Jim DeMint further discredits the discredited Heritage Foundation
by digby
He’s pushing the congress to defund Obamacare and thinks that Obama will sign the bill. Seriously, that’s how delusional he is:
I’m sure you all recall that the Affordable Care Act was modeled on a Heritage Foundation proposal. Give ’em an inch and they’ll laugh in your face…
The latest from the he-man club
by digby
So Janet Yellen’s a great gal, smart and thoughtful and what not. But she’s just not one of the boys:
They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face. When Timothy Geithner was New York Fed president, for example, he, Bernanke, and Kohn were very much a team plotting the central bank’s response to the financial crisis (other key players in that tight-knit group were Bill Dudley, then the head of the New York Fed’s markets desk, and Kevin Warsh, then a Fed governor in Washington). In the early months of the Obama administration, the same could be said of the group that included Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling and others who are now influential voices advising the president on the decision.
Throughout this time, Yellen was running the San Francisco Fed — very effectively, according to interviews with people who worked with her closely before and during the crisis. But she was on the outside looking in regarding some of the seat-of-the-pants decisions that were being made over how to rescue the American economy.
And those are some big pants — huge (if you know what I mean.) And Yellen’s a lady. She’s got nothing to offer when it comes to pants.
Read the whole article. They apparently value “manic” decision making over deliberate analysis, which explains a lot. And while the president told us all the other day that he wanted the fed to concentrate on getting unemployment down, in this article he seems to have morphed into a Chicago school inflation hawk. And apparently poor Yellen just isn’t as hardcore as one might want about keeping our virtually non-existent inflation in check even if the cost is perpetually high unemployment. Waddaya gonna do?
Greenspan’s still around, probably muttering something about irrational exuberance and parasites, I’m sure he’d be up for another term. Why are we setting our sights so low? Hell, why doesn’t he just reanimate Andrew Mellon’s corpse and nominate him?
Ron Suskind took a lot of heat for writing in Confidence Men
So they want to “fix the debt” do they?
by digby
Representative Barbara Lee wrote this piece yesterday for Daily Kos and I thought it raised an important issue. It’s good to see Democrats speaking in this explicitly worker friendly (dare I say populist) language and introducing bills to deal with the problem. For too long all we’ve heard from both parties has been a celebration of producerism to one degree or another. Like the new move to raise Social security benefits, this sort of thing will undoubtedly provoke a torrent of complaints from the owners of America, but that’s part of he process.
The more they complain, the more likely it is that Americans will hear the other side of the argument:
Imagine a group of CEOs who want to “fix the debt” but benefit greatly from corporate tax breaks. That’s what’s happening today.
While the American middle class hangs on by a thread through a “jobless recovery”, corporations are making record profits and paying out record bonuses as well as over-the-top executive compensation packages. Corporations paying such huge executive pay packages have nearly unlimited deductibility.
Cash-strapped taxpayers shouldn’t be picking up the tab.
To stop this rising income inequality and fix our broken tax system, I have introduced HR 199, the Income Equity Act, which would limit the tax deductibility of executive compensation packages.
Under the current rules, the more a firm pays its CEO, the more the firm can deduct from its taxes.
To be clear, corporations can compensate their executives as much as they’d like. The idea is to prevent corporations from passing the buck to the American taxpayers.
My bill would eliminate a “backward” incentive for excessive compensation, which the bill defines as more than 25 times that of the lowest paid workers at the company.
Please take a look at a chart (below) by the Economic Policy Institute showing the total economy’s productivity over more than half a century vs the real hourly compensation of production/non-supervisory workers in the private sector.
To understand the impact of the incentives that our tax code creates, see a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. It documents 25 corporations that paid their CEOs more than the entire company paid in federal income taxes.
There’s a petition you can sign at DKif you so desire.
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First they came for the hard drives …
by digby
Over the years I’ve been a pretty fierce media critic and I don’t think I’m naive about the ways of the political press. So it’s a bit of a shock to me that I’m still capable of being surprised by their servile acquiescence to the political establishment. But here I am, gobsmacked once more at some journalists’ reactions to the NSA revelations and the government’s response to them. Much like the Wall Street crowd that gleefully participated in killing their golden goose, many elite journalists seem to be joining the government repression of the free press instead of being defiant and protecting their own prerogatives. I guess they are of the same social status as those rich boyz who recovered nicely after nearly toppling the world economy so they figure these things won’t blow back on them personally either. And maybe they won’t. Too bad for the rest of us.
