Month: March 2013

Just because they’re crazy doesn’t mean people won’t vote for them

by digby

Kevin Drum talks about the Andrew Kohut finding that all the Democrats are ecstatically passing around today, which says that Republicans are doomed, I tell you, doomed. Kevin writes:

This has practically reached the status of conventional wisdom these days. Republicans are doomed because they don’t appeal to the young, or to Hispanics, or to women, or whatever. Their core base of pissed-off white guys is shrinking, and they’re inevitably going to shrink along with it.

That makes sense to me. And yet….there’s something about it that doesn’t quite add up. Republicans control the House, and no one seems to think that’s going to change in the near future. (And no, it’s not just because of gerrymandering.) On the other side of Capitol Hill, Democrats seem genuinely concerned about holding onto the Senate next year. As for the White House, Republicans have only lost two presidential elections in a row, both times in years where the fundamentals favored Democrats. And they continue to hold outsize majorities in state legislatures and governor’s mansions.

This doesn’t seem like the markers of a party so far outside the mainstream that they’re doomed to extinction. Frankly, they seem to be holding on fairly well.

Not only that, they are moving their agenda of shrinking government while protecting defense spending and making everyone hate the government at the same time. To top it off the Democrats are eager to do their dirty work for them and take the blame for cutting vital and popular programs. Let’s just say they are a very effective opposition party.

Kevin doesn’t mention the states, but this extreme party has been doing some pretty extraordinary work at the the state level and haven’t paid a price for it as yet.

I think he makes an important observation here:

I agree that the Republican Party has some long-term demographic problems that are pretty serious. Nevertheless, it’s not clear to me that the American public is ready to throw them overboard. Or, perhaps more accurately, the American public has so far shown little inclination to throw them overboard when their only alternative is the Democratic Party.

People who vote on social issues will have no problem making that choice at the moment. But on the larger issues of war and peace and the economy, I am guessing that it’s not entirely clear to most people what’s going on. They probably sense that the Republicans are being obstinate and uncooperative, and maybe they don’t like that. But I’m not really sure they think the policy differences are that huge. Why would they? They aren’t. So, if they aren’t going to vote based on the culture war (and not everyone does) they’ll use the “who I’d like to have a beer with” heuristic for president and flip a coin for the congress. That could go either way.

I’m just not sure that the fact the GOP has gone batshit is the guiding fact to most people when it comes time to vote. If anything, the old “not a dimes worth of difference between them” may be more salient. They like Obama, they didn’t like Romney. But I’m not  convinced that translates into partisan loyalty. We’ll see. I hope I’m wrong because the Republicans really are batshit …

Update: Also too, Perlstein

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Entrepreneurial wingnuttery: Glenn Beck is making a *lot* of money

by digby

Good God:

TheBlaze, a set of online ventures run by conservative pundit Glenn Beck, is raising $40 million in new funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The filing states that the company has raised $1.5 million so far. It also says that TheBlaze currently has revenue between $25 million and $100 million.

The amount of money circulating around this garbage is just staggering.

Think about it: Beck was too looney and extreme for Fox. Yet his media empire is thriving.

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Are they really using a notoriously illegal precedent to justify a current illegal action?

by digby

I assumed that Dick Cheney would have no problem citing the illegal bombing of Cambodia as a precedent since he presumably thought it was a good idea in the first place. But I would have thought that most liberals would have a problem with this:

On Page 4 of the unclassified 16-page “white paper,” Justice Department lawyers tried to refute the argument that international law does not support extending armed conflict outside a battlefield. They cited as historical authority a speech given May 28, 1970, by John R. Stevenson, then the top lawyer for the State Department, following the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.

Since 1965, “the territory of Cambodia has been used by North Vietnam as a base of military operations,” he told the New York City Bar Association. “It long ago reached a level that would have justified us in taking appropriate measures of self-defense on the territory of Cambodia. However, except for scattered instances of returning fire across the border, we refrained until April from taking such action in Cambodia.”

