Month: October 2013

A tiny bit of justice for women


by digby

Sometimes, despite so much evidence to the contrary, there is a little bit of justice in this world:

Citing “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct, the Kansas Supreme Court on Friday indefinitely suspended the law license of former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline.

The court found that Kline violated 11 rules governing the professional conduct of attorneys during his tenure as the state’s highest law enforcement officer and while he served as Johnson County district attorney.

The disciplinary action that led to Friday’s order arose from Kline’s investigation of abortion clinics while he was attorney general, and from his handling of a grand jury proceeding while Johnson County’s district attorney.
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The ruling caps a 10-year political drama that began shortly after Kline became Kansas attorney general in 2003.

As attorney general and later Johnson County district attorney, he presided over investigations of the late George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita and Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

Kline had accused Planned Parenthood and Tiller of violating state abortion law and covering for pedophiles by not reporting pregnancies of underage girls. Kline said he sought medical records of former patients to prove his case.

The investigation of Planned Parenthood produced a 107-count criminal indictment. The case against the abortion provider was later dropped by current Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe.

The disciplinary proceedings against Kline began in January 2010 when complaints were filed by Tiller’s attorney and the forewoman of a Johnson County grand jury called to investigate Planned Parenthood. The complaint accused Kline of misleading judges and mishandling evidence as he investigated abortion clinics.

The next year, 12 days of evidence and testimony were presented at a hearing before three lawyers appointed by the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys. That panel found multiple incidents of misconduct and recommended indefinite suspension.

Kline’s objection to those findings triggered a review by the Supreme Court that led to Friday’s 154-page order.

The court found Friday that when he was attorney general, Kline committed misconduct by instructing members of his staff to attach sealed documents to a publicly filed document in violation of a Supreme Court order. He also told staff to file a court pleading that contained misleading information.

The court further found that as Johnson County district attorney, Kline failed to properly advise members of a grand jury about Kansas law and sought to enforce a grand jury subpoena against the grand jury’s wishes.

It also found that Kline gave false testimony to a judge and made “false and misleading” statements to the Supreme Court about the handling of patient records obtained during the criminal investigations. He also did not correct a misstatement to the state’s disciplinary administrator regarding the storage of patient records.

According to testimony during the disciplinary process, copies of some patient records were kept in the apartment of a staff member for weeks, although Kline related that they were under “lock and key.”

He’s a liar for the Lord. (Though not in the Mormon sense.) He’s just a straight up forced childbirth zealot who believes in using any means necessary to obtain his goal.

The good news for old Phill is that he’s now in the bosom of his people, where he’s spreading his ethics and morals to the next generation of extremists like himself:

Kline[is] now an assistant professor of law at Liberty University in Virginia.

What the American people want

by digby

Adam Nagourney is a terrible, agenda-driven journalist

by David Atkins

Adam Nagourney is already famous as the New York Times journalist always eager to write “Democrats in disarray” stories. But of all of the slanted stories he has written over the years, this one about California has to be the worst.

Nagourney looked at California’s resurgent economy and drama-free politics after the 2012 elections gave Democrats a 2/3 supermajority in all houses and put Democrats into every statewide seat, and decided that the reason for it was–wait for it–centrist reforms. No, really:

Lawmakers came into office this year representing districts whose lines were drawn by a nonpartisan commission, rather than under the more calculating eye of political leaders. This is the first Legislature chosen under an election system where the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary run against each other, regardless of party affiliations, an effort to prod candidates to appeal to a wider ideological swath of the electorate.

As any honest observer of California politics will tell you, the non-partisan citizens redistricting commission didn’t result in more moderate legislators. It resulted in more Democrats and less safe Republican seats. Prior to the non-partisan redistricting, institutional Democratic power in the state drew lines to maximize the safety of incumbent legislators, not to maximize the number of winnable seats for Democrats in overwhelmingly Democratic California. When the lines were redrawn to reflect real communities of interest, many Democratic lawmakers in deep blue areas found themselves displaced from their comfortable territories, while many bluish purple areas found themselves realistically able to elect a Democrat for the first time in recent memory. Safe Republican seats also became significantly less safe. More Democrats in office meant crashing through the 2/3 supermajority barrier. It wasn’t centrism that led to a better politics in California, but the utter marginalization of Republicans.

