Today’s moment of zen
by digby
House of Cardinals:
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2013
Rand Paul’s filibuster
by digby
“When people talk about a ‘battlefield America’,” Paul said, around hour four, Americans should “realize they’re telling you your Bill of Rights don’t apply.” That is a consequence of the September 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that did not bound a war against al-Qaida to specific areas of the planet. “We can’t have perpetual war. We can’t have a war with no temporal limits,” Paul said.
This is actually something of a radical proposition. When House Republicans attempted to revisit the far-reaching authorization in 2011, chief Pentagon attorney Jeh Johnson conveyed the Obama administration’s objections. Of course, many, many Republicans have been content with what the Bush administration used to call a “Long War” with no foreseeable or obvious end. And shortly before leaving office in December, Johnson himself objected to a perpetual war, but did so gingerly, and only after arguing that the government had the power to hold detainees from that war even after that war someday ends.
Paul sometimes seemed to object to the specific platform of drones used against Americans more than it did the platform-independent subject of targeted killing. But Paul actually centered his long monologue on the expansive legal claims implied by targeting Americans for due-process-free execution: “If you get on a kill list, it’s kind of hard to complain… If you’re accused of a crime, I guess that’s it. … I don’t want a politician deciding my innocence or guilt.” Paul threw in criticisms of other aspects of the war on terrorism beyond targeted killing, from widespread surveillance of Americans to the abuses of state/Homeland Security intelligence “fusion centers.”
I think the Kafkaesque nature of the no-fly list should be enough to persuade people that secret lists are generally a bad idea.
For those who are feeling warm and fuzzy about the right wing’s newfound concerns about civil liberties, listen to Charles Krauthamer on Fox News declare that he believes that the president is a tyrant, but he would certainly think it was ok if Bush had “taken out” John Walker Lind in a coffee shop somewhere in the US. So I think there may be some confusion about what this means among our brethren on the right.
On the other hand, it’s possible that because the Republicans — with the exception of Paul, who is a true believer — are opportunistically seizing on this there might be some serious investigation and push-back on these policies. Obama has been worse on the drone war than Bush, but it’s only because Bush didn’t have the huge drone fleet available to him. They were fully on board, very early. But there’s a slim possibility that the Congress could actually make some policy here, if only because the GOP is so secure in its image as tough, terrorist-fighting manly men that they don’t have to worry that the voters will punish them for being wimps. They might just do something.
In any case, good for Rand Paul for taking a stand. This is a discussion that I would guess not more than 10% of the public has even heard of until now. Doing a real filibuster to draw attention to it is a smart move and hopefully we’ll see a little more awareness of this very important constitutional debate.
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Stock market reaches record high in broke, destitute nation
by David Atkins
This country is broke. So, so broke:
NEW YORK–Blue chips continued to climb to new heights, pushing beyond the record levels reached in Tuesday’s rally after a better-than-expected reading on the labor market.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 42.47 points, or 0.3%, to 14296.24 in late trading on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the blue chips soared 126 points to punch through a closing level not seen since before the turmoil that ensnared the markets for five and a half years. Dow industrials have climbed for three sessions in a row and five out of the past six.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index tacked on 1.67 points, or 0.1%, to 1541.46. But the Nasdaq Composite Index fell 1.77 points, or 0.1%, to 3222.36, pulled down by Apple and Google, which shed 1.3% and 0.9%, respectively.
In fact, we have no choice to come together in a bipartisan fashion to slash Medicare, Social Security, climate mitigation and investments in our nation’s future. We certainly can’t ask our job creators to pay for any of it:
Our lazy citizens just aren’t producing enough to stay competitive in a global marketplace, so wages have to come down.
And our poor, bedraggled corporations just aren’t making enough profits to justify hiring.
So, so broke. Whatever shall we do?
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QOTD: Scott Lemieux
by digby
In response to the fact that the Senate is filibustering yet another DC circuit nominee:
If the Senate ever becomes functional enough for a non-wingnut is confirmed to the D.C. Circuit, it will be a little harder for the D.C. Circuit to make it impossible for government to function, so you can see the dilemma here.
It’s hard out here for a wingnut.
Lemieux wrote a longer piece here about the mess with the DC Circuit.
