff like that. So, to me, it’s a political disaster in the making for Republicans.

Their problem is they don’t want to sign on to any more tax increases, given they’ve already given a lot on that ground. So they’re sort of stuck. But I wish they’d wiggle out of it.

There are three incredible whoppers here:

1) Social Security does not contribute to the debt “problem.” It’s a self-funding program temporarily losing ground due to the recession, with an easily correctable shortfall decades from now. Further, it’s debt the government owes to itself at low interest rates, which doesn’t impact the overall debt picture.

2) Even if one gave Brooks the benefit of the doubt on Social Security and the debt, Brooks is so awash in hatred of “entitlements” that he thinks Republicans will be hated by voters for cutting discretionary spending “things people actually like,” but not for cutting two of the most cherished programs in American history. Not to mention that while all Americans will need them eventually, Medicare and Social Security currently benefit seniors, one of the most Republican demographic constituencies in the country. Does Brooks not believe that seniors will be extremely upset if their Social Security and Medicare payments are slashed? Does Brooks not remember that the Republican victories of 2010 were largely due to Republicans making the false claim that the Affordable Care Act would take money from Medicare and give it to “those people”?

3) Brooks thinks that Republicans have “already given a lot” on tax increases. The data begs to differ:

It’s remarkable that David Brooks still has a job in punditry. Or it would be, if accountability mattered a whit in the Village.

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Jackass of the week: Dana Rohrabacher

by digby

Who’s responsible for the hate? Look to congress …

As a DREAMer, a Californian, and a civically engaged college student, I have painfully discovered that a major source of toxicity comes from members of Congress themselves.

Since learning in high school that I was undocumented, I’ve known that people struggled with the idea of undocumented Americans living and working alongside them. But I have never before experienced the kind of naked hostility I did when I attended a meeting in Washington to discuss citizenship legislation with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who represents my hometown in California’s 48th district.

I have lived in Costa Mesa since my parents brought our family here when I was 3 years old, and it is the only home I have ever known. I played in TeWinkle Park with my brothers and cheered for the Mustangs at Costa Mesa High School. I was a part of the Business Academy team that placed 5th in the nation my senior year. Now I am 18 years old, working and going to college full time. Last November I went door to door to encourage people who could vote to support more funding for our schools, and because of our civic engagement we showed that Californians care about education.

I work hard, I study hard, I pay taxes, and I have applied for the deferred action program that President Barack Obama instituted last year for young undocumented Americans like me.

On Feb. 6, I went to speak with Rep. Rohrabacher at his Washington office about the need to include a roadmap to citizenship in an immigration bill. President Obama has made it clear that a roadmap to citizenship should be part of legislation, and bipartisan groups from the Senate and the House of Representatives have begun to talk seriously about creating a better immigration process for people like me and my family. Support for citizenship is growing; I was excited to talk with a member of Congress about the possibilities, even if he wouldn’t agree with me in the end.

I wanted to tell Rep. Rohrabacher my story, I wanted to explain that I have no other home than Costa Mesa, I wanted to speak for all those in my community who are too afraid to talk about their status, all those who live in the shadows and who have had their families torn apart. But when I told him I was an undocumented American he stiffened visibly. He got angry and told me he “hates illegals.” He pointed his finger at me and asked — who are you, that you think you’re so important?

He hates “illegals”, but he loved the Taliban.

A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, “If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy.”

I dunno, the right wing has a lot in common with the Taliban. Before that unfortunate incident on 9/11 Dana and his pal Grover Norquist were bffs with the super-conservative, highly religious, patriarchal Taliban. I’m going to guess they don’t like “illegals” either.

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Watching JJ squirm

by digby

Because I just can’t get enough of this stuff:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defended President Barack Obama at a Phoenix town hall Wednesday when a constituent asked him why Congress had not impeached the president.

“I do not believe that the President has committed impeachable offenses — that’s high crimes,” McCain said in response to a woman named Angelica. While McCain received scattered applause for his answer, Angela received significantly more cheers from the audience for her question.

“But I would remind you, and I hate to remind you, I really dislike reminding you — the president just was reelected by a majority of the American people,” he added.

It was a strangely familiar position for McCain, who, during the 2008 presidential election, famously defended then-candidate Obama at a town hall when a questioner said the Democratic candidate was “an Arab.”

Over four years later, McCain is still dealing with conspiracy theories. One of the last people to ask McCain a question on Wednesday asserted that Obama won elections “because of voter fraud.”

What does he expect? What do any of these Republicans expect? They’ve been peddling bizarroworld reality for a very long time. I agree that it’s shocking so many people believe this crap, but there you have it.

And, by the way, when it really counted, McCain was spinning like a top trying to get re-elected. And every day that he pimps Benghazi like it means something, he adds to this lunacy.

The ticking carbon bomb will explode soon

by David Atkins

While most of Washington obsesses over which grandmothers and minimum wage workers the nation will place on a cat food diet in order to please David Brooks, the Confidence Fairies and Bond Overlords, a ticking time bomb is about to explode in the permafrost:

Nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere’s land surface is covered in permanently frozen soil, or permafrost, which is filled with carbon-rich plant debris — enough to double the amount of heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere if the permafrost all melted and the organic matter decomposed.

