Month: February 2013

QOTD: Cardinal Mahoney

by digby

… generously asking God to forgive his critics for humiliating him:

To be honest with you, I have not reached the point where I can actually pray for more humiliation. I’m only at the stage of asking for the grace to endure the level of humiliation at the moment.

In the past several days, I have experienced many examples of being humiliated. In recent days, I have been confronted in various places by very unhappy people. I could understand the depth of their anger and outrage–at me, at the Church, at about injustices that swirl around us.

Thanks to God’s special grace, I simply stood there, asking God to bless and forgive them.

God’s special grace is really something.

You can read much more about the latest in the Mahoney revelations and various Catholic hierarchy crimes here.

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Republican revival won’t be so easy

by David Atkins

Judging from recent opeds, establishment Republicans have looked in the mirror and concluded that their party’s woes derive from being stuck in the 1980s. Gerson and Wehner have a long piece to that effect in Commentary, and Ramesh Ponnuru penned an oped in the New York Times with a similar argument.

It would be nice to believe that Republicans are demographically and politically frozen as reactionaries from the 1980s. The truth is that they’re much more extreme than that today. When Ponnuru correctly points out that Republicans are still pushing for reductions to the top marginal rate, he pretends that that represents a frozen ideology when it fact it represents that ideology on steroids. It would be as if Democrats had succeeded in securing a $20/hour minimum wage indexed to inflation, and then consistently passed bills increasing it to $30. That wouldn’t be a frozen ideology: it would represent a further shift to the left. That is in essence what Republicans are doing now.

But the problem is worse. Ponnuru and Gerson present best case scenarios for Republican ideological reform. These reforms have no chance of gaining traction in their deeply reactionary caucuses any time soon. But even if they did, the policy agenda is still a set of fantasies that are either deeply damaging to the nation, or have already been adopted as mainstream neoliberal Democratic policy.

Gerson’s list includes opposition to corporate welfare; a Teddy Roosevelt inspired push to break up the big banks, education “reform” via charters, testing and merit pay (you can take Gerson out of the Bush Administration, but you can’t take the Bush Administration out of Gerson); acceptance of climate change and the need for adaptation (but not mitigation); increased spending on the frayed edges of the safety net, including children’s health; promotion of marriage and two-parent families regardless of sexual preference; and, of course, immigration reform. Gerson is, in essence, arguing that Republicans should simply become Blue Dog Democrats. In fact, Gerson’s proposed policy agenda is in many ways to the left of the more conservative wings of the Democratic Party.

Ponnuru’s challenge is more arduous. He argues that Republicans must focused on raising real wages, but doesn’t provide any examples of how he would go about doing that. Given that the only proven pathways to wage growth are strong unions, robust minimum wage laws and curbs on worker exploitation (resulting in higher pay per productivity hour), it’s hard to see how Ponnuru gets there while laying any claim at all to the mantle of conservatism. Ponnuru also argues that while income taxes were more burdensome in 1980, payroll taxes are the biggest tax bite out of the middle class today. That’s certainly true: any sort of middle-class-friendly tax reform seeing to boost employment should begin there. But, of course, payroll taxes directly fund Social Security. So Ponnuru would either need to institute a separate (progressive?) tax to fill the shortfall in Social Security or, more likely, would sooner the program wither on the vine due to lack of funding. If Ponnuru thought Republicans have a messaging challenge now, wait until they advocate killing off Social Security entirely.

In short, even if Gerson and Ponnuru could mobilize their recalcitrant base and its favored sons to accept their agenda, it would be a disaster for them. Ponnuru offers “solutions” so full of holes they would fail a freshman course assignment. Gerson advocates that Republicans simply become Blue Dog Democrats, a move that would guarantee a third party movement and internal civil war.

The Republicans have a long, long way to go to escape the wilderness. Gerson and Ponnuru don’t have the answers.

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It only took 148 years. What’s the big deal?

by digby

How (g)ratifying:

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. Lawmakers in Mississippi, however, only got around to officially ratifying the amendment last month — 148 years later — thanks to the movie “Lincoln.”

The state’s historical oversight came to light after Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra saw the Steven Spielberg-directed film last November, the Clarion-Ledger reports.

After watching the film, which depicts the political fight to pass the 13th Amendment, Batra did some research. He learned that the amendment was ratified after three-fourths of the states backed it in December 1865. Four remaining states all eventually ratified the amendment — except for Mississippi. Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment in 1995 but failed to make it official by notifying the U.S. Archivist.