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The human sacrifices being dragged in the water
by digby
Adele Stan attended an event featuring Krugman yesterday and asked him an important question:
While the right has legions of mouthpieces reading from the same economic playbook, Krugman has emerged as the go-to guy for mainstream shows when they seek a progressive voice. So I asked him to assess, as a communicator, what progressives need to do to even up the score. Here’s his reply:
I will say, [conservatives] have a remarkable shortage of guys who are actually competent on the economics…
One thing that’s really true, though, is that progressives, they still spend a lot of time trying to appease, trying to sound moderate and reasonable. I’ll give you a case that’s actually interesting: Larry Summers — Larry Summers — is actually on the substance, at this point, indistinguishable from me on macro-policy. And he may be a bit to the left, because he’s even more certain than I am — I believe it’s true, but he’s definite that some extra spending now will actually help us more in fiscal terms. So Larry’s come out.
So he published a piece in the Financial Times that was meant to be a big statement about this. But before he got to that, he spend three paragraphs about the importance of dealing with the deficit in the medium term — which was all, I think, to establish that ‘I am a respectable person; I am not like that rabble-rouser, Krugman.’ And then I watched the reactions, and nobody inside the Beltway — you’re inside the Beltway, so you know who I mean — none of the usual suspects got past those first three paragraphs. Larry was just clearing his throat, and that wound up drowning out the message. And that’s very typical.
Look at the president…Since the fall of 2011, the administration’s been on the side of the angels here. The American Jobs Act didn’t go anywhere, but it was definitely bolder than we expected; it was the right kind of thing. What they pushed for, relative to what I’d like to be hearing from them, it’s nothing, but relative to what the other side is saying, it’s very much on the right side — but they are stuck in the language of deficits. It would be great if the president could just say: ‘This is not the time for spending cuts,’ instead of saying: ‘I want to replace the sequester with a smarter package.’ This is a ‘progressive lite.’
I understand where this comes from: It comes from many years of electoral defeats and always feeling that, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, always finding that you needed to appeal to conservative voters — and the quest for respectability. At the higher levels, you find yourself in rooms full of bankers — a lot…It’s very hard to stand up to them, and not just because they have power but because they’re, by and large, actually pretty smart. They have fantastic tailors. And to get over that and say, ‘Look, you’re just wrong,’ and, ‘My side is right’ — that’s something that progressives still have a hard time learning to do.
So my advice has , obviously been — part of it is that we need infrastructure, and there’s not enough people — but also, yeah, you need to take a look at the way people express things. I you think it’s really stupid to be cutting spending now, you should start your article by saying, ‘It’s really stupid to be cutting spending now’ instead of saying, ‘the deficit is a significant problem over the medium term, and then, four paragraphs in, say, ‘I do not think it is a good idea to be cutting spending now.’
‘Look, you’re just wrong,’ and, ‘My side is right’ — that’s something that progressives still have a hard time learning to do. Sadly, I suspect that many Democrats don’t agree with that. They are deficit hawks too. The devil’s bargain they are prepared to make in service of Krugman’s reality-based assessment today is to trade the near term cuts of the sequester for medium and long term cuts to the social safety net. I call that robbing Paul to pay Pete Peterson.
Who’s pushed this idea that we should do deficit reduction with long term cuts to Social Security (despite the fact that it has no bearing on the budget deficit?) The right wing? Not exactly. Former Obama budget chief Peter Orszag:
From 2017 to 2022, Social Security’s normal retirement age is scheduled to gradually increase to 67. And I’ll bet that not only happens as planned, but does so with little fanfare — which is pretty much what happened several years ago when the age rose from 65 to 66.
Therein lies an important point: When policy makers put in place measures carefully designed to reduce the federal deficit in the future, most of them happen[…]
The increases in Social Security’s retirement age were legislated in 1983 — almost 30 years ago — and Congress has allowed them to take effect. The same holds for most Medicare changes Congress has passed, even those phased in over time.
A careful study of lawmakers’ record on Medicare, published in 2009 by James Horney and Paul Van de Water, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, concluded: “The history of health legislation in recent decades demonstrates that, despite some critics’ charges, Congress has repeatedly adopted measures to produce considerable savings in Medicare and has let them take effect.
For example, Congress took such action as part of major deficit-reduction packages in 1990 and 1993 and as part of more modest deficit-reduction packages in 1997 and 2005. Virtually all of the cuts that it enacted in 1990, 1993 and 2005 went into effect.”
Even in the special circumstances surrounding the aftermath of the 1997 deal, when the budget briefly moved into surplus, Congress allowed about four-fifths of the 1997 reductions to take effect.
Though he never says it outright, the logic of his argument is that you just have to get “entitlement” cuts passed and then everyone will forget about it because it doesn’t hit the old duffers until its too late for them to realize what’s hit them. (That’s certainly why they all assure the near term seniors that they won’t be hurt…)
Orszag framed his argument as the need for short term stimulus in exchange for long term deficit reduction. That’ didn’t work out, did it? But you have to admit that the argument works even better now that we have stumbled into drastic cuts in the short term. How convenient.
Regardless of whether they read that very clever Orszag column, I’m going to guess that it hasn’t escaped the notice of many pols that the real pain of whittling away at these vital programs won’t be felt by the people until many of them are out of office getting their just desserts feeding at the corporate trough. It’s not as if we have a culture of accountability for the powerful or anything. What’s not to like?
I wish I thought these people were capable of planning this whole thing because at least there would be some sense that all this isn’t happening out of chaos. But I honestly believe it’s just a matter of sharks swimming toward blood in the water. They act on instinct and every move in this series of budget negotiations has led them toward the human sacrifices that are being thrown overboard.
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Another taboo bites the dust
by digby
As I listen to the Democratic defenders on cable news talk about the “hypothetical” case in which another 9/11 happens and the president has to use military force on American soil, I am reminded of the sick feeling in my gut when I realized that a taboo had been breached on torture. I cannot remember a time in my life when this question would have even been broached, much less defended by virtually anyone. Even the McCarthy era stopped at character assassination. This is a sea change in our understanding of the power of the presidency — especially since the “War” they are using as a rationale for this unprecedented power grab is a war that they also say has no borders and no end.
This is not a tough question, it really isn’t. If the president has the power to order the assassination of people on American soil the constitution does not say what we’ve always thought it said. The country is awash in militarized law enforcement with every known technology. There is little reason to worry that they couldn’t get an arrest warrant for a real threat. The idea that the president should have the power to override these guarantees basically says that they no longer acknowledge one of the fundamental rationales for the constitution.
“[The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights.” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782.
That’s not really working out is it?
I’m no fan of Rand Paul, but I’m glad he’s filibustering this the old fashioned way:
Paul and his allies don’t have the 41 votes they need to block a cloture vote (translation: how the vast majority of modern-day filibusters happen) that is the only thing standing in the way of John Brennan’s confirmation as the new director of the CIA. That said, Senate rules and decorum allow the senator to keep speaking for as long as he chooses, and as long as he’s doing that, the upper chamber remains in a holding pattern.
Of course, it’s only been two hours so far, so Paul has a long way to go before he even approaches the talking-filibuster legends of old. Strom Thurmond once spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, according to the Senate archives. If nothing else, Paul’s throwback speech is sure to capture the attention of the Beltway, bringing more scrutiny to the Obama administration’s drone policy.
Unfortunately, now that we’ve removed the taboo against a president ordering assassinations on American soil it would appear to me that most people will probably agree with it and “their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights.” Let’s hope that someday the courts will weigh in on the side of the constitution. But as with torture I don’t think we’ll ever be quite the same.
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Chart ‘o the day
by digby
“As in the period before the Oklahoma City bombing, we now are seeing ominous threats from those who believe that the government is poised to take their guns,” the group’s president, Richard Cohen, wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
The number of Patriot groups peaked after the bombing in 1996 at 858, before falling off steeply and remaining low under George W. Bush. However, since the election of Barack Obama, the number of groups tracked by the SPLC has skyrocketed and continued to climb.
Last year, the SPLC found 1,360 Patriot groups in the country — up more than 500 over the ’96 peak — including 321 militia groups.
I’m just glad we’re concentrating on locking up undocumented workers and pot smokers. Keepin’ us safe.
