Month: April 2013

“We have certainly made it more difficult to stand firm going forward”

by digby

That’s a funny line. Greg Sargent has the latest on the sequester drama and it’s gallows humor at best:

In an interview this morning, Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a top party strategist — was surprisingly frank in conceding that Dems had given away crucial leverage by agreeing to the FAA fix. But he said Dems could still make up some of that lost ground — and called on them not to agree to any more targeted sequester fixes.

“We have certainly made it more difficult to stand firm going forward,” Van Hollen told me. “But we’re going to have to reclaim some lost ground here. We cannot have a situation where people just cherry-pick the sequester.”

Van Hollen bluntly suggested that Dems — in agreeing to just a targeted FAA fix — had sent a message about Congress that it’s only responsive to powerful interests.

“If you do that, you’re attacking the symptoms rather than the underlying cause,” Van Hollen said. “When you do that, what happens is the most politically strong groups with the most lobbyists get relief, at the expense of everybody else. Meals on Wheels, or kids on Head Start, or grants on biomedical research — all of those get left behind.”

This is working out just great isn’t it? Greg points to the next showdown over the debt ceiling, which the Teajadist Republicans are chomping at the bit to hold hostage to more human sacrifice, as a warning that the GOP leadership may not be interested in dealing on the sequester so they can show their sadistic troops that the poor and the vulnerable are already bleeding and suffering so there’s no need to risk hurting anyone important by fiddling with the credit rating. If I had to guess right now, I’d say we’ll end up doing both, but that’s mainly because the Democrats are so incredibly inept they appear to have not thought of any strategy at all until it was too late.

Greg thinks it’s worthwhile for the Democrats to at least pretend to stop giving away the store even though it won’t make a difference because it will show the American people that some in the government are responsive to something other than the wealthy and well-connected. At this point it’s hard to see how that happens. They’ll agree to lift the sequester on all the items the Republicans have an interest in lifting them because they have an interest in lifting them too — and always did. Democrats want to fund the government, even the stuff that Republicans like. The only items they ever really disagreed on were those items that affected the poor and the vulnerable, which Republicans don’t care about. So that’s what’s going to get cut.

And if we’re really lucky, we’ll get a debt ceiling showdown that results in even more cuts. See, Republicans are always in favor of austerity — it isn’t just a fashion with them. As long as they can keep it rolling, they will. And as long as Democrats are strategic morons, they’ll be able to.

Update: Jonathan Bernstein reports that the Republicans have a new ask for the debt ceiling now that it’s apparent that they can’t find enough Republicans to commit Seppuku by signing on to Social Security and medicare cuts, even if the President can deliver a whole herd of suicidal Democrats to get it done. So they have to come up with something to excuse their required obstructionism.Bernstein points out that they don’t even have a tax reform plan ready to go and won’t have one this year, and concludes that they are not in the business of extortion for extortion’s sake.

I actually think this is a good sign. The cuts are biting and they know they can’t ask for any more. The can’t do the grand bargain because that hits right in the middle of their only growing demographic. So they have to make up something to ask for. And the Democrats should make up something to give them. “Tax reform” is filled with possibilities for meaningless “compromises.” Let’s hope they;re thinking ahead this time.

.

Liberal Hollywood strikes again

by digby

Robin Marty has the lowdown on the latest left wing atrocity polluting the minds of your teenagers:

“I Hate the Government” follows three young adults who say they don’t trust the government and have joined groups to “reform” it: a teenage Tea Party activist, a young woman trying to break into the militia movement, and an anti-choice extremist.

Get More:
True Life, Full Episodes

(The relevant portion of the episode begins at about 17:30.)

The show follows Andrew Beacham, who believes the current government needs to be tossed aside because it has abandoned the Bible. In watching the show, however, it becomes clear that the 28-year-old activist really is there simply to give camera time to former Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. Beacham, as Terry’s acolyte, is shown protesting with him, creating graphic abortion campaign ads, and even moving into a group home where the goal is to find a way to end all abortion.

But it’s not just abortion that they are targeting. Terry makes it clear that to be truly “pro-life,” you have to outlaw anything that will allow someone to have sex without risking pregnancy, childbirth, or parenthood—even if that means putting women in jail for avoiding pregnancy.

The whole thing is unbelievable creepy and not just the anti-abortion/birth control stuff, although that’s probably the most extreme.(And it’s also the most irresponsible to broadcast to teen-agers. The last thing they need is more disinformation about birth control.)

I’m reminded, once again, that Network was prescient. Back in the 70s it made some sense that the ambitious, amoral programmer would create a reality show featuring left wing radicals but as was always far more likely, right wing revolutionaries are far more likely to make the kind of lucrative deals Chayevsky imagined.

.

Villagers on steroids

by digby

I wrote a throw away post the other day about this nauseating Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen piece on an upcoming book about the Village. But I wasn’t paying close enough attention to see what the whole thing is about. This article by Jim Newell in TNR spells is all out and it is fascinating. The one thing I got right in my brief analysis is that Politico thinks it’s all about them. Turns out it is:

Now we know that the damage-control strategy Politico has been putting together over the last couple of years begins today, three months before the book’s release. Here are some of the rumored inclusions Allen’s heard about, such as the ones about himself and the media outlet that defines him:

The targets are the worst-kept secrets in this town, an overused expression of D.C. insiders: Robert Barnett; Tammy Haddad; the people transacting or showboating at Tim Russert’s funeral; the warring factions in Obama’s campaign and White House; former Obama aides who try to cash in; and Kurt Bardella, the House aide who was fired when POLITICO reported that he had been forwarding reporters’ emails to Leibovich. Oh, and POLITICO broadly and Mike Allen specifically.

Do you, reader, know who Tammy Haddad is? The answer is most likely no. She’s a “former TV producer” or something, whatever. Google says she is now a media consultant. Good for her. But she’s not a household name for most people. But to Allen, VandeHei and a few dozen other D.C. social-sceners whose main goal each calendar year is to get invited to her White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend “garden party,” she is apparently so well known that nowhere in this article, a good quarter of which is about her, do they bother explaining who Tammy Haddad is. In their minds, “Tammy Haddad,” along with, perhaps, Jesus Christ or George Washington or Lindsey Lohan, is in that elite class of universal name recognition that allow a reporter to skip the basic journalistic step of explaining who the person you’re writing about is.

The closest thing we get to an explanation of Haddad’s importance is this modest afterthought: “For what it’s worth, Haddad is a friend who has thrown parties for us. Come to think of it, she has thrown parties for virtually every other person and cause we know.” Likewise, Allen and VandeHei mention that “Washington’s super-lawyer” Robert Barnett will be another big target of the book, then add, “Barnett once represented us for a brief period. Come to think of it, he represents almost everybody we know.” In this way, throughout the piece, the authors try to inoculate themselves and their company from Leibovich’s thesis. We don’t deserve to be singled out, because everyone we know has these same relationships. So in attempting to soften whatever embarrassments Politico may suffer upon release, they end up explicitly confirming Leibovich’s points about the incestuous, too-cozy relationships among Washington’s elite.

It’s very hard to read the original VandeAllen piece without rushing for a barf bag. But this piece in TNR makes it all worthwhile. This is the Village run amock for all the world to see.

.

QOTD: the most dangerous Republican in America

by digby

“… you could just not be a buncha squishes”

Do not underestimate this man. He isn’t like some of the more colorful libertarian cranks or right wing doofuses. He is just as radical as they are. But he is very, very smart. I watch him and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

.

Liberals have a Koch

by digby

Meet your new liberal overlord:

Billionaires get frustrated by Washington ineptitude just like everybody else. The difference is that they can afford to do something about it. Tom Steyer, who founded the San Francisco-based hedge fund Farallon Capital Management and retired last year with an estimated $1.4 billion fortune, is one such fed-up billionaire. Steyer’s particular grievance is the lack of government action to combat global warming. “If you look at the 2012 campaign, climate change was like incest—something you couldn’t talk about in polite company,” he says. “With the current Congress, the chance of any significant energy or climate legislation that would move the ball forward is somewhere around nil—possibly lower.”

So Steyer, 55, a major Democratic contributor, quit Farallon to devote his time and much of his money to changing this reality. In doing so, he’s joined an emerging class of billionaires—including this magazine’s owner, Michael Bloomberg and Facebook (FB) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg—who have forsaken the traditional approach of working through the political parties and instead jumped directly into the fray, putting their reputations and fortunes behind a cause.

Some environmental activists are thrilled. “In a country that’s dominated by billionaires gaming the political system for their narrow self-interest, it’s pretty neat to see a player who’s in it for the common good,” says author and environmentalist Bill McKibben. “He’s not a greedhead.” Many Democrats, McKibben among them, view Steyer as a liberal analogue of the conservative Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of Koch Industries, whose lavish support of free-market causes and political ruthlessness loom large in the liberal imagination.

Let me just say, upfront, that if a billionaire is going to throw his money at a particular cause, I think climate change is the
one to throw it at. It has no constituency in politics and average people are more concerned about putting food on the table today. So, good for him for putting his millions to work in a cause that badly needs some advocacy. We all know that the consequences of doing nothing are catastrophic and somebody besides Al Gore needs to step up.

But on the whole, I just can’t help but mourn for our poor rickety system of democracy to see yet another billionaire jump into the arena and decide for the people what issues are important. I can now easily imagine a time at which we simply choose our billionaires rather than our politicians or parties and pledge our loyalty to “Team Bloomberg” or Team Koch” just like the serfs we are rapidly turning into.