Here’s an excerpt from a column from the Guardian’s editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger:
The detention of Miranda has rightly caused international dismay because it feeds into a perception that the US and UK governments – while claiming to welcome the debate around state surveillance started by Snowden – are also intent on stemming the tide of leaks and on pursuing the whistleblower with a vengeance. That perception is right. Here follows a little background on the considerable obstacles being placed in the way of informing the public about what the intelligence agencies, governments and corporations are up to.
A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.
The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government’s intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?
The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won’t do it in London. The seizure of Miranda’s laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald’s work.
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like “when”.
We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint. Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK, oddly, on the right) may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack. But at least reporters now know to stay away from Heathrow transit lounges.
He’s wrong about one thing. Many journalists will be able to maintain their most cherished confidential sources. After all, those sources are the ones that disseminate the information the government wants us to have. (This is also known as “access”.) As long as a journalist doesn’t report anything other than official government propaganda, they’ll be just fine.
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Another patriot exercising his freedumb
by David Atkins
Another militiaman nobly defending against tyranny and invasion:
A member of a Minutemen militia was arrested Saturday night for allegedly pointing his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy.
Richard Malley, 49, and two other group members were patrolling the area along Interstate 8 in search of illegal activity when two deputies approached, according to court documents. The Minutemen watch for unauthorized immigrants and drug smugglers crossing to Arizona from Mexico.
Malley pointed his rifle and flashlight at one of the deputies. He was also armed with a .45 caliber pistol and a fixed-blade knife. The deputy identified himself as a law enforcement officer, but Malley did not lower his weapon. Instead, he demanded that the deputy provide him with identification.
The deputy showed Malley his Maricopa County Sheriff uniform, including his badge, the patches on his sleeves and the word “Sheriff” across his chest. He then asked Malley to lay down his weapons, but Malley refused.
The irony here is that while this is supposedly a “near miss” and potential tragedy, the logic of gun rights activists is that guys like Richard Malley should shoot deputized law enforcement officers if they believe that the government has become “tyrannical.” Who decides when that is? It’s up to the militia man’s own moral compass and interpretation of the Constitution, of course.
What a comforting thought.
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Your moment of zen
by digby
Can a former nude centerfold model become president? We’re about to find out:
Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown told the Herald he is looking at a possible 2016 presidential bid today as he hit a well-worn stomping ground for Oval Office hopefuls – the Iowa State Fair.
“I want to get an indication of whether there’s even an interest, in Massachusetts and throughout the country, if there’s room for a bi-partisan problem solver,” said Brown, who has been meeting with top Republicans nationally and last week hosted a Fenway event for Republican National Committee members. Brown indicated he isn’t close to deciding whether he will run. “It’s 2013, I think it’s premature, but I am curious. There’s a lot of good name recognition in the Dakotas and here – that’s pretty good.”
Hey, there was a time when everyone thought Fred Thompson was so handsome and charismatic that he was a shoe-in to win the nomination. Why shouldn’t Brown give it a whirl?
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Because we’re good and they’re evil:
Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event’s reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah’s ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year.
But it has taken almost six decades for the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge openly that it was behind the controversial overthrow. Published here today — and on the website of the National Security Archive, which obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act — is a brief excerpt from The Battle for Iran, an internal report prepared in the mid-1970s by an in-house CIA historian.
The document was first released in 1981, but with most of it excised, including all of Section III, entitled “Covert Action” — the part that describes the coup itself. Most of that section remains under wraps, but this new version does formally make public, for the first time that we know of, the fact of the agency’s participation: “[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy,” the history reads. The risk of leaving Iran “open to Soviet aggression,” it adds, “compelled the United States … in planning and executing TPAJAX.”
Not that this wasn’t common knowledge, but that only shows just how absurd it was for the CIA to keep this classified for 60 years. Especially considering that little “blow-back” we experienced in 1979 and have been dealing with ever since.
I can only imagine what they’ll be releasing in 2073 about what the government’s denying it’s doing today.
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How getting married could make you lose your right to vote
by digby
I hadn’t even considered this, but it could very well be a problem:
Women often have trouble with government officials because they change names. I never did it but I have certainly run into various problems when trying to deal with my husband’s business because we don’t share a last name. And I have seen women in airport lines and passport offices tangling with clerks over their mismatched IDs.
I’m not sure that this is a conscious right wing strategy, however. While it’s true that more women vote for Democrats than Republicans, many millions of women still vote GOP and making it difficult for them to vote is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I suspect they just didn’t think of this what with being so focused on keeping the so-called “urban vote” down. Of course, that does work in their favor as well — women of color are more likely to vote for Democrats so perhaps it’s a two-fer.
