Month: June 2013

Chinese super polluters now face execution

by David Atkins

Next time your Republican uncle Joe tells you that the U.S. shouldn’t do anything about climate change because China and India need to act first, you can send him this:

China has introduced “harsher punishments” for breaking the nation’s environmental protection laws: reckless violators of pollution standards in the world’s biggest and fastest-growing economy now face execution.

A new judicial interpretation taking effect on Wednesday has tightened Chinese “lax and superficial” enforcement of environmental protection laws, Xinhua reported citing a government statement.

The government is set to introduce a “precise criteria for convictions and sentencing” while the “judicial explanation provides a powerful legal weapon.” Law enforcement should take environmental regulations seriously and “all force should be mobilized to uncover law-breaking clues of environmental pollution in a timely way,” the statement reads.

Earlier this month the cabinet approved new measures to combat air pollution as social discontent over the air quality in urban centers continues to rise.

To help tackle the environmental danger, Beijing has promised to focus more on solar energy, despite ongoing trade disputes with the United States and Europe.

There are many extreme and horrifying disadvantages to having an economy and society as tightly managed as China’s. Execution for non-capital crimes is unconscionable. But one silver lining to running a country that way is the ability of government officials to turn public policy on a dime.

After decades of neglect, China is now taking both environmental pollution and climate change very seriously. No longer can Americans use the Chinese as an excuse for failure to act. Our failure is on us.

.

Let them eat garbage


by digby

This is not a joke. Some well-fed congressional staffer says that Food Stamps are too generous and to prove it he goes to the store, buys a bunch of garbage and basically tells the poor to eat it and shut up:

Donny Ferguson (no relation to this reporter), an aide to outspoken right-wing congressman Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) claims that people who say that the Special Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as food stamps, isn’t enough to live on are lying and that the program should be cut even further. Think Progress flagged a Stockman press release in which Ferguson said he believed that the weekly allotment of food for one person of $31.50 is too generous because he claims was able to purchase a week’s worth of food for $27.58.

“I wanted to personally experience the effects of the proposed cuts to food stamps. I didn’t plan ahead or buy strategically, I just saw the publicity stunt and made a snap decision to drive down the street and try it myself,” Ferguson said in the release. “I put my money where my mouth is, and the proposed food stamp cuts are still quite filling.”

Ferguson was reacting to the “SNAP Challenge,” in which Democratic legislators and activists are protesting proposed cuts to the newest Farm Bill, which would slash benefits to people on SNAP. To protest the cuts, people taking the challenge will attempt to live for a week on the amount of food money allotted to people who receive SNAP benefits, $31.50 a week, or $4.50 per day.

Stockman’s office called the challenge “a left-wing publicity stunt” and claimed “Democrats have been intentionally buying overpriced food and shopping at high-priced chains to make it appear the cuts go too far.”

With his $27.58, Ferguson purchased:

Two boxes of Honeycomb cereal
Three cans of red beans and rice
Jar of peanut butter
Bottle of grape jelly
Loaf of whole wheat bread
Two cans of refried beans
Box of spaghetti
Large can of pasta sauce
Two liters of root beer
Large box of popsicles
24 servings of Wyler’s fruit drink mix
Eight cups of applesauce
Bag of pinto beans
Bag of rice
Bag of cookies
Gallon milk
Box of instant oatmeal

He apparently thinks that people should live on beans and rice (both canned and dried, he likes it so much!) some cheap pasta, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and junk food full of sugar. No fresh vegetables, no meat (not even canned), no eggs, no condiments, no fresh fruit, no oil, not even a box of real oatmeal.

He must have gotten his shopping list from Sean Hannity:

Sean Hannity today in answer to a caller who said that people couldn’t relate to Mitt Romney because he’d never gone to bed hungry:

I don’t believe people are going to bed hungry. Do you know how much, do you ever go shopping? I go sometimes but I hate it. Do you ever go? … you can get, for instance I have friends of mine who eat rice and beans all the time. Beans protein, rice. Inexpensive. You can make a big pot of this for a week for negligible amounts of money and you can feed your whole family.

Look, you should have vegetables and fruit in there as well, but if you need to survive you can survive off it. It’s not ideal but you could get some cheap meat and throw in there as well for protein. There are ways to live really, really cheaply.

Hannity makes more than 10 million dollars a year. I’m sure he has just tons of friends who live on rice and beans.

And as for people not going to bed hungry, this piece by Dave Johnson writing about the sequestration cuts to meals on Wheels puts the lie to that:

But wait, there’s more. The study of the results of the cuts in food to seniors found that the money saved on cutting food to seniors actually causes to government to spend more, because of what happens to seniors when you stop giving them food.

South Shore Journal: The Impact of Nutrition Program Service Cuts on a Senior Population in Northwest Indiana. From the abstract,

Low-income seniors receiving home-delivered meals in Northwest Indiana experienced service cuts in late 2010 and early 2011. Reductions came in the form of fewer food deliveries per week, less food, or new cost-sharing. Six months after the cuts began, 283 seniors who experienced reductions were surveyed. Ninety-five responded for a 34% response rate. Twenty-five percent of respondents were identified as “food insecure,” more than four times as great as statewide and national prevalence rates among seniors. A disturbingly high 35% of respondents lost weight in the six month period. 

The authors warn that continued budget cuts for community-based senior nutrition programs is a penny-wise-pound-foolish fiscal policy given the documented risk of increased hospitalizations and premature nursing home admissions attributable to nutritional disorders among the elderly.

These “cuts” don’t even actually “cut.” Because they cause the government to have to spend on “increased hospitalizations and premature nursing home admissions attributable to nutritional disorders.”

If the Hannitys and Stockmans of the world have  their way, that won’t happen.  We’ll tell the seniors to shop around for some cheaper junk food  and health care.

.

More “be careful what you ask for” follies

by digby

They aren’t going to let facts get in the way:

The conservative Heritage Foundation continues to cite its controversial study on the proposed “Gang of Eight” immigration reform bill, this time to challenge the findings of the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the bill would decrease the federal deficit by about $200 billion over the next decade. The study claims the immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion even though it only takes into account the amnesty portion of the bill.

When contacted by BuzzFeed, Heritage spokesman Daniel Woltornist said Heritage had no immediate comment about the CBO estimates, but recommended a preemptive post published June 10 that said the CBO’s estimates would likely only report the economic effect of the bill over the next 10 years. The post refers to the study near the top, claiming it looked at the “fiscal costs of unlawful immigration and amnesty detailed fiscal costs during four phases: (1) Current law, (2) The interim period, (3) What Heritage calls the “full amnesty” period, and (4) Retirement.”
[…]
The CBO’s report, however, extends beyond the 10-year window that Heritage assumed it would cover. According to the CBO report, the bill would decrease the federal budget deficit by “roughly $700 billion” from 2024 to 2033.

Reminder: this special “beyond the 10 year window” projection was demanded by anti-reform fanatic Senator Jeff Sessions.

The problem is that this thorough refutation of their claims is unlikely to inhibit them from continuing to state otherwise.

.

The greatest threat of our time

by David Atkins

President Obama lays out the stakes on climate:

President Obama on Wednesday called climate change the “global threat of our time” in a speech in Berlin.

Amid signs the White House is getting ready to unveil new executive-level steps to curb greenhouse gases, Obama linked fighting climate change to peace and justice while calling for bold action.

“Peace with justice means refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet,” he said in a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. “The effort to slow climate change requires bold action.”

Obama touted his first-term work on green energy and boosting auto efficiency rules, but added: “We know we have to do more — and we will do more.”

The White House within the next few weeks is expected to outline executive actions to be taken by the Environmental Protection Agency and other departments.

Obama’s climate aide Heather Zichal previewed the plan in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Obama said Wednesday that a global climate accord is needed.

“With a global middle class consuming more energy every day, this must now be an effort of all nations, not just some. For the grim alternative affects all nations — more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise. This is the future we must avert,” Obama said.

For the Game of Thrones fans out there, watching all the fights over budgets and social issues in Congress is a bit like watching the Houses in the kingdoms fight over the Iron Throne. Yes, we care deeply about those fights and hope to see the bad guys thrown out of power so that peace and justice can reign.

But from another perspective, spending my time obsessing over these issues while climate change looms over us is a bit like cheering on Starks and Tyrells over Lannisters and Greyjoys, all the while knowing that none of it makes a day’s bit of difference given the ominous threats from the north and the east that will kill everyone if they’re not addressed.

Budgets can be fixed. Generations currently alive will suffer if they are mismanaged. But a wrecked climate is potentially a disaster that affects all future generations and the fate of the human race.

.

Deja vu all over again

by digby

Am I the only blogger/blog reader who feels as if I’ve entered a time warp reading these new exposes and analysis of insular beltway culture. I mean, they’re right. But bloggers were writing about this stuff a decade ago. Of course, at the time we were dismissed as silly gadflies who were not to be taken seriously.

I guess we should be happy that the obvious has finally been acknowledged by our betters. But frankly, it’s a little stale at this point.

.

Speaking truth to power

by digby

Michael Hastings:

He wasn’t one to mince words or suffer fools gladly. Muckrakers tend to be like that.

Here is his last column:

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop. 

Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security. 

“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly. 

That’s right: don’t panic. 

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008. Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to “urgently hold an inquiry” into what was supposedly President Bush’s domestic wiretap program. […] 

Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools “essential” to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they’ve seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama’s leadership. The AP spying scandal — which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself —was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign. It’s unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. 

However, judging by the DOJ’s and FBI’s recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congress—records, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to. In short: any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature, would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one based overseas.

I don’t think even the horribly abrasive Glenn Greenwald could have been any more pointed in his criticism.

Hastings will be sorely missed.  There aren’t enough courageous journalists like him around.

Update: This piece from Vanity Fair in 2010 called “Why the hacks hate Michael Hastings” is well worth reading.

.

Is it ok to taser people we don’t like?

by digby

Here’s a test for your princples against police use of tasers: a heckler at a gun control rally was tasered by police for shouting at a victim of gun violence.

Yes, this person is definitely a creep. But … he didn’t physically threaten anyone, did he? Indeed, his resistance, like many people, seems to be a reaction to being shot through with electricity, not the cause of it. It seems to me to be a rather natural reaction.

As Cantin spoke, just moments after delivering the names of the dead to Sen. Ayotte, Musso began to get agitated. “Why are you shaking talking about this?” WMUR-TV, which had a reporter on the scene, quoted him as saying. “You’re not the truth!” The Concord Monitor added that he kept asking Cantin to elaborate on what kind of gun was used to kill his daughter. “A pellet gun, a machine gun – what kind of gun, sir?” Musso reportedly said. All the while, he wore a red T-shirt with a message supportive of Native American rights, according to Concord Patch.

The interruptions continued for several more minutes before Musso walked away, but police had already arrived on the scene and decided they’d seen enough. A struggle ensued, lasting about 90 seconds before officers deployed a Taser and took him to the ground. A gathering of about 60 counter-protesters, many of whom were openly carrying firearms according to The Union Leader, appeared disappointed, but Cantin was unmoved. “They just weakened their cause and strengthened ours,” he told the paper.

“People just need to be more respectful, don’t get so emotional about this,” Cantin added, speaking to WMUR-TV. “Everybody has the right to their own opinion. We’re all Americans. We should be able to express that.”

He’s right, of course. But I’m pretty sure that’s what this fellow was doing too. This is a contentious debate and just because someone is “emotional” doesn’t mean they are dangerous. He wasn’t armed, which would have been a different situation. He was just some gun proliferation yahoo who couldn’t contain his frustration and started shouting at the speaker.

I completely disagree with his stand on guns and yes, we should probably all be more polite in general. But I think the police could have handled the situation without deploying a taser. They used to be able to do it all the time. Even gun nut hecklers don’t deserve to get shot through with 50,000 volts merely for expressing their opinion, however vociferously, at a public rally.

.

They ain’t dead yet

by digby

This is from Breitbart today:

Rep. Steve King is holding a six-hour press conference on immigration on the east lawn of the Capitol. Despite the early start on a day in the middle of the week, a couple hundred activists attended the beginning of the event. It is a sign of growing anxiety in the grass-roots over the Senate amnesty legislation.

“Border security, Rule of Law Members of Congress are unlikely to get a full debate inside the halls of Congress,” King said. “So we are taking the debate outside it’s halls.”

Thousands of Americans will also arrive in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday for a mass “Audit the IRS” rally to protest the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups. The Tea Party Patriots, a group targeted by the IRS, organized the rally.
Tea Partiers and conservatives who were targeted will speak at the rally along with prominent conservative legislators like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart’s Sonnie Johnson will also speak at the rally.
Conservative talk-radio host Glenn Beck will speak at both events.

It’s hard to know if they have enough clout to spook Boehner into truly evoking the Hastert Rule, therefore preventing the bill from coming to a vote. (He says he will, but unless he has reason to believe he’ll lose his chairmanship if he doesn’t he might do it anyway if his caucus wants this bill to pass — with Democratic votes.) I would guess this rally is an attempt to gin up enough popular opposition to make the caucus think twice about it.

On the other hand, he may just be doing what his caucus wants him to do:

Republican lawmakers have a message for those who want the party to soften its emphasis on social conservatism in hopes of reaching a wider national audience: Not so fast.

House Republicans flexed their cultural and conservative muscles Tuesday, passing the most restrictive abortion measure in years. They also advanced legislation to crack down on immigrants living illegally in the country, even as senators pursue a plan that would offer those same millions a shot at citizenship.

The actions reflect a roiling debate among Republicans over why they lost two elections to President Barack Obama, and how best to rebuild a winning formula.

Many Republicans in Congress and elsewhere think the party’s establishment erred in concluding the GOP must embrace “comprehensive immigration reform” to attract Hispanic voters. And they dismiss the notion that Republicans should soft-pedal their opposition to abortion, a subject on which they say public opinion is moving their way.

“There’s been a misleading thought as to what happened after the last election cycle,” said Rep. John Fleming, R-La.

“Most Americans do not support amnesty, especially without securing the borders,” he said, regarding the idea of citizenship for those here illegally. As for abortion, Fleming said, there’s growing public concern about second-trimester abortions, “so we’re actually gaining ground.”

They think they’re winning. And in some senses they are. The red states are pushing hardcore right wing legislation and rules. The Supreme Court’s conservative wing is fully dominant. They have a House majority that is far to the right of anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes — and they are willing to use it to ruthlessly move the goalposts in their direction and thwart any progress that the national majority votes for.

I have long said that they are the most effective opposition party in the world and now that they are gerrymandered into long term power in the House, we may see it demonstrated in living color for some time yet. They like being the opposition — they can fight freely and without constraint. And fighting is their lifeblood.

.

Every state needs a citizen redistricting commission

by David Atkins

Politico has a sobering analysis of the difficulty Democrats will face in retaking the House until 2022. It’s a topic I’ve discussed before, but it bears repeating:

Democrats fell far short of winning the House in 2012, an otherwise banner year for the party, and many are privately glum about taking back the chamber in 2014.

But that grim immediate outlook raises a far more troubling longer-term prospect for Democrats: that the newly drawn congressional lines have tilted the electoral playing field so decisively in the GOP’s favor that the party could control the House through 2020.

That this, in other words, could be the Democrats’ Lost Decade.

Three of the past four elections have produced partisan upheaval, so political forecasting must be approached with caution. Democrats say projecting beyond next year, let alone next month, is a fool’s errand.

But strategists in both parties say they are still reckoning with the long-term implications of Democrats’ disastrous performance in 2010. Not only did they lose the House that year, but setbacks in state capitals meant that Republicans controlled the once-a-decade process of line drawing in 213 districts — nearly five times the number of districts Democrats had oversight over. And Republicans used that power with a vengeance.

The GOP effectiveness in erecting a gerrymandered fortress has created a paradox: Even in a fast-changing electorate, with many demographic trends favoring Democrats, the part of the national government that the Founders imagined would be most responsive to shifts in public opinion and voter behavior may actually be the least responsive.