But don’t worry, you have the same right to free speech as they do — and if you can afford to spend billions, you too can buy the television advertisements to compete with what they’re selling. So, it’s all good.

I would just note one thing: this is the only billionaire among our new liege lords who is an unabashed liberal.The rest of the relatives sane ones like the Zuckerberg crowd, Bill Gates and Bloomberg are all just a little bit more murky in their philosophical and ideological fundamentals. They are, at best, market oriented centrists or libertarians even if their chosen “cause” might be considered on the left side of the dial. So, our new “proxy” democracy is highly unlikely to be any more democratic — that is, representative of the people’s priorities — than the one we already have.

And that’s largely because the problem this presents is an old one: institutions. The right wing billionaires play the full political spectrum: they fund causes they believe it, they fund the Republican Party and they fund conservative and libertarian institutions to push their ideology, which they fully and completely embrace. The centrist and liberal millionaires and billionaires not so much. They narrowly choose their issue, whether it’s education or something else and refuse to fund ongoing ideologically based institutions. At this point, that’s tantamount to working for the other side.

As I said, if there’s one discrete issue that I exempt from this complaint it’s climate change which is such a huge challenge with such catastrophic implications that I wouldn’t complain if every liberal with money decided to focus on fighting it. But now that we are seeing the emergence of a new aristocracy dedicated to fighting our battles for us, it would be useful if some of the ones who’ve taken up the liberal standard would build a few ideological political and media institutions to match the right wing’s advantage.

I’m surely grateful for my new liberal liege lord and just hope that he won’t lose interest once he finds that it’s hard to make a difference as so many previous noble liberals have done. I even bow my head to my centrist ally Lord Bloomberg on the gun issue — he’s making a difference. But overall this country is looking less and less like a democracy every day.

Update: I’d forgotten that David Atkins wrote about this liberal billionaire recently as well.
.

Inhumanity

by David Atkins

It’s somewhat fascinating to see just how strongly Matt Yglesias’ suggestion that Bangladeshis choose more dangerous jobs has bothered so many. After all, Yglesias is just one economist, writing at a not-so-terribly-important online magazine. Everyone is entitled to say a boneheaded thing now and again. So why was I compelled to expound on it? Why did Gaius Publius at Americablog have such an intense reaction, and RJ Eskow at the Huffington Post feel the need to write at length as well?

Why, indeed, since Yglesias’ take on the issue is the one currently accepted by modern law and economics? After all, we don’t currently have an international regulatory system set up to prevent international corporations from needlessly endangering workers in developing countries.

I think that Tom Sullivan got closest to emotional core of the distress at Scrutiny Hooligans:

What we witness in Yglesias is also present on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, in the comments of bank executives and business moguls, and among an entire class of free-market fanboys and Pete Peterson’s Fix the Debt apostles. It is the unacknowledged, dehumanizing effect of long-term immersion in a business culture that treats every human interaction as an economic transaction first and foremost. Other concerns — moral concerns, human concerns — if they come in for consideration at all, are tertiary.

People everywhere are starting to realize the bill of goods we’ve been sold for decades now isn’t true. Markets left to their own devices do not in fact lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. Free trade doesn’t automatically make for free people. Communism was obviously horribly flawed, but the market ascendancy that replaced it has some very obvious shortcomings that have only grown worse as the world has flattened. People know the system isn’t working, but it’s not clear what the alternative path might be. Some foolishly advocate for pure libertarianism. Others pine for the old days long gone of strong nation-states and rampant protectionism. More forward thinkers see weakened nation-states humbled by strong corporations acting globally, and realize that a supra-national regulatory force must be brought to bear to keep them in check.

It was this idea, not yet fully formed in its details, to create international regulation governing worker safety that caused Yglesias to retreat to the comfort of the current economic model and defend differential safety rules for Bangladesh. That was clearly a cold and inhumane position to take, but it was necessitated by reliance on the economic ideology of the day.

Demanding that corporations not be allowed to manufacture in Bangladesh is obviously unacceptable, and would serve to utterly impoverish that struggling nation. Demanding that large tariffs be placed on goods manufactured there would be economically destructive to all parties. But to fail to control abusive corporate practices that lead to mass deaths, be it in Texas or Bangladesh, is utterly inhumane.

The system is broken. It’s inhuman. Its defenders are forced to defend inhuman practices. People know an alternative must be found. And when some people finally start down the right track–namely, international regulation of multinational corporations–and defenders of the economic status quo reject the proper answer out of hand in defense of the inhumane–it’s going to strike a nerve.

And I anticipate it will happen more and more often in the future.

.

Blowing off steam

by digby

I’m just grateful that we no longer live in a patriarchal society in which women are treated as second class citizens:

According to the complaint, in 2010 the victim was sexually assaulted by a star player on the school’s basketball team. The assault took place on campus in a sound proof band room at Forest Hills Central High School. The victim notified a teacher who in turn reported the assault to the principal. But rather than open an investigation into the allegations, the principal discouraged the student and her parents from filing charges, telling them that doing so could ruin the assailant’s prospects at being recruited to play basketball for a Division 1 school.

The victim and her parents ignored the principal’s request not to file charges because they were concerned that this student might attack other girls. Instead, the student and her parents filed a police report, and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department began a criminal investigation. Meanwhile, the school did nothing.

As alleged in the complaint, two weeks later another female student was sexually assaulted by the same attacker. Despite a legal obligation under Title IX to investigate the assault and protect the student, the high school officials never interviewed the girl or her parents again, failed to conduct an investigation, and for two and a half weeks left the attacker in one of her classes.

It gets worse. As word of the sexual assault spread among the student body, the female victim became the target of an intensive cyber-bullying and harassment campaign—both at school and online—that depicted her as a liar and a “whore” who was trying to bring down an innocent athlete. These cyber-attacks were only reinforced by the fact that the school continued to take no action to reprimand the male student. Not only did fellow students harass the victim, the attacker and his friends verbally and physically harassed the girl as well. They followed her around as she moved in and out of classrooms, through hallways, and around the school campus. The attacker sometimes pushed her into other students as she walked down the hallway, causing her to slam into lockers. Despite repeated efforts by the victim’s parents and other students to alert the principal and the school’s Title IX Coordinator about the viciousness of the harassment by the attacker and other students, school administrators took no action.

Thankfully law enforcement did. Five weeks after the sexual assault, the Kent County Prosecutor’s office authorized two felony counts of criminal sexual conduct against the attacker for his assaults on NWLC’s client and the second female victim at the school. The attacker later pled guilty to a single count of misdemeanor assault and battery. He was sentenced to attend Kent County’s Adolescent Sexual Offender Treatment Program for a second time. The only sanction the school imposed upon the student assailant was to temporarily bench him on the basketball court.

But hey, a basketball scholarship for a very popular jock was at stake here. She should have known that her bodily integrity was nothing in comparison and should have been happy to volunteer to serve as his sexual plaything for such an important cause. She really has no one to blame but herself.

Reminder: it’s 2013, people.

.

Pathetic is as pathetic does

by digby

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013

Other than the fact that Palin is a multi-millionaire celebrity whose only “job” seems to be finding ways to con sad true believers out of their hard earned cash and keep from paying her fair share of taxes, she’s not exactly wrong is she?

Some Villagers, however, are quite offended by her salty language though:

With “assclowns” line, Sarah Palin has become an Internet troll. Maybe she always was one.— Jonathan Alter (@jonathanalter) April 28, 2013

Fetch me mah smallin’ salts, I’m like to faint right dead away.

.

An important detail

by digby

From the fog of war:

In all the chaos, MBTA officer Richard H. Donohue Jr. had been shot near his groin, possibly by a fellow officer, and collapsed in a pool of blood at the corner of Dexter Avenue and Laurel Street. One civilian witness, who asked not to be identified, said there were police officers positioned behind Donohue and they appeared to be firing in his direction. The Middlesex district attorney’s office is investigating.

These are trained police, most of whom are wearing uniforms to stand out as “good guys.” And they accidentally shoot each other when the bullets start flying. The last thing anyone needs is a bunch of gun-toting yahoos who’ve seen way too many Rambo movies butting in.

.

Must see: Greenwald, Moyers and Chris Hayes too

by digby

From Bill Moyers:

The violent Boston rampage triggered a local and federal response that, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald, adds a new dimension to troubling questions about government secrecy, overreach, and what we sacrifice in the name of national security. Greenwald joins Bill to peel back layers that reveal what the Boston bombings and drone attacks have in common, and how secrecy leads to abuse of government power.

“Should we change or radically alter or dismantle our standard protocols of justice in the name of terrorism? That’s been the debate we’ve been having since the September 11th attack,” Greenwald tells Bill. “We can do what we’ve been doing, which is become a more closed society, authorize the government to read our emails, listen in our telephone calls, put people in prison without charges, enact laws that make it easier for the government to do those sorts of things. Or we can try and understand why it is that people want to come here and do that.”

Glenn believes that the drone attacks are instrumental in the radicalization of Muslims. And here’s a perfect illustration of how that happens from Chris Hayes last week: an interview with Farea al-Muslimi:

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

I have to say that I feel some hope for us at the moment. There was a time not too long ago when nobody could have put these views on television. But here they are. And if you care about these things, you should watch. It’s important.

.