As for the awful top-two system? There is no evidence whatsoever that it has decreased partisanship. In deep blue and deep red areas, it has meant a personality-driven, primary circus atmosphere all the way into November featuring Republican-on-Republican and Democrat-on-Democrat races where party bosses and big money have enormous sway. In a few rare cases it has led to perverse situations: for instance, one Democratic district had a race with many Democrats running and only two Republicans, leading to both Republicans making it to the general election. In order to avoid this situation, party bosses now have even greater incentive to clear the field of challengers to the favored candidate. And in most purple battleground districts, races still came down to a normal Democrat vs. Republican battle–except this time, you can’t vote for a third party candidate at all. In 2006 if you were a progressive unhappy with Dianne Feinstein, you could cast your vote for the Green Party candidate. Not so in 2012: your only choices were Feinstein, the Republican, write-in, or leave it blank.

Of the many, many faults of the top-two primary system, injecting centrism into elections was not one of them.

Even worse, Nagourney tries to bring relaxed term limits into the picture as well:

And California voters approved last year an initiative to ease stringent term limits, which had produced a Statehouse filled with inexperienced legislators looking over the horizon to the next election. Lawmakers can now serve 12 years in either the Assembly or the Senate.

Yes, that’s true, and the relaxation of term limits is a positive development. But to say the passage of that initiative just last year has had a significant impact on legislative culture is ludicrous. It may and likely will have impacts down the road, but the new rules don’t apply to legislators already in office. Since the old term limit rules are a complicated mishmash that, to oversimplify matters, give Assemblymembers six years in office and State Senators eight years (they can hop to the other chamber for a short time afterward as well for a maximum of 12 years total), well under 1/4 of the current lawmakers are governed by the new, more relaxed term limits laws. Moreover, any laws to weaken term limits can hardly be called centrist: it is centrists who have been most influential in strengthening term limits laws, and partisan advocates who have been most vocal about relaxing them.

Meanwhile, these two paragraphs are exemplary of moebius-strip backward thinking:

The fact that these reforms are kicking in at the same time that Democrats enjoy ironclad control of the government makes it difficult to draw long-term conclusions about their effectiveness. Some critics of state governance argued that Democratic dominance and the fact that Mr. Brown has proved to be a moderating force on his party, vetoing certain bills on gun control and immigration, were as much driving factors.

“It’s sort of like the good government community and political elite are doing an end-zone dance at the 45-yard line,” said Joe Mathews, a longtime critic of California’s governance system. “We’ve been in this box for so long, there’s such a natural hunger to say things are doing better that things are going better.”

Let’s get this straight: Nagourney is crediting “good government reformers” for legislative successes that are due purely to Democratic partisan dominance. Then he cites “critics” who say that all this “reform” might be illusory because it may be jeopardized by Democratic dominance that has only been disguised by Jerry Brown’s moderate politics. That’s an incredible little tap dance there, particularly since most of the dysfunction that still remains in Sacramento is caused by Jerry Brown’s unfortunate insistence on austerity economics during a recession, and the fact that lawmakers and even the governor’s own staff have no idea what he will or will not do with his veto pen on any given day. Jerry Brown is a good governor all things considered, but elect a more predictable and reliably progressive governor in California, and the state will run even more smoothly than it does now.

Then there’s this head scratcher:

As Mr. Mathews noted, ballot initiatives continue to be a force for disruption in California governance — the most notable example being Proposition 13, which severely limited the ability of governments to raise taxes. Two years ago, voters rolled back the requirement that two-thirds of lawmakers approve any spending increase, removing a major impediment in Sacramento, but there remains a two-thirds requirement for raising taxes.

Did Nagourney forget that not only did voters erase the two-thirds restriction on the budget in order to give Democrats more functional control, but the two-thirds rule is essentially irrelevant because Democrats now have over 2/3 of both houses? Even if Nagourney wrongly chooses to see the relaxation of the 2/3 rule for budgets as some sort of victory for centrism rather than the victory of Democratic partisanship it is, how is it relevant?

This is golden, too:

J. Stephen Peace, a former Democratic legislator who is head of the Independent Voter Project, which pressed for the top-two voting system, said the very fact of Democratic dominance was actually evidence of how the reforms were changing the way business is done.