In fact, Nixon had begun his secret bombing of Cambodia more than a year earlier. (It is not clear whether Mr. Stevenson knew this.) So the Obama administration’s lawyers have cited a statement that was patently false.

To be sure, the administration may have additional arguments in support of its use of drones in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other countries. To secure the confirmation of John O. Brennan as the C.I.A. director, it recently showed members of the Congressional intelligence committees some of the highly classified legal memos that were the basis for the white paper. But Mr. Obama has asked us to trust him, and Cambodia offers us no reason to do so.

Is it possible that they didn’t know this speech was based upon a lie? And even if they didn’t, isn’t it a rather shocking episode to use as an example on its own merits?

You know, just as a rule of thumb. When you’re trying to demonstrate the legality of your actions, it’s probably not a good policy to cite one of the most notorious examples of presidential secrecy and overreach in American history.

Henry Grabar explained this last month in The Atlantic:

Like the current conflict, the military action in neutral Cambodia was so secretive that information about the first four years of bombing, from 1965 to 1969, was not made public until 2000. And like the current conflict, the operation in Cambodia stood on questionable legal ground. The revelation of its existence, beginning in 1969, was entangled with enough illegal activity in this country — wiretaps, perjury, falsification of records and a general determination to deceive — to throw significant doubt on its use as a precedent in court.

The most important parallel, though, isn’t legal or moral: it’s strategic. As critics wonder what kind of backlash might ensue from drone attacks that kill civilians and terrorize communities, Cambodia provides a telling historical precedent.

Between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives — more than the Allies dropped in the entirety of World War II — on Cambodia, whose population was then smaller than New York City’s. Estimates of the number of people killed begin in the low hundreds of thousands and range up from there, but the truth is that no one has any idea.

The bombing had two primary effects on survivors. First, hundreds of thousands of villagers fled towards the safety of the capital Phnom Penh, de-stabilizing Cambodia’s urban-rural balance. By the end of the war, the country’s delicate food supply system was upended, and the capital was so overcrowded that residents were eating bark off of trees.

Secondly, the attacks radicalized a population that had previously been neutral in the country’s politics. The severity of the advanced air campaign — “I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them,” then-U.S. President Richard Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger — fomented immense anger in the Cambodian countryside. Charles Meyer, an aide to the deposed Prince Sihanouk, said that it was “difficult to imagine the intensity of [the peasants’] hatred towards those who are destroying their villages and property.” Journalist Richard Dudman was more precise. “The bombing and the shooting,” he wrote after a period in captivity in the Cambodian jungle, “was radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the country into a massive, dedicated, and effective rural base.”

Using this precedent to justify the current covert war across the globe is truly astonishing. That it’s being done by the prsident who most people see as the most liberal since FDR is just sad.

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Did Chris Matthews bravely stand against the war?

by digby

With all the memories floating around about the start of the Iraq war ten years ago, I think the thing that surprises me the most is the idea that Chris Matthews was some kind of stalwart opponent of the war who stood up bravely against the establishment. While it’s true that he wrote a column (maybe two) in which he expressed opposition, what he portrayed on TV was something entirely different. Indeed, I thought it was well known that he was extremely nervous about being perceived as anti-war, so much so that he endorsed the firing of Phil Donohue:

Donahue’s problems only increased when Chris Matthews let it be known that he wanted Donahue off the air. Matthews was a rising force at the network, with a reported salary of $5 million. He cultivated former G.E. CEO Jack Welch and had the ear of NBC CEO Bob Wright (the two summered together on Nantucket). Matthews saw himself as MSNBC’s biggest star, and he was upset that the network was pumping significant resources into Donahue’s show. In the fall of 2002, U.S. News & World Report ran a gossip item that had Matthews saying over lunch in Washington that if Donahue stays on the air, he could bring down the network.

I think what people misunderstand about that is not that he was personally for the war, but rather that he was a careerist who didn’t want to endanger his very lucrative gig.