Batra spoke to another Mississippi resident, Ken Sullivan, who contacted Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann about the oversight.

I kind of doubt it was an oversight.

But it’s nice to see that a Spielberg movie still has the power to change hearts and minds. Politicians rarely even bother to try.

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Downton Abbey 20500

by digby

Via the creative team of … Hardball?

Not bad. This one was better:

I suppose one could find a metaphor in both of those little vignettes but really, why bother?

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But everyone knows that bloggers are always right

by digby

Lindsey Graham explains the latest Hagel “scandal”:

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.): Well, on the day of the vote, there was a blog posting about a speech I think in 2007 or 2008 that Chuck Hagel made at Rutgers University, and the blogger was a supporter of Senator Hagel. He was thinking about running for president, and he put on his blog the next day six points of the speech, question-and-answer session. And point six was allegedly Senator Hagel said that the U.S. State Department was an adjunct of the Israeli foreign minister’s office, which I think would be breathtaking if he said that, had such a view.

I got a letter back from Senator Hagel, in response to my question, did you say that and do you believe that? And, the letter says he did not recall saying that. He disavowed that statement.

He did say that since Hagel denied it, he wouldn’t hold it against him, so that’s something. It sure has Jennifer Rubin hopping mad at Huckleberry Graham, though. She knows that the wily (yet inept) Hagel is pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes:

Whoa. Graham is a good lawyer, good enough to spot Hagel’s dodge. Hagel’s answer is downright bizarre — he can’t recall if he made it, but it’s a terrible thing to have said?! The average senator, I am quite certain, would feel comfortable categorically denying — not simply pleading a poor memory — an egregious statement such as that. However, Hagel draws a blank. And Graham seems to have fallen for it.
Then there was Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who repeated that Hagel is unqualified but “We will have a vote when we get back, and I am confident that Senator Hagel will probably have the votes necessary to be confirmed.” Huh?

Both McCain and Graham (who termed Hagel “one of the most unqualified, radical choices for secretary of defense in a very long time”) haven’t merely said they disagree with Hagel or that other nominees would be better. They said flat-out that he’s unfit, uninformed and “radical.” So why in heaven’s name would they help him get confirmed by lifting the filibuster? They cite respect for the president’s ”discretion,” but no discretion is owed to confirm someone unfit for the job, who said he couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job.(Hagel denied he’d be a policymaker or would run anything, pleading that it didn’t matter what he thinks.)

She’s demanding that they keep up the filibuster (and it’s actually refreshing to see a Republican actually admitting there was a filibuster) and bemoans the fact that Democrats refuse to treat Hagel as the Harriet Meiers figure he so clearly is. There’s a blog post that proves he’s an enemy of Israel! What’s it going to take?

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Today’s dispatch from bizarroworld

by digby

Erick Erickson responding to Elizabeth Warren’s now famous question to the bank regulators

The rich irony of Elizabeth Warren asking her question to these regulators, whose ranks she would have joined but for a Republican effort to block her nomination prior to her Senate run, is that she is an advocate of increasing the very regulations that contributed to the financial meltdown and that prevent suits against Wall Street banks. After all, Wall Street was just complying with Washington’s orders.

In a final irony, the legislation designed to prevent this all from happening again, commonly called Dodd-Frank, has institutionalized the idea that certain banks are “too big to fail” and put smaller banks at a competitive disadvantage. More and more American assets are held by fewer and fewer banks thanks to ideas advocated by people like Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

If she wants a scalp, she should look in the mirror.

Ok. First, if she looks in the mirror she will indeed see her own scalp. When he’s right, he’s right.

But on the “substance” Erickson says that Elizabeth Warren is responsible for the housing crisis and the recession because she helped set up a new regulatory agency for consumers after it happened. Also too Dodd-Frank, which also came about after it happened.

Why? The government allegedly forced the banks to become gambling addicts because it insisted that they steal money from poor people and then Republican Hank Paulson forced them to take huge sums of money from the taxpayers. Because regulation. And socialism.

He’s writing from his new home at Fox News, by the way.

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Stiglitz tells it like it is

by David Atkins

Joe Stiglitz throws some cold water on the politicians who keep pretending the American Dream is alive and well in America:

The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider. Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity.

Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.

It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.