“Only with a top-two majority would you have an overwhelming Democratic Legislature which is also the most moderate Legislature in 30 years,” he said. “Look at the Chamber of Commerce job kills list — every measure on it was defeated except the increase in the minimum wage…”

There is reason to think that changes in legislative behavior might get more pronounced with turnover and as incumbent legislators who have not faced competitive elections before begin confronting a more competitive electoral landscape.

“We can already see that these reforms are improving the function of the Legislature and forcing people to come out of their partisan boxes and talk to the broader electorate,” said Sam Blakeslee, head of the California Reform Institute and a former Republican member of the Assembly. “We’re seeing, almost against the odds, a more centrist Legislature, at least when it comes to jobs and budget issues.”

Yes, I’m sure that Republican Sam Blakeslee would prefer to give credit for the state’s successes to “reforms” rather than to his own party’s being utterly relegated to the sidelines. And I’m sure the conservative “Democrat” who pushed the terrible top-two system on everyone while celebrating the positions of the Chamber of Commerce would be pleased to do likewise.

But that doesn’t make it true. The painfully obvious truth is that, as Hullabaloo veteran Dave Dayen notes, California is succeeding because we threw obstructionist Republicans overboard and gave total control of the state’s executive and legislative apparatus to Democrats. Even Adam Nagourney must be able to see that.

But Nagourney has an agenda he clearly needs to push–journalistic standards be damned.

Update: see also this excellent takedown by Seth Masket.
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Your moment of zen: tossed word salad sprinkled with nuts

by digby

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Statistic ‘o the day

by digby

Via:

Two-thirds of regular Republicans believe the federal budget deficit has grown this year and 93 percent of Tea Party Republicans agree.

Both are wrong; the budget deficit is projected to fall this year from $1.1 trillion to $642 billion.

So why are we still obsessing about deficits?

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The fact-free laziness of centrism

by David Atkins

Reading about the Bircher war on the institutional Republican Party, it’s easy to see how an average reader would want to embrace “centrism”:

To Deace, “political-party disintegration” is on the horizon. And he’s not alone: Sean Hannity, on his radio show on Monday, said he’d previously opposed a third party, but “I’m not so sure anymore. It may be time for a new conservative party in America. I’m sick of these guys.” Ann Coulter’s new book is titled Never Trust a Liberal Over 3—Especially a Republican. Groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action wear their contempt for GOP elites as a point of pride, and spend the bulk of their resources campaigning against rather than for Republican officeholders.

The Republican establishment, these conservatives say, doesn’t seem to understand that the Tea Party isn’t a wing of the GOP. “It’s an autonomous force,” said Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In emails and conversations across the country, Martin told me, she’s hearing more rumblings about taking the Tea Party out from under the GOP than ever before, though the organization hasn’t taken a position on it. “When either party is doing the right thing, the Tea Party stands with them,” she said. “And when either party is doing the wrong thing, we hold them accountable.”

The recent government shutdown, and the infighting it laid bare between Republican factions, convinced many conservatives that the institutional GOP would rather sell them out than stick up for them. “There are two views on the right. One says more Republicans is better; the other says better Republicans is better,” said Dean Clancy, vice president of public policy for the Tea Party group FreedomWorks. “One view focuses on the number of Republicans in the Senate, the other on the amount of fight in the senators.”

When Beck made his appeal to “defund the GOP,” he told his listeners to stop giving money to Republican committees and give to FreedomWorks instead. “We kind of agree,” Clancy told me. “Giving to the party committees is wasted money, because they’re just incumbent protection clubs …. Sometimes you have to beat the Republicans before you beat the Democrats. Just because they’re ‘our guys’ doesn’t mean they’ll be our guys when it counts.”

If you switch the words “Republican” for “Democrat”, and “conservative” for “progressive”, this could easily be mistaken for an article in The Nation or at Daily Kos.

But that’s why viewing politics as merely a set of competing opinions on a sliding scale away from some hypothetical center is so dangerous and ill-advised. Facts matter.
One of the problems with horse race journalism is not just that it’s content-free. It’s also that by continually focusing on power and the perceptions of power, the muddling of fact into opinion creates an environment wherein both sides of the mythical “center” of the parties are seen as equally extreme.

It’s true, of course, that one difference here is that Tea Partiers dominate the Republican Party while progressives are a back bench voice that rarely gets serious treatment in the Democratic Party. But that alone isn’t a compelling argument. After all, while there are some folks on the left who view their own marginalization as proof of their virtue, by and large progressives want to have more power in Congress. The difference is that more progressive power would be better for the country.

It matters that conservatives have been proven wrong about the relationship between deficits and inflation. It matters that conservatives have been proven wrong about climate change. It matters that countries with single-payer healthcare have better care at lower cost. It matters that treating minorities as human beings with equal rights does not cause society to fall apart. It matters that supply side economic theory has been proven to be a disaster. It matters that record corporate profits and low effective tax rates are accompanying high unemployment, killing all conservative claims about economic realities in any fair debate. It matters that blue states tend to be socially and economically happier than red ones. It matters that countries with decent gun control laws have far lower rates of gun violence and murder in general. It matters that imposing austerity during a recession only deepens the economic doldrums while increasing the debt, and that this fact has been proven out in recent years. It matters that income inequality is damaging to a country’s economic future, and that retirement programs for the elderly can easily be paid for by taking what amounts to pocket change in taxes from the wealthiest Americans. These aren’t matters of opinion to be gauged on the sliding scale. These are matters of fact.

It also helps that by and large, progressive policies are much more popular than conservative ones. That’s a fact as well.

These things matter. Facts are important. Without a grounding in fact, all politics looks like a battle of the center against the extremes of both sides. But that’s an incredibly lazy and ignorant way to look at the world.

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Hey guess what? The government is still shutting down — in slow motion

by digby

A little needed perspective from dday, in TNR:

You could argue that the recent shutdown inflicted much more damage than sequestration. You would be wrong. Standard and Poor’s estimated that the shutdown cost the economy $24 billion over its 16-day stretch. Sequestration, meanwhile, will be in place for ten years unless Congress does something, and the spending cuts over that time total $1.2 trillion—50 times the economic impact of the shutdown. And that doesn’t include the knock-on effects to the economy—reduced purchasing power by federal employees, fewer contracts for private companies doing business with the government, and generally lower consumer spending as a result.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, sequestration cuts will cost as much as 1.6 million jobs if kept in place through the 2014 fiscal year, with a reduction in GDP of 0.7 percent. The continuing resolution funds the government at sequestration levels through January 15, 2014, so we’re well on our way. As veteran Congressional observer Norm Ornstein wrote, “Damaging as the shutdown is for governance, it is minor compared with the long-term damage of the sequester.”
[…]
This represents clear, self-inflicted damage, mostly achieved due to Republican control of one house of Congress. Their demands for smaller government have succeeded—the budget deficit has fallen at the most rapid pace since the demobilization following World War II—but it has come at a massive cost to the country’s economic fortunes. The economy was simply too fragile, with aggregate demand too low, to withstand the blow of shutting down the government. Unemployment would be far lower, and growth far higher, without these wounds.

And sadly enough, leading Democrats egged on the pivot to austerity, including President Barack Obama. Insufficient stimulus, measures like a federal employee pay freeze, and the inability to counter-balance forced budget cuts from the states led government policy to harm an economy that needed help. Indeed, Goldman Sachs’ macroeconomic analysis showed that federal fiscal policy—not just state and local—began to drag on growth in the middle of 2010, when Democrats still controlled Congress. That has been borne out by subsequent analyses, and it puts us in year four of an unnecessary, damaging partial government shutdown.

But by all means let’s keep patting ourselves on the back for being such big winners in the budget wars.

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Lying for nothing

by digby

So apparently Sean Hannity had some Real Americans on his show last night complaining about how Obamacare is ruining their lives. Unfortunately for them, someone fact-checked them.  Someone who knows how Obamacare actually works:

I tracked down Hannity’s guests, one by one, and did my own telephone interviews with them.

First I spoke with Paul Cox of Leicester, N.C. He and his wife Michelle had lamented to Hannity that because of Obamacare, they can’t grow their construction business and they have kept their employees below a certain number of hours, so that they are part-timers.

Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less. But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? “Well,” he said, “I haven’t been forced to do so, it’s just that I’ve chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs.” What costs? And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a long pause, after which he said he’d call me back. He never did.

There is only one Obamacare requirement that applies to a company of this size: workers must be notified of the existence of the “healthcare.gov” website, the insurance exchