Month: March 2013

Enemies, a GOP love story

by digby

Being fairly sure that the new found love for civil liberties among Republicans seeking the presidency is a tad opportunistic, I highlighted some delicious examples of GOP hypocrisy on presidential wartime powers during the Kosovo campaign. Now Perlstein takes them through the Wayback machine and it’s a wild trip. He starts off by recounting this week’s events and then asking:

Does all this mean the ancient (and even, sometimes, honorable) tradition of Republican “isolationism” (the word being more than a little bit of an epithet, its advocates prefer “non-interventionism”) is making a comeback? Or, alternately, did it never really go away at the conservative grassroots, save for those distracting moments when the Commander in Chief is a conservative Republican hero like in those heady first few years of W’s Iraq War? Or is all this just another opportunity for Obama-bashing, and as such a perfect exemplar of the intellectual contentlessness and bottomless cynicism of that favorite Republican activity? (As I put it in the piece on the convention, “What they really love—shown by the way McCain and Condi were able to win back their audience by taking cheap shots at Obama—are enemies. And within their authoritarian mind-set [as George Orwell taught us with his talk about Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania], enemies are fungible.”

Do read on. It’s quite a lesson in partisan opportunism.

This is why I don’t truck too much in the hypocrisy argument on either side. Both parties are guilty of it, particularly in national security and foreign policy, which is interesting since the nation has been run on a bipartisan consensus on this pretty much for half a century. You see this playing out on both sides right now in which a few Democrats are tepidly speaking out against tactics in the covert war against terrorism, while some of the GOP’s more aggressive, ambitious types are taking up the mantle of the ACLU. Meanwhile, John McCain (as he did during the Kosovo campaign) holds down the pro-military end on the right while the Democratic president and his allies in congress holds it down on the left. You’ll see the same dynamic when a Republican is in the White House.

Perlstein’s observation is more interesting: with the right, it’s about the enemies and enemies are fungible. That’s really the best way to understand them, I think.

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QOTW: Roger Ailes

by digby

“Gingrich is a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner. Newt’s a prick.”

Ailes would know.

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Democracy? The all-powerful dominant conservative movement only represents about 30% of the country

by digby

Chris Hayes and guests had a fascinating discussion this morning about this new study that shows politicians think their constituents are much more conservative than they are:

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

Tim Carney made the good point that conservatives are more likely to challenge the Republican leadership while liberals are more likely to follow the Democratic leadership. I think that’s some of it, although the Republicans sure were in lockstep behind George W. Bush when he was riding high and they now treat him like last week’s leftovers. There’s more to it, particularly the fact that politicians are by definition elites and they spend time with other elites. And elites tend to be more conservative. (I think Chris meant to get to that but the conversation took another turn.) Chris used this chart to show how this identification has changed over the years:

It turns out that roughly the same number of Americans describe themselves as conservatives as they did in the 1970s, while the number of politicians describing themselves that way has skyrocketed. And yet Democrats, even as they win elections and hold massive amounts of power in the government are still on the run, following these GOP politicians as they race ever further to the right.

It’s odd to say the least but I think it can be at least partially explained by noting that the right has a very well financed and successful propaganda machine that’s aimed more at the elite opinion makers of both parties than the people. In the insular world of politics, where they all talk to one another more than they talk to anyone else, it is a conservative country.

And I think a lot of this shows the power of unanswered propaganda. Every national politician from Ronald Reagan to John Boehner has used the word “conservative” in their speeches, portraying it as the default Real American value and using it as the avatar of patriotism. And while that was happening Democrats were denying their own identities as liberals and changing their messaging in response to conservative cant constantly. This kind of thing infects their thinking. They too come to see conservative as a positive value and liberal as a negative value — and the policies follow.

It works very well. Even now, with the GOP having gone certifiably nuts, we see that the only answer among the liberal cognoscenti is for Democrats to move right again and give in to the Republicans because they just have no choice. This time they are talking Democratic voters into accepting degradation of the greatest social justice achievement of the Democratic Party in the last century. This is allegedly because they have no choice: Democrats are impotent, powerless. After all, they only control two of the three branches of government and the other side is more unpopular than herpes. What else can they do?

That’s a pretty sweet victory for a movement that only 30% of the country identifies with.

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Hiding behind the details

by digby

Rand Paul says he’s satisfied with Eric Holder’s answer to the question of whether the president can order assassinations on American soil:

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: ‘Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?’ ” the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., wrote to Mr. Paul. “The answer to that question is no.”

Well at least we’ve eliminated one weapon. Maybe Paul should have followed up with another question asking if they can use a Bowie knife to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil. Or a baseball bat. I happen to think the choice of method really isn’t really the point, but I guess that’s just me.

Greenwald has been on a speaking tour this week, but his twitter feed shows that he’s unpersuaded, as is Emptywheel. And so is law professor Ryan Goodman in the New York Times, who raises a number of excellent points:

Mr. Holder’s letter raises more questions than it answers — and, indeed, more important and more serious questions than the senator posed.

What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by “engaged in combat”? The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know. We have some clues, and they are troubling.

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”

One could argue that that definition applied solely to prolonged detention, not to targeting for a drone strike. But who’s to say if the administration believes in such a distinction?

American generals in Afghanistan said the laws of war “have been interpreted to allow” American forces to include “drug traffickers with proven links to the insurgency on a kill list,” according to a report released in 2009 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then led by John Kerry, now the secretary of state.

The report went on to say that there were about 50 major traffickers “who contribute funds to the insurgency on the target list.” The Pentagon later said that it was “important to clarify that we are targeting terrorists with links to the drug trade, rather than targeting drug traffickers with links to terrorism.”

That statement, however, was not very clarifying, and did not seem to appease NATO allies who raised serious legal concerns about the American targeting program. The explanation soon gave way to more clues, and this time it was not simply a question of who had been placed on a list.

In a 2010 Fox News interview, under pressure to explain whether the Obama administration was any closer to capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers.” That revelation — killing financiers — appears not to have been noticed very widely.

As I have written, sweeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict stretches the laws of war beyond recognition. But this is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance, disclosed last May in a New York Times article, that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

Mr. Holder’s one-word answer — “no” — is not a step toward the greater transparency that President Obama pledged when he came into office, but has not delivered, in the realm of national security.

I’m reminded of how both Bush and Obama used the odd phrase “America does not torture.” This is a lawyerly choice of words, done for a particular purpose. Bush wanted to say that what he did wasn’t torture and Obama wanted to say that Bush’s torture regime had ended — but neither wanted to admit that it had existed because it’s a violation of International Law and a war crime, which might have subjected some people in high places to legal sanction. So they used exactly the same phrase, twisting their answers into this odd present tense, and they did it repeatedly.

It’s fair to say that these odd phrasings and very particular choices of words are not an accident and anyone with common sense can tell instantly that by being so precise, they are hiding something.

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Don’t cut Social Security, expand it


by digby

Josh Barro, a conservative, explains the utter wrongness of the Chained CPI better than anyone else I’ve read. I urge you to read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

Back in December, I wrote that applying chained CPI to Social Security is the wrong solution to our budget problems: It’s just a way of dressing up a cut to retirement benefits at a time when retirement insecurity is rising. Despite its problems, Social Security is the best-functioning component of the U.S.’s retirement-saving system. Instead of cutting, the federal government should be expanding its role in retirement saving. 

I’m always struck when people talk about Social Security as “just” an insurance program, when it’s in fact the most important retirement-saving vehicle. The chart below, adapted from a 2012 paper by Boston College Professor Alicia Munnell, shows the financial situation of a “typical” pre-retirement household. These are the mean holdings of a household in the middle net worth decile among households headed by people age 55 to 64.

Social Security is dominant: Forty-nine percent of this household’s wealth is in the form of the expectation of drawing government benefits in the future. The next largest slice, 23 percent, is accrued benefits in traditional pension plans. But that figure is skewed by a handful of workers who are lucky enough to participate in such plans; as of 2010, only 14 percent of U.S. workers were earning benefits in such a plan. 

Private saving for retirement is woeful. This typical near-retirement household has just $42,000 in retirement accounts and $18,300 in other financial assets. For most Americans, Social Security isn’t augmenting private saving; private saving is (just barely) augmenting Social Security. 