Back before I was blogging I used to hang out on various message boards and one of them was Bartcop, who is still around. So did other early bloggers like Atrios and Avedon Carol. Anyway, I kept this post from a prolific commenter named Samela, whose insights I often quoted on this blog in the early years. This is from December of 2002, when she attended a small gathering at which Matthews and his wife spoke:

So, there we are in a room of 30 or 40 people, mostly students but a few others–including an old friend of Tweety’s from their Peace Corps days in Swaziland, where he claimed a lot of “reefer” was exchanged in the middle of the night–and Mr. Matthews and his wife Kathleen (attractive woman, nightly news anchor in D.C., claims to have gotten her start listening to Al Lowenstein speak out against the war in Vietnam back at Stanford) do their shtick for 30 or 40 minutes.

Matthews tells the kids if they have a passion, go for it: “don’t leave the violin in the closet” or whatever your violin is, because the only people he knows who are happy are the people who have stuck with their passions. He says watch Hillary Clinton, because this woman has passion and ambition and he has rarely seen anyone as passionate as she is. These other guys (he mentions Gephardt) are still running for class president, he sez. He says Ed Rendell is his hero, because he’s one of the few out there that is really involved in service…he’s in the community, he really did stuff for the people of Philadelphia, and that’s why he won.

So he goes off into this rant about neocons—how the neocons are paralyzing the country. They are “like a disease” he says. The ideological base of the neocons is “scary.” He comes back to this later, when someone asks a question about Iraq. And he is bitching about the neocons again–Krauthammer, Kristol, Bennett, and all their crazy front groups, as well as the people in the White House–Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby. Who is this guy, he yells? Who wrote that shit about the axis of evil? You think George Bush thought up that list of countries? Who here, in all honesty, thinks George Bush thought that up himself? He’s yelling about the RIGHT WING. He all but calls these guys chickenhawks: he says they never fought a day in their lives, not even on the playground, and that they would never send their kids to fight. That all they do is write op-eds and think they are tough shit. And he thinks this war is UNAMERICAN, against the whole basis of the US as “reluctant warrior.”

So finally this young black man, originally from Ghana, asks a question about the media, and whether the American media should be giving us better information or should we be responsible for getting it ouselves. Chris and Kathleen talk about, yeah, American media don’t tell Americans about the world. Chris reminisces about listening to BBC World Service back in Swaziland and says the average, isolated American would be lost listening to it. (I am thinking, do you really think we’re that dumb?) The wife mentions how she read in Washington Post about a crisis with corn seed in Africa, and how if that happened in Iowa, the rest of the world would know about it, but we don’t want to know what is happening there. She mentions….ratings.

So this leads me to my question. I direct it to Chris, after acknowledging her. I say I want to ask about how ratings affect his approach to political discourse. I say I have noted, as have many others, that there is a certain disjuncture between the kinds of positions and tone he brings to discussion on his television show, Hardball, and the positions and tone he brings to his syndicated column or his appearances on other shows. I cite, as an example, how a study on media bias in election coverage done by the Project for Excellence in Journalism attributed a full 17% of all negative characterizations of Al Gore in the last election to Hardball. And yet, according to the same article in the Columbia Journalism Review, when he appeared on Charlie Rose in the post-election period, he had nothing but praise for Gore.

Who did that study? he yelled! Did you watch my coverage? Yes, I responded, I watched you in part. And how did you think it was? I said I thought he was throwing some red meat to a particular base. He quieted. Look, I said, what I’m saying is: you wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year on John Kerry that was very thoughtful, especially about his energy policy. But on Hardball, are you going to talk about that or about his haircut like everyone else has been doing today?

Well, he mumbled, “his $150 haircut,” mumble mumble. And he laughed. His wife was shocked. She said, is THAT what they’ve been talking about today? Then she turned to him and asked if he would actually change the content of his positions to respond to a particular television audience.

Look, he said, turning to me. (And I am quoting here! I wrote it down!). “You’re a very smart woman. You got me.” And he went on to say, look, yeah…the audience for cable is very right wing, they feel they’ve been left out and have nowhere else to go. Charlie Rose is not going to make it on cable.