In any case, these strict ID laws are likely to catch some women in the trap simply because they are often people who change their names. You’d think the family values party would have a problem with that.
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California Republicans think bringing Rick Perry to speak for them is a good idea
by David Atkins
How out to lunch is the California Republican Party? They actually think bringing Rick Perry to town is a good idea:
Seemingly ready and raring for a second shot at the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has accepted the top speaking slot at the California Republican Party’s fall convention in Anaheim this fall.
Perry will speak to more than 1,000 members on the future of the party, focusing on next year’s midterm elections and the impending race for the presidency.
While California Republicans are certainly the minority in the state (they trail Democrats by 13 percentage points), the event is the nation’s largest state GOP gathering attracting state activists, donors and officials.
If California Republicans wanted to remind the voters that they don’t share California values, the best way they could do it is by bringing in the arch-conservative from Texas.
The Texan economy is a hollow mess of low wages, poor education, high poverty wages and flimsy safety nets. The California economy, meanwhile, is resurgent after voters gave Democrats a 2/3 supermajority in the statehouse. Yet Republicans are intent on trying to convince America and California of how well they’ve run Texas into the ground, and how much the rest of us should want that for ourselves.
Seems like a great bet.
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Hoover on steroids
by digby
I wrote a bit about this on Friday but I think it’s worth mentioning again. I’ll quote Kevin Drum:
On Thursday, after reading that the NSA violated its surveillance rules 865 times in the first quarter of 2013, I wondered how big a percentage that was. On Friday, they provided an answer:
The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100 errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about 20 million such queries each month.
Holy crap. They perform 20 million surveillance queries per month? On the bright side, if you assume that their internal auditing really does catch every “incident,” it means they have a violation rate of about 0.001 percent. On the less bright side, they perform 20 million surveillance queries per month.
First, assuming that internal auditing catches every incident is quite a stretch. But the other point really is worth thinking about. Are we really dealing with a threat that justifies this massive level of inquiry? It’s very hard for me to understand how that could be unless we really are dealing with an impending invasion by Martians. This is absurd.
Of course, one of the natural consequence of a government agency collecting large amounts of information is … paranoia, particularly on the part of those who know something about the surveillance but not everything. Such as government officials.
I happened to be doing some research the other day and found this article from December 2012 featuring earlier NSA whistleblower William Binney commenting on the Petraeus scandal. I don’t know if what he said is true, but with what we know now it is certainly possible:
Following the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus, which was reportedly prompted by an extramarital affair he had with his biographer, a formerly high-ranking member of the National Security Agency (NSA) claims the FBI’s probe into Petraeus indicates that digital privacy has become a freedom of the past.
“What I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of virtually everybody in the country,” NSA whistleblower William Binney affirmed in a recent interview with the Kremlin-funded news outlet Russia Today (RT). “And the FBI has access to it.”
[…]
Binney testified that all congressional lawmakers are being monitored as well.“They are all included,” he said, “So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason — they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.”
Again, I have no idea if this is true. But then neither does anyone who might be targeted, including members of the government. Maybe especially members of the government. After all, as I’ve written repeatedly, it’s not as if we don’t have a little history with this sort of thing:
Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on scores of powerful people, especially politicians, which were kept separate from official FBI records. On his orders, the files were destroyed immediately after Hoover’s death. In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover’s apparently cozy relations with the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed muckraker Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia’s organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover’s retaliation and continual harassment of Anderson lasted into the 1970s. Hoover has also been accused of trying to undermine the reputations of members of the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party.
Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson each considered firing Hoover, but concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great.
I’m not saying the NSA (or some discrete piece of the NSA/FBI/CIA spook nexus) has become Hoover on steroids. But you have to be concerned about the possibility that someone could use this capacity in this way for their own purposes. And it’s certainly something that someone could tell a government employee or contractor they have and it would be impossible to prove otherwise. As you can see from the Hoover example, you don’t have to know what they have on you to be afraid of it.
There are many dangers associated with these data collection programs. But perhaps the worst is the idea that we are all going to have to think twice about what we say and do from now on. That’s not because we are afraid of offending someone, but because we have to wonder whether we are drawing the government’s attention in some way that will give them the excuse to trawl through our lives. That is particularly problematic for people in public life who have something to lose. And it presents an opportunity for certain members of the surveillance/military industrial complex to leverage lawmakers in new and different ways. They don’t even have to have anything — all they have to do is imply it.
Secrecy breeds paranoia. And paranoia is the enemy of freedom.
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