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Another milestone on the way to the extinction of the human race
by David Atkins
No need to pay attention to this. I’m sure everything will be fine.
The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees as many global leaders have hoped, new federal figures show.
Scientists say the rise in CO2 reflects the world’s economy revving up and burning more fossil fuels, especially in China.
Carbon dioxide levels jumped by 2.67 parts per million since 2011 to total just under 395 parts per million, says Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
That’s the second highest rise in carbon emissions since record-keeping began in 1959. The measurements are taken from air samples captured away from civilization near a volcano in Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
The great tragedy here is that we have three gigantic problems right now, each of them with the same simple solution. We have a climate problem, first and foremost. We have a global economic and unemployment problem, second. And we have a global terrorism (or imperialism, depending on your point of view) problem focused largely on oil producing states, third.
All of these problems have the same solution: a global effort to create jobs in renewable energy, conservation and climate adaptation technologies while transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The importance of this effort to the climate problem is obvious. The human race is quite literally going to go extinct if we don’t solve this problem by mitigating the climate crisis and bringing emissions under control. The longer it takes us to solve this problem, the more in danger we are of civilization collapse unless we figure out significant adaptation solutions. And it may well be that, dangerous as it certainly is, we may be forced to attempt geo-engineering as well.
But this is also of crucial importance to the economy. When people think of “green jobs”, they tend of think of highly trained engineers working on solar panels. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Conservation involves all sorts of projects: weather stripping and insulating homes, painting rooftops, creating bicycle lanes and railroads, enabling telecommutes, and a host of other variegated economic activity, much of which creates jobs that don’t require advanced training. Transitioning from fossil fuels also involves some massive conversion projects, including altering and retrofitting every gas station in the world and all the associated infrastructure. We’re talking about untold millions of jobs here in nearly every sector of the economy. It wouldn’t even hurt capital markets much, except insofar as it would require the taxes to pay for them. But then, with the Dow Jones and wealth inequality at record levels, it’s not as if the investment community can’t afford to pitch in a little to help.
Finally, there’s the security angle. The Right and the Left like to argue about who is to blame for the horrors in the Middle East. The Right points to Islamism and other cultural problems, not without some justification. The Left points to the long history of imperialism and war that has decimated those societies, again with no little justification.
But the biggest problem is simply oil wealth. When a country has vast quantities of the world’s most precious resource under its soil, two things happen: first, every other nation wants to control it; and second, the leaders of that nation find it easier to buy off their public with easily gotten money than to build a stable, diversified middle class with a tax base.
Political scientists know that one of the most crucial factors in creating a society built on principles of democracy and constitutional liberalism respecting human rights, is the presence of a vibrant, diversified middle class that demands a say in its own government. Although it may cause increased instability in the short term, ending both imperialism and despotism in the Middle East will require the devaluation of oil as a commodity.
All of these problems have the same solution. And yet our leaders across the globe are taking precisely the wrong measures at every turn.
Instead of focusing on renewables and conservation, we are working to extract and transport as much fossil fuel energy as quickly as possible.
Instead of embarking on a massive jobs program, we are slashing deficits and enacting austerity in order to placate bond investors who are fatter and wealthier than ever.
And instead of defusing the military security problems in the world by reducing the power of oil, we are actively and expensively making them worse.
History will not be a kind judge. But it’s important that the record show that there were voices shouting sanity from the rooftops, even if it only amounts to cries in the wilderness. It’s that or just giving up. And giving up isn’t an option.
The future of our species depends on it.
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All war is based on deception.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War
by digby
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am:
Last month, [Rand] Paul threatened to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, Obama’s pick to head the CIA, “until he answers the question of whether or not the president can kill American citizens through the drone strike program on US soil.” Tuesday, Brennan told Paul that “the agency I have been nominated to lead does not conduct lethal operations inside the United States—nor does it have any authority to do so.” Brennan said that the Justice Department would answer Paul’s question about whether Americans could be targeted for lethal strikes on US soil.[…]
Here’s the bulk of the letter:
As members of this administration have previously indicated, the US government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so. As a policy matter moreover, we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat. We have a long history of using the criminal justice system to incapacitate individuals located in our country who pose a threat to the United States and its interests abroad. Hundreds of individuals have been arrested and convicted of terrorism-related offenses in our federal courts.
The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States. For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001.
The letter concludes, “were such an emergency to arise, I would examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the president of the scope of his authority.”
Well that’s good to know. I’m sure we can trust all presidents and their Justice Departments to know what that line is. Because nothing in history would suggest that leaders ever convince themselves that they are protecting the country by killing someone without due process.
And using 9/11 as an example of a permissible pretext takes some real chutzpah considering the fact that we just had a president who lied about ties between the perpetrators of 9/11 and Iraq and took the country to war based on them. That was bold of the Obama administration, I’ll give them that, particularly since he made his national reputation as the guy who wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.
I don’t honestly know what this means. It sounds as though they would use law enforcement (of which we have in huge numbers at the federal, state and local levels, so don’t be afraid kiddies) unless they decide they need to use the military. It doesn’t explicitly say that they believe they can assassinate people on American soil, but it doesn’t exactly rule it out. It stands the constitution on its head to even contemplate it.
I think it’s immoral and probably illegal to go about the world assassinating people because you think they might be a threat, but it’s a different set of laws and norms that govern such a thing. This case is something a 5th grader could answer: anyone on American soil is subject to the US Constitution which guarantees them due process. Nobody, not even the president doing his honest to gosh best to protect the country, has the authority to issue an assassination order within these borders. The fact that they still refuse to openly admit this is troubling, to say the least.
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Republicans are cowards, Part 367
by digby
Yes, yes, they’re tough guys who are forcing the entire government to come to a screeching halt because they ar so crazy. But really, they’re just a bunch of wimps:
A number of Republican senators Tuesday either didn’t know or wouldn’t say if they consider the Voting Rights Act to be constitutional, even though many of them voted to reauthorize it in 2006 and the Supreme Court is currently considering whether to invalidate a key section of it.
As they entered and exited weekly party luncheons Tuesday afternoon, I and other reporters asked many GOP senators if they consider a centerpiece of the law, which was battered by conservative justices during Supreme Court oral arguments last week, should be upheld. Every one of them dodged the questions, some more artfully than others.
“Uh,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), before a long, awkward pause, “I haven’t even thought about it.” He laughed and said, “I’ll leave that to the courts. I’m having a hard enough time being a senator, much less a Supreme Court justice.”
I asked the same question to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who, like Graham, voted to renew the law in 2006. “The Voting Rights Act?” he asked. Yes, I said. Should it be upheld? “Oh, I don’t know,” Inhofe replied. “I’ll let someone else answer that.”
Read the whole thing. There are a bunch of them pretending they haven’t given it a moment’s worth of thought because, you know, they’re just a bunch of old country Senators and they don’t know anything about that Constitution. Which is ridiculous. Normally, they don’t have any problem issuing an opinion on whether laws are constitutional.
Here’s one example:
ObamaCare violates the Constitution down to its “very DNA,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch in a speech on the Senate floor on February 9. “At its core, the law and its expansion of government are a threat to personal liberty…As the state controls more and more of our lives to further a political agenda, our freedom is put in greater and greater jeopardy.”
Or how about this from Lindsay Graham himself:
Graham: There is no constitutional right to get on an airplane without being screened that I know of and you know when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution they didn’t consider flying. And I don’t believe that the Constitution protects any of us from being able to get on an airplane without being screened and here’s the big elephant in the room.
More than 100 congressional Republicans signed a brief Friday urging the Supreme Court to strike down the entire healthcare reform law if it finds the law’s individual mandate unconstitutional.
The lawmakers joined an amicus brief filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative advocacy group. If the Supreme Court strikes down the requirement that almost all Americans purchase health insurance, the brief says, it should toss out all of the Affordable Care Act.
“Congress would not have passed the ACA absent the individual mandate,” the brief sates. “Without the individual mandate, the ACA’s remaining provisions cannot function properly. Thus, the unconstitutional individual mandate is not severable from the ACA, and the entire Act must be invalidated.”
Suddenly they’re all tongue tied and it’s none of their business?
They know they are on the wrong side of this with the public and they don’t want it to spill over on them. They’re happy to have the “activist Supreme Court judges” take the heat for them. Cowards.
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