OK, I didn’t want to monopolize the time….I wanted to tell him he’s wrong…that if he spoke like he did tonight in this room, or on Charlie Rose, or in his column occasionally, his ratings would go way up. That the tide has turned, and it’s not the conservos who feel left out anymore. Au contraire. I wanted to tell him that it’s whoring to sell your beliefs just for (perceived) ratings. But I think he knew that. He knew I had pegged it….and I don’t know why he thinks no one noticed before. I’m not that smart….I just told him the truth, and he was a little shocked that someone said it.

So, you know, it’s nice that Matthews said privately and in his newspaper column that he was against the war. But on his TV show he was helping the right wingers because that’s who he perceived his audience to be.

This from FAIR gives a good example of just how slimy he was about it:

September 25, 2002 —MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews asks of World Bank/IMF protests in Washington, D.C.: “Those people out in the streets, do they hate America?” Conservative pundit Cliff May responds: “Yes, I’m afraid a lot of them do. They hate America. They align themselves with Saddam Hussein. They align themselves with terrorists all over the world.” Hardball correspondent David Shuster later adds that “anti-Americanism is in the air.”

No, he didn’t personally say that the protesters were anti-American. He just asked the question. And never let on that he disagreed. Ever. And he asked questions like that over and over and over again.

Of course, it’s all relative. This MSNBC careerist really takes the cake:

Joe Scarborough (4/10/03): “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types…. I just wonder, who’s going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: ‘Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong’? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war….

“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”

Both Matthews and Scarborough are now leaning to the left on their shows. But I’m going to assume it’s because they’ve decided there’s money in it. I don’t know what they really believe, and I don’t honestly care. They proved they’ll say anything for ratings, even when it’s a matter of life and death. So, for some reason, I’m finding it hard to see them as liberal heroes.

Update: Alex Pareene took MSNBC downtown a couple of days ago. I hadn’t seen that Joe Scarborough quote. I’m awfully glad he’s got a major cable show. He has excellent judgment.
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It’s no way to run a country

by David Atkins

My new Congresswoman, former California Assemblymember Julia Brownley, on the federal budget process:

Brownley lamented what she called “the craziness” of “budget mania day” and said she was in disbelief “that this is the way we are governing here in our nation’s capital.”

“It’s just sort of shocking, particularly after being in the California Legislature,” Brownley said. “Not to say we did things perfectly there. But we had a process. Everyone agreed to the process, and budgets were debated in great detail in committees and moved from one house to the next. We really wrestled with our state budget.”

In Washington, “it just seemed to me these budget proposals have not been through a committee process, haven’t been fully sunshined,” she said. “They haven’t gone through a full discussion with Democrats and Republicans sitting on committees, debating the issues, debating the priorities. Suddenly, these budgets appear, and we take votes.”

The Tea Party Constitution worshippers and strict constructionists are funny people. Largely because of them, we’re so far from anything the Founders envisioned for our government we might as well not even be talking about it.

If science could somehow revive Jefferson, Washington, Adams and the rest, spend a year teaching them American and world history and acculturating them to modern ethics, they would almost certainly go back to the drawing board in drawing up our governmental structure. The current situation is untenable.

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Oh good, it’s not enough that we still have millions unemployed, but it’s time to humiliate them too

by digby

Because we’re free, that’s why:

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) said he “constantly” hears from constituents that people with jobs have to pass drug tests, so people on government assistance should have to pee in cups, too.

“For too long, our government has been avoiding the issue of accountability for the federal unemployment compensation program,” Pearce said in a press release on Wednesday. “Hard-working middle class Americans are struggling to make ends meet, and should not have to pay the way for those who have drug addictions.”

Pearce is incorrect to say that the government has avoided the issue. Last year, lawmakers compromised on a deal to reauthorize federal jobless aid and a payroll tax cut, and the legislation also gave states permission to drug test some unemployment claimants. At the time, Pearce praised that aspect of the legislation, though he voted against the bill because it increased the budget deficit.