Another way of looking at equality of opportunity is to ask to what extent the life chances of a child are dependent on the education and income of his parents. Is it just as likely that a child of poor or poorly educated parents gets a good education and rises to the middle class as someone born to middle-class parents with college degrees? Even in a more egalitarian society, the answer would be no. But the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.

How do we explain this? Some of it has to do with persistent discrimination. Latinos and African-Americans still get paid less than whites, and women still get paid less than men, even though they recently surpassed men in the number of advanced degrees they obtain. Though gender disparities in the workplace are less than they once were, there is still a glass ceiling: women are sorely underrepresented in top corporate positions and constitute a minuscule fraction of C.E.O.’s.

Discrimination, however, is only a small part of the picture. Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality. After World War II, Europe made a major effort to democratize its education systems. We did, too, with the G.I. Bill, which extended higher education to Americans across the economic spectrum.

But then we changed, in several ways. While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs – or rich enough to send their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance – the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found.

My primary vote for President in 2016 will go to the individual who is willing to take on Wall Street and call out the truth: that the American Dream is all but dead in America. It can be brought back, but not without fixing this:

by digby

From Mitt Romney’s campaign guru:

STEVENS: Let me say something, Republican Party had a problem with Hispanic voters before this primary. I don’t think it got better during the primary certainly. And I think that — 

KARL: I mean, it got worse. 

STEVENS: That’s regrettable. But if you look at the numbers, it didn’t get significantly worse. 

The greatest appeal that the Obama campaign had for Hispanic voters turned out to be ObamaCare. And they ran a tremendous amount of their advertising appealing to Hispanic voters. It was the only place in their advertising where they talked about ObamaCare, was into — in it — to the Hispanic community, because an extraordinary percentage of Hispanic voters are uninsured.

Damn 47 percenters. All you have to do is buy them off with some free stuff and they’ll do whatever you want.

I think these Republicans have a way to go on this. They just can’t help themselves.

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“An intimate connection between public safety and private authority”

by digby

Here’s a good read for a Sunday afternoon: Corey Robin’s essay about Oliver Wendall Holmes’ famous metaphor about free speech not extending to shouting fire in a crowded theater.  It turns out that it stems from a very dicey view of what shouting fire might mean — and he likely got his metaphor from a very real event in which someone (rumored to be a company man) falsely shouted fire and caused a panic among workers involved in a labor dispute. It’s fascinating stuff.

The piece (written with co-author Ellen Schrecker)concludes with this:

Holmes’s metaphor was supposed to illustrate the unity of society in the face of an alien danger and the right of the government, grounded in neutral and universal principles, to suppress that danger. But Calumet, like Schenck, reveals the opposite: a society divided—not just in the face of danger but over the face of danger—and a government selectively deciding whom to protect and from what to protect them.

While Holmes’s metaphor obfuscates the realities of Calumet and Schenck, it also reveals a deeper nexus between them. Why, after all, might Holmes have remembered and reached back to an incident from the nation’s bitter labor history to describe an equally bitter conflict over war and peace?

Perhaps it is because there is an intimate connection between public safety and private authority. A safe and secure nation, many believe, is publicly united—and privately obedient. Workers submit to employers, wives to husbands, slaves to masters, the powerless to the powerful. A safe and secure nation is built on these ladders of obedience, in its families, factories, and fields. Shake those ladders and you threaten the nation. Stop people from shaking them and you protect it.
[…]
“Men feared witches and burned women,” wrote Justice Brandeis in Whitney v. California. That’s true, but men also feared women and burned witches. It is that traffic—between the uppity and the unsafe, the insurgent and the insecure, the immoral and the dangerous—and the alchemy by which a challenge to a particular social order becomes a general threat to the whole, that is the real story of how a fire in a theater, which may or may not have happened in the way various men and women think it happened, became a national obsession and an emblem of our constitutional faith.

Those who have been following Robin’s efforts to preserve freedom of speech on his own campus will, of course, find this especially interesting. But I think the analysis speaks to a universal truth about the ongoing tension between conservatism and the modern world. How do they keep control?

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Because smell test!

by digby

John McCain gets testy when asked what it is he suspects the Obama administration to have done on the Benghazi story:

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

McCain the former maverick is now the defender of party loyalty and right wing orthodoxy. I wonder if it’s time for people to admit that his supposed iconoclasm was always a phony pose taken to distance himself from his shady, corrupt past and get the starry-eyed boys in the press to stroke his massive ego.

He is who he seems to be.  A jerk.

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