The possibility of a decade or more of GOP House dominance is something Democrats – and even some Republicans, who still need to hit up donors – are loathe to talk about publicly. But make no mistake: Even as they struggle in presidential and Senate races, Republicans have a structural advantage in the House that could last through the next four elections.

From a long-term perspective, this could end up redounding massively in Democrats’ favor. Republican safety in the House will build overconfidence and extremism, making the party ever more unpalatable to most Americans. By 2020, Democrats should get most of the statehouses back that they lost (outside the South), another round of more favorable redistricting will follow the census, and barring other bumps in the road Democrats should be able to win crushing victories in 2022 that would be extremely difficult to reverse. Hubris should always be avoided in politics, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the 2022 election could destroy the Republican Party as we know it.

Of course, that assumes there aren’t major crises that must be solved before then, climate change among them. However, if that is true the country is in trouble, anyway: the extremist Republican House isn’t about to solve any problems at all, much less urgent and devastating ones their base chooses to ignore.

But there’s a bigger problem in all this highlighted by the Politico article: the House of Representatives is supposed to be the body most responsive to changes in popular will. Gerrymandering makes it the least responsive. One answer to that problem is to do what California did in 2008: create a non-partisan redistricting commission in each state to take the power of drawing lines out of the hands of the state legislature, and place it instead in the hands of non-partisan citizen commissioners.

It sounds like a risky thing, which is why the Democratic Party in California strongly opposed it at the time. I bucked the party line to support it, however–partly on good governance grounds, and partly out of belief that Democrats would actually gain seats by making some incumbent Democrats more vulnerable but still mostly safe, while opening up a swath of previously unassailable Republican territory to real competition. Which is precisely what happened, allowing Democrats to take control of 2/3 of the state legislature while providing most of the gains in the House that Democrats did enjoy in 2012. The fears of opponents that the commission would be stacked by special interests did not materialize. The process was clean and fair.

Taking district drawing out of the hands of legislatures would be a gigantic step in the right direction. It’s a popular idea with both Democrats and Republicans, all of whom distrust politicians generally and despise gerrymandering specifically. Progressives, especially those in states that have a ballot initiative process and that are majority Democratic but controlled by Republican legislature, should push to put on the ballot citizen redistricting modeled exactly on California’s approach.

It would go a long way toward fixing a broken system, making Congress more accountable, and breaking up artificial conservative gridlock at both the state and federal levels.

.

Put ’em on the grid: CBO edition

by digby

I’ve been saying for a long time that immigration is good for what ails us. The right disagrees, of course. A month ago one of their leaders thought he was being very clever:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has urged the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to consider the costs of immigration reform beyond the next decade.

Sessions is concerned the CBO will dramatically underestimate the costs of comprehensive immigration reform by only projecting its costs over the next decade.

He argues that the biggest costs will kick in after the 10-year window typically used in CBO cost analyses.

“It is crucial that your fiscal and economic projections extend well beyond the current 10-year budget window,” Sessions wrote in a letter to CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

“Given the long time period over which the key elements of this bill are implemented, I cannot imagine a circumstance in which a 10-year scoring of S. 744 would be deemed adequate for guiding the policy decisions that Congress will confront,” he wrote.

Guess what?

In a boost for proponents of comprehensive immigration reform, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the immigration bill currently being debated in the Senate would increase the U.S. population by 10.4 million and would decrease federal budget deficits by $197 billion between 2014 and 2023.

The much-anticipated report indicates that enacting the legislation would create new federal outlays of about $262 billion in the first decade but would increase revenues – largely from new income and payroll taxes – by $459 billion.

It also estimates that about 8 million undocumented immigrants would initially gain legal status under the bill’s provisions.

While the CBO does not typically provide estimates beyond the first decade of enactment, the report tackled estimates for the time period of 2024-2033, estimating that the federal budget deficits would decrease by an additional $700 billion over that time. By 2033, the net increase to the U.S. population as a result of the bill’s enactment would be about 16 million, CBO says.

The positive estimates are a boon for proponents of the reform effort, who argue that immigration is an economic imperative for the country as well as a moral and political one.

What’s that old saying? Be careful what you ask for?

700 frickin’ billion dollars!

.