Pearce’s spokesman didn’t immediately respond when asked if Pearce thought last year’s drug testing legislation didn’t go far enough. His new drug screening proposal, which is much broader than the one already on the books, is unlikely to become law or even get a hearing. But he said it made a constituent happy.

“As a small business owner, I know the difficulty of finding qualified, drug-free employees,” said Katy Petermeier, owner of a New Mexico business called Occupational Medicine 360, according to Pearce’s press release. “The sad truth is that many employers hold their employees accountable to be drug free, while federal welfare programs do not.”

It’s “welfare” now? Of course it is …

Here’s just one little relevant factoid from the EPI:

[We have] an economy with 7.7 percent unemployment, and unemployment projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be roughly 7 percent by the end of 2015. Current unemployment is comparable to that of the worst month of the early 1990s recession and substantially higher than that of the worst month of the early 2000s recession.

This has been going on now for over four years. It’s not because a bunch of drug addicts refuse to work. It’s because there are not enough jobs!

I’m very happy for Pearce’s constituent that her business is doing well and she isn’t one of the millions who are out of work. There but for the grace of God … I will say this — she’s evidently in the health care field and if I needed any kind of service I think I’d steer clear of her business. Empathy should be a requirement in medicine. I’m afraid I couldn’t trust someone who obviously has so little of it.

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The GOP pretends it’s never done oppo research (and dirty tricks) before

by digby

So the Republicans have decided to take up something really new and sexy:

“Well funded conservative groups should seek to hire activists to track Democratic incumbents and candidates with video cameras constantly recording their every movement, utterance, and action,” the report urged.

The five-member study group’s report outlined in stark terms what it wants:

“An allied group dedicated to research to establish a private archive and public website that does nothing but post inappropriate Democrat utterances and act as a clearinghouse for information on Democrats would serve as an effective vehicle for affecting the public issue debate.”

We all know about James O’Keefe and Breitbart’s phony “cinema verite” and we know what happens when someone films a presidential candidate in what they think is a private setting, don’t we? But the idea that this “archive” of “inappropriate utterances” is something they’ve never done before is just a teensy bit misleading. The fact is that they professionalized this stuff a very long time ago:

[A] BBC documentary titled Digging the Dirt … was filmed during the 2000 campaign and never aired in the United States. The film centers on a team of Republican opposition researchers —a species that has existed in politics for eons but had recently undergone an evolutionary leap. From deep within the Republican National Committee headquarters the BBC tracked the efforts of this team, whose job it was to discredit and destroy Al Gore.

Political campaigns always attempt to diminish their opponents, of course. What was remarkable about the 2000 effort was the degree to which the process advanced beyond what Barbara Comstock, who headed the RNC research team, calls “votes and quotes”—the standard campaign practice of leaving the job of scouting the target to very junior staff members, who tend to dig up little more than a rival’s legislative record and public statements. Comstock’s taking over the research team marked a significant change. She was a lawyer and a ten-year veteran of Capitol Hill who had been one of Representative Dan Burton’s top congressional investigators during the Clinton scandals that dominated the 1990s: Filegate, Travelgate, assorted campaign-finance imbroglios, and Whitewater. Rather than amass the usual bunch of college kids, Comstock put together a group of seasoned attorneys and former colleagues from the Burton Committee, including her deputy, Tim Griffin. “The team we had from 2000,” she told me recently, to show the degree of ratcheted-up professionalism, “were veteran investigators from the Clinton years. We had a core group of people, and that core was attorneys.”

Comstock combined a prosecutor’s mentality with an investigator’s ability to hunt through public records and other potentially incriminating documents. More important, she and her team understood how to use opposition research in the service of a larger goal: not simply to embarrass Gore with hard-to-explain votes or awkward statements but to craft over the course of the campaign a negative “storyline” about him that would eventually take hold in the public mind. “A campaign is a lot like a trial,” Comstock explained. “You want people aggressively arguing their case.”

Maligning an opponent, even with his own words and deeds, is a tricky business; voters take a dim view of “negative” politics, and are liable to punish the campaign carrying out the attacks rather than the intended target. Digging the Dirt provides a rare glimpse of how political operatives have learned to use the media to get around this problem, by creating a journalistic black market for damaging stories. During the first debate between Gore and Bush, in October of 2000, the BBC crew stationed itself inside the RNC’s war room, filming researchers as they operated with the manic intensity of day traders, combing through every one of Gore’s statements for possible misstatements or exaggerations. The researchers discovered two (Gore erroneously claimed never to have questioned Bush’s experience, and to have accompanied a federal official to the site of a Texas disaster), and immediately Tim Griffin tipped off the Associated Press. Soon the filmmakers would catch the team exulting as the AP took the story.

And it went both ways:

During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material.

The Price of Carbon (UPDATE: Video Link fixed)

by David Atkins

A great video reminder from the Climate Reality Project folks about the price of carbon pollution:

One would think the deficit fetishists would take note. But then, deficit fetishism isn’t about reluctantly cutting important government functions in order to reduce debt. It’s about drowning government in the bathtub while using debt as an excuse.

We all pay for that in many ways.

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QOTDecade: Richard Cohen

by digby

EventhelibrulRichardCohen:

The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.

I’m waiting anxiously to see how (or if) he tries to walk that one back.

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Don’t worry it’s just a “technical fix”

by digby

This fine piece by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute blog makes an important point that simply cannot be made often enough:

I hate to say it, but some of my liberal friends, including those in the Obama administration, have a contradictory/illogical position. Kathy Ruffing, Paul Van de Water and Robert Greenstein argue in a recent CBPP paper that a chained index is more accurate, even if it does not use weighting specific to the elderly, but that the switch should only be done “if it is accompanied by several necessary adjustments to prevent significant hardship.” However, as elaborated below, if the index is accurate then there is no hardship.

In fact, a recent paper from Moment of Truth quotes a 2004 paper written by Bob Greenstein that makes this same point, saying: “this change [chaining the CPI] should not be regarded as a benefit cut or a tax increase. It should be regarded more as a technical change to achieve Congress’ stated goal of keeping pace with inflation in as accurate a way as possible.”

The CBPP paper also argues that the change in indexing should not be assumed to apply to all programs that rely on the current CPI for indexation or eligibility thresholds. Instead, it should just be applied to a handful of specified programs that will see large spending reductions because of the shift. Again, this just does not look like a “technical adjustment.”

It is not logical to argue that a chained CPI is more accurate and simultaneously argue that we need to protect the vulnerable from its consequences. The administration’s wish to protect poor beneficiaries, veterans and the oldest old suffers from the same contradictions. Jared Bernstein also gets caught up in this contradiction, saying, “It’s a more accurate price index, but it would constitute a benefit cut.”

A more accurate index would be a benefit cut only in the most literal sense that benefits would be less than currently written into law, but such an adjustment would adequately and totally insure benefits against erosion by inflation—the purpose of the COLA. However, a chained CPI would be a benefit cut in both the literal and commonly understood sense of the term if you believe, as I do, that the failure to use the detailed consumption weights of Social Security beneficiaries leads a chained CPI to understate inflation for this population.

The economics could not be clearer: in regards to the Social Security COLA, there is no merit at all to the claim that adopting a chained CPI measured for the average consumer is a technical improvement. In addition, there is no liberal safe harbor where one can argue that a chained CPI is technically accurate but vulnerable populations should be shielded from the consequences.

I guess we’re all supposed to just accept that the Chained-CPI isn’t really changing anything and it isn’t a benefits cuts, but we’ll try to make sure that all the people who are hurt by it will be taken care of.

And, by the way, the people they designate as the ones who will be hurt by this are only those below the poverty line. All you wealthy retirees who are living high on the hog on 25k a year will just have to take the hit. Of course, there is no hit. Except for the one’s who will be hit. Which we’ll make sure to take care of. Sort of. At least a little bit. Maybe.

Oh, and by the way, let’s not forget that even with the current CPI — the benefits are miserly and inadequate. I’d love to see some of these people try to live on $1200.00 a month and see how easy it is.

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