According to a paper published Thursday in Science, that melting could come sooner, and be more widespread, than experts previously believed. If global average temperature were to rise another 2.5°F (1.5°C), say earth scientist Anton Vaks of Oxford University, and an international team of collaborators, permafrost across much of northern Canada and Siberia could start to weaken and decay. And since climate scientists project at least that much warming by the middle of the 21st century, global warming could begin to accelerate as a result, in what’s known as a feedback mechanism.

What happens when the permafrost bomb explodes, guaranteeing a 4 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures? This:

A 4C rise in the planet’s temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse…

“Drought and desertification would be widespread … There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on [wild] ecosystems. Large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events…”

“This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes [and] an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. In such a 4C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world.”

Kevin Anderson, one of the lead scientists for the Royal Society Journal report, put it this way:

“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.” Double whee!

But that’s not all. Once the 4C threshold is hit, the feedback loops involved almost certainly guarantee even more warming, leading to even more instability, migrations, war (possibly nuclear), food and water shortages, and utter economic collapse.

America’s budget deficit is simply not a problem by contrast. Insofar as an improving economy doesn’t eliminate the deficit on its own, any lingering issues can solved very simply. Raising the payroll tax cap funds Social Security into the forseeable future. Enacting the People’s Budget easily resolves the rest. Fixing the deficit without slashing Medicare and Medicaid would simply be a matter of political will, much more easily accomplished after 2022 when the ultra-conservative rump of old white Republicans will no longer have the demographic or representative power to block needed changes.

But failing to defuse the climate bomb has much more catastrophic consequences that mere human decisions will likely be unable to fix. Once the climate hits the 4C threshold, there will likely be no political will on earth able to stop it. It will be too late.

Our generation certainly faces a moral crisis. But that moral crisis has nothing to do with the deficit.

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Papal traditions

by digby

I watched The Borgias with fascination marveling at how much sexytime there was in the Vatican during the 15th century. Well, it looks like some traditions die hard:

A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.

The pope’s spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica.

The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called “Vatileaks” affair.

Last May Pope Benedict’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was arrested and charged with having stolen and leaked papal correspondence that depicted the Vatican as a seething hotbed of intrigue and infighting.

According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising “two volumes of almost 300 pages – bound in red” had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope’s successor upon his election.

The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were “united by sexual orientation”.

In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to “external influence” from laymen with whom they had links of a “worldly nature”. The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.

It quoted a source “very close to those who wrote [the cardinal’s report]” as saying: “Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments.”

The seventh enjoins against theft. The sixth forbids adultery, but is linked in Catholic doctrine to the proscribing of homosexual acts.

La Repubblica said the cardinals’ report identified a series of meeting places in and around Rome. They included a villa outside the Italian capital, a sauna in a Rome suburb, a beauty parlour in the centre, and a former university residence that was in use by a provincial Italian archbishop.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said: “Neither the cardinals’ commission nor I will make comments to confirm or deny the things that are said about this matter. Let each one assume his or her own responsibilities. We shall not be following up on the observations that are made about this.”

He added that interpretations of the report were creating “a tension that is the opposite of what the pope and the church want” in the approach to the conclave of cardinals that will elect Benedict’s successor. Another Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, alluded to the dossier soon after the pope announced his resignation on 11 February, describing its contents as “disturbing”.

The three-man commission of inquiry into the Vatileaks affair was headed by a Spanish cardinal, Julián Herranz. He was assisted by Cardinal Salvatore De Giorgi, a former archbishop of Palermo, and the Slovak cardinal Jozef Tomko, who once headed the Vatican’s department for missionaries.

Pope Benedict has said he will stand down at the end of this month; the first pope to resign voluntarily since Celestine V more than seven centuries ago. Since announcing his departure he has twice apparently referred to machinations inside the Vatican, saying that divisions “mar the face of the church”, and warned against “the temptations of power”.

La Repubblica’s report was the latest in a string of claims that a gay network exists in the Vatican. In 2007 a senior official was suspended from the congregation, or department, for the priesthood, after he was filmed in a “sting” organised by an Italian television programme while apparently making sexual overtures to a younger man.

In 2010 a chorister was dismissed for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. A few months later a weekly news magazine used hidden cameras to record priests visiting gay clubs and bars and having sex.

Personally, I don’t see why anyone cares that these fellows are having affairs, but it does seem to be of concern to the Catholic Church generally, which has all kinds of opinions on who people have sex with and how they do it.

I do love the idea however, that the horrors of global child molestation going on for decades wasn’t enough to make the pope resign. It was the idea that few gay priests were meeting up at a spa once in a while. Either he has a very bizarre notion of what constitutes shocking immorality, or there’s more to this than meets the eye. (Why do you suppose the pope would decide to resign on the spot when he read a report about a bunch of gay priests?)

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Huckleberry’s Oscar

by digby

I have often characterized Huckleberry Graham’s performances on the senate floor as something out of Gone with the Wingnut. But he’s really been chewing the scenery on Benghazi — and Jon Stewart nails it perfectly:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Lawdie Miss Mellie, I liked to die.

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Ted Cruz, the brilliant wingnut

by digby

This guy is a piece of work:

Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech.

Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

The article goes on, needless to say, to show that this astonishing accusation is not true.

He’s a wily fellow, who many people seem to think is just playing a role in order to get over in Texas politics where he wants to be Governor (and then perhaps president someday?)He’s extremely smart, and very, very ambitious. And he’s obviously quite dangerous.

Update: Sarah Posner has much more on Cruz here. He’s very, very creepy.

Breaking: David Brooks doesn’t know what he’s talking about

by digby

This is fun: watch Ezra Klein demonstrate just how intellectually lazy the Very Serious David Brooks really is:

Ezra Klein: In the column, you said that the Obama administration doesn’t have a plan to replace the sequester. I feel like I’ve had to spend a substantial portion of my life reading their various budgets and plans to replace the sequester, and my sense is that you’ve had to do this, too. So, what am I missing?

David Brooks: First, the column was a bit of an over-the-top lampooning column about dance moves. I probably went a bit too far when saying the president didn’t have a response to the sequester save to raise taxes on the rich. In the cool light of day, I can say that’s over the top. There’s chained CPI and $400 billion in health proposals. So I should say I was unfair. I’m going to attach a note to the column, if it’s not up already.

The second thing I would say is that, as [Congressional Budget Office director] Doug Elmendorf said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, there’s no scorable plan they’ve come up with, at least this time around. And given that one theme of the budget negotiations has been that it can be very hard to tell what’s on the table from the White House, it would serve the country well if they put out something specific.

EK: I don’t know the Elmendorf comments off-hand, but CBO did score the president’s budget, and almost all of their proposals are drawn from that. I find, in general, that legislators often ask Elmendorf if he’s scored things from the White House and then crow about the fact that he hasn’t, when all that’s really going on is CBO doesn’t score everything the president does or says.

DB: If you look at the charts I’ve seen, they’re targets that, say, cut x from agriculture spending, and specifically how you do that is vague. And given the difficulty of past negotiations, I think having something concrete and standalone is the way for the president to go. The difficulty is that on the one hand, the president is one side of the negotiation with the Republicans, and on the other hand, he’s the president, and I think hes got a responsibility to set the basic framework of the debate. He’s set basic concepts, like balance, which he’s right about, but I don’t think he’s given us a document that would anchor the debate in a boring, managerial framework so we can have a debate over substance.

EK: On that point, one theme in your column, and in a lot of columns these days, is this idea that the president should, on the one hand, be putting forward centrist policies, and on the other hand, that if he’s putting forward policies that the Republican Party won’t agree to, those policies don’t count, as they’re nothing more than political ploys. But while I agree that some level of political realism should enter into any White House’s calculations, it seems a bit dangerous and strange to say the boundaries of the discussion should be set by the agenda that lost the last election.

DB: In my ideal world, the Obama administration would do something Clintonesque: They’d govern from the center; they’d have a budget policy that looked a lot more like what Robert Rubin would describe, and if the Republicans rejected that, moderates like me would say that’s awful, the White House really did come out with a centrist plan.

EK: But I’ve read Robert Rubin’s tax plan. He wants $1.8 trillion in new revenues. The White House, these days, is down to $1.2 trillion. I’m with Rubin on this one, but given our two political parties, the White House’s offer seems more centrist. And you see this a lot. People say the White House should do something centrist like Simpson-Bowles, even though their plan has less in tax hikes and less in defense cuts. So it often seems like a no-win for them.

DB: My first reaction is I’m not a huge fan of Simpson-Bowles anymore; I used to be. Among others, you persuaded me the tax reform scheme in theirs is not the best. Simpson-Bowles just doesn’t do enough on entitlements, For sensible reasons, they took health care more or less off the table. I don’t know where Rubin is right now. I held him up as an exemplar of Democratic centrism, but if he had a big tax increase and entitlement reform, I’d be for that.

There are times when I think the White House offered Republicans plans they were crazy not to take. I wrote that in 2011. And I hope Republicans look back on that as a gigantic missed opportunity. So I agree with you they shouldn’t be given veto power over the debate, but I still think that if you look at what moderates want the administration to do, they have not gone far enough.

EK: What would be far enough, in your view? What would you like to see them offer?

DB: My fantasy package, and I’m not running for office, would include a progressive consumption tax, and it would have chained CPI, and it would have a pretty big means-test of Medicare. I’d direct you to Yuval Levin’s piece in the Times a few days ago, which seemed sensible.

I particularly like the fact that he used to be for Simpson-Bowles but now he isn’t because it doesn’t whack “entitlements” enough. Move those goal posts fella, don’t even try to hide it.

And yes, Yuval levin’s piece “seemed sensible.” but then so did Simpson-Bowles until the new “center” was declared by the likes of David Brooks in order to give themselves a raison d’etre in the political eco-system. After all, his position as the Goldilocks of the New York Times requires him to be perpetually dissatisfied with both sides’ “extremism.” Since he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has only the slimmest hold on the facts, he just has to make things up.

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