And as both home equity and stocks were battered over the last few years, retirement insecurity worsened. Munnell and her colleagues estimate that as of 2010, 53 percent of American households were on track to be more than 10 percent below the amount of assets they would need at age 65 to maintain their standard of living in retirement, up from 44 percent in 2007. 

No entity is better positioned to fix this problem than the federal government. Employers won’t do it: They have been dropping their defined-benefit pension plans for good reasons. And with Americans working for an increasing number of employers over the course of a career, such plans become ever more inappropriate. 

Individuals won’t do it: Tax advantages of retirement-saving accounts don’t seem to induce people to save enough on their own. And when people do use individual retirement accounts and 401(k) accounts, they’re often hit by high fees and bad investment choices. 

State and local governments won’t do it, either: They’re already under severe fiscal pressure, particularly due to rising health costs. Unlike the federal government, their obligation to approximately balance their budgets annually makes them unsuited to providing retirement security. Part of the way a government can shoulder the economic risks of retirement is by making deficit-financed payments when the economy is weak. For this reason, states and localities are right to work on reining in the cost of their employee pension plans, rather than expanding them. 

Unlike every other player, the federal government is positioned to help. If we made it a priority, we could expand the retirement benefits that the federal government provides to Americans, in any of three ways.

He offers up three solutions, about which your mileage may vary. I think raising the cap is the most logical, but he has some other ideas as well. But what’s most important is that he lines out just how immoral it is to cut Social Security at a time when it’s going to make up a larger portion of retirees income and is already inadequate.

And he’s right in saying it’s a matter of priorities. This remains an extremely wealthy country and there is simply no excuse for making our elderly more impoverished. Taxes are still at historic lows and the nation has a borrowing capability like no other. To focus on this, particularly at this time, is simply immoral. Millions of people will live lives that are less dignified, less healthy and less comfortable in their old age than they need to. There is no good reason to do this.

A ray of truth in a sea of CW darkness

by David Atkins

Sure, it’s a press release. But it’s still awesome:

Washington DC – Business owners applauded the introduction today of legislation to raise the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (IA) and Rep. George Miller (CA) introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which would gradually raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $10.10, then provide for annual increases linked to the rising cost of living. The Fair Minimum Wage Act would also gradually raise the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time in more than 20 years from an abysmal $2.13 an hour at present to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.

“At Costco, we know that paying employees good wages makes good sense for business,” said Craig Jelinek, Costco’s President and CEO. “We pay a starting hourly wage of $11.50 in all states where we do business, and we are still able to keep our overhead costs low. An important reason for the success of Costco’s business model is the attraction and retention of great employees. Instead of minimizing wages, we know it’s a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment and loyalty. We support efforts to increase the federal minimum wage.”

“The biggest problem for Main Street businesses is lack of customer demand,” said Business for a Fair Minimum Wage Director Holly Sklar. “Minimum wage increases have been so little and so late that workers making the current $7.25 an hour – just $15,080 a year — have less buying power than minimum wage workers in 1956, and far less than they had at the minimum wage’s $10.59 high point in 1968, adjusted for inflation. Corporate profits are at their highest since 1950, as a percentage of national income, while the share going to employees is near its low point. We can’t build a strong economy on a falling wage floor. Let’s raise America by raising the minimum wage.”

This stuff isn’t that complicated. This debate should have been settled in the 1940s. And it was, by and large.

But I think we know what happened. In the late 60s and early 70s, a bunch of white men (and no small number of white women) freaked out that the women and the blacks were getting a little too uppity. Business saw sexism and racism as a good wedge to drive between segments of the working class. An entire generation of pundits who cut their cut under Nixon and Reagan bought into the notion that America was a fundamentally conservative country, rather than one experiencing a generational hysterical fit over loss of white male privilege.

The people who actually work for a living haven’t won this battle yet. In fact, things still look pretty dim. But we will. It’s just a matter of time. The old wedges don’t work so well anymore.

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The Village’s idea of “consequential”

by digby

Really. This is from NBC’s First Read:

A consequential week: A year from now, we could look back on this first full week in March as being a pretty significant week in American politics. For starters, we saw former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush dip his toes into the 2016 waters with his media blitz to sell his new book on immigration reform. It produced some backlash, because his immigration plan (written before this year’s Senate movement on the issue) didn’t include a pathway to citizenship. We also saw Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) dip his toes in the 2016 waters, too, as he 1) mounted a highly publicized filibuster against CIA pick John Brennan (who nevertheless was confirmed yesterday) and 2) told Politico he was “seriously” considering a presidential bid.

That election is three years and eight months away. Or, to put it another way, nobody in the country gives a shit about this.

Was that it though? No:

And then after Washington’s inability to avert the so-called sequester budget cuts, we saw President Obama launch a charm offensive, taking 12 GOP senators out to dinner and inviting House Budget Committee Chairman (and failed VP nominee) Paul Ryan to lunch at the White House. It remains to be seen if this recalibration will pay dividends for Obama. But if a Grand Bargain on the budget — or close to it — occurs later this year, we’ll look back on this week as being pretty consequential.

Tipnronnie FTW

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Is this a recovery? Not even close.

by David Atkins

Most of us have seen by now many of the graphs showing the reality of income inequality and the separation of the investment economy from the wage economy. But we haven’t really seen in chart form the impact those figures have had on the recovery from the Great Recession–or lack thereof.

Fortunately, NPR’s Jacob Goldstein has it covered in a story that hasn’t received nearly enough attention.

Here’s the chart most of us have seen before:

OK, so the recovery is slower than usual. But it’s real, right? Big recession, slow recovery. Scary, but things are eventually getting better, right? Not so fast. Here’s Goldstein:

The chart cuts off when employment gets back to its previous peak. But, because of population growth, getting back to where we were five years ago isn’t enough. To get back to full employment, we need to have millions more jobs than we had then.

This led us to wonder: What would Scariest Jobs Chart Ever look like if you compared the past five years with comparable periods for all of the other postwar recessions. How much worse is it this time?

Here’s the answer:

What is the impact of this? A 13 million job difference between this “recovery” and a normal recovery:

In other words, if this had been a typical recession and recovery, the U.S. economy would now have roughly 10 million more jobs than it did at the previous peak. In fact, there are now three million fewer jobs.

Why is this happening? Well, we know it’s not because the rich “job creators” don’t have enough money. We know it’s not because corporations don’t have high enough stock valuations, or because they don’t have enough profits. We know it’s not because labor has too much power in the marketplace.

The answer is pretty simple: it’s a matter of weak aggregate demand. Paul Krugman explained it succinctly:

I wish I could say that it’s all good news, but it isn’t. Those low interest rates are the sign of an economy that is nowhere near to a full recovery from the financial crisis of 2008, while the high level of stock prices shouldn’t be cause for celebration; it is, in large part, a reflection of the growing disconnect between productivity and wages…

Meanwhile, about the stock market: Stocks are high, in part, because bond yields are so low, and investors have to put their money somewhere. It’s also true, however, that while the economy remains deeply depressed, corporate profits have staged a strong recovery. And that’s a bad thing! Not only are workers failing to share in the fruits of their own rising productivity, hundreds of billions of dollars are piling up in the treasuries of corporations that, facing weak consumer demand, see no reason to put those dollars to work.

We have an unemployment (and underemployment) crisis. There are 13 million fewer jobs in the economy than there should be. We have an income inequality crisis. And we have a climate crisis.

The solution should be obvious. It is obvious. But it’s just not apparent to the the policy makers and media figures at the top of the political food chain, because it’s very difficult to convince a person of the necessity of doing something that interferes with his own income. The rich and comfortable are making a whole lot of money off the status quo. Well, “making” is too kind a word for it. “Legal theft” would be more appropriate.

The rest of us, however, aren’t doing so well.

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Outsourcing the scut work

by digby

Paul Waldman on the plague of plagiarism among top tier pundits:

Not long ago I was getting a shiatsu massage in my office when my assistant came in to tell me that he’d gathered the data on government spending that I’d asked for, and written it up in text form so I could drop it into my next column. When I read what he’d written, it looked suspiciously like turgid think-tank prose, so I asked him whether these were his own words or those of the source from which he got the data. When he began his response with “Um…” I knew he had failed me, so I flung my double espresso in his face, an act of discipline I thought rather restrained. Over the sound of his whimpering and the scent of burning flesh, I explained to him that real journalists don’t pass off the work of others as their own. As part of his penance, I forced him to write my columns for me in their entirety for the next three weeks. The scars are healing nicely, and with my benevolent guidance he is well on his way to becoming the journalist I know he can be.

OK, that didn’t actually happen. I don’t have an assistant. I suppose if I resided at a higher tier of the Washington opinion journalism hierarchy, I would. Like Juan Williams, who finds himself in a spot of trouble today. As Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon reports, parts of a column Williams recently “wrote” for The Hill were lifted almost word-for-word from a Center for American Progress report on immigration. read on …

I guess when you spend a lot of time in limos and green rooms you just don’t have time to be meticulous about this stuff. But honestly, in the internet age it’s just daft to plagiarize. All that has to happen to get caught is for someone to plug in a phrase from your writing and you’re a dead duck.

I don’t get it. But then I just write seven days a week without a research assistant (or ride in limos and green rooms) so what do I know?

I suppose that many of the biggest of big-time columnists have research assistants, though I’m not really sure. After all, someone needs to look up obscure quotes from the Federalist Papers for George Will (and imagine if there’s actually an intern transcribing the insights of Bangalore cab drivers on Tom Friedman’s behalf). If I’m ever offered a New York Times column and become fabulously well-paid for doing basically the same thing I do now, but I also have to fit in the writing between appearances on Meet the Press and lucrative speeches to the likes of the National Grommet Council, maybe then I’ll hire a research assistant. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with having an assistant who doesn’t just do research for you but actually writes prose that you then present as your own, even if it’s only a paragraph here and there. When you’re a writer and articles go out under your byline, your readers believe that the words are yours. If one week your assistant wrote half your column, then he should get credit for it, not only because he deserves it, but because otherwise, you’re deceiving your readers. Just a line at the bottom saying “This column was prepared with the assistance of Jimmy Olsen” could be enough. If you can’t manage to write your own words, then you should get into another line of work.

I think many of these folks crossed over long ago from being writers to TV celebrities. It’s a different line of work for most of them much more lucrative and satisfying. Of course they’re going to outsource the shit work. That’s what wealthy TV celebrities do. There are only so many hours in the day.

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Name change challenge

by digby

This piece by Jill Filipovic asking why women still change their names when they get married is long overdue:

Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I’m disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don’t recognize. You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity? And if family unity is so important, why don’t men ever change their names?

On one level, I get it: people are really hard on married women who don’t change their names. Ten percent of the American public still thinks that keeping your name means you aren’t dedicated to your marriage. And a full 50% of Americans think you should be legally required to take your husband’s name. Somewhere upwards of 90% of women do change their names when they get married. I understand, given the social judgment of a sexist culture, why some women would decide that a name change is the path of least resistance.

But that’s not what you usually hear. Instead, the defense of the name change is something like, “We want our family to share a name” or “His last name was better” or “My last name was just my dad’s anyway” – all reasons that make no sense. If your last name is really your dad’s, then no one, including your dad, has a last name that’s actually theirs.

It may be the case that in your marriage, he did have a better last name. But if that’s really a gender-neutral reason for a name change, you’d think that men with unfortunate last names would change theirs as often as women do. Given that men almost never change their names upon marriage, either there’s something weird going on where it just so happens that women got all of the bad last names, or “I changed my name because his is better” is just a convenient and ultimately unconvincing excuse.

T%he one I always used to hear was that it’s important for children for their mothers and fathers to have the same name they do. Obviously, in this age of divorce and multiple families that’s no longer operative. But then I never understood this. I’m a lot older than Filipovic and but it never occurred to me to change my name when I got married and my husband and I never even discussed it. He understood it the same way I did: it’s weird. It just seems like an anachronistic ritual, strangely unmodern. Why would you change the name you were born with to someone else’s name? If you don’t like your name, why not change it one you choose, like actors do? The whole thing has always struck me as a little bit medieval.

Of course, I don’t really care what anyone does in these matters. If a woman wants to change her name to her husband’s that’s certainly her right and it’s none of my business why she does it. These are very personal decisions. But I confess that it’s always seemed odd to me, especially now. Maybe Facebook will be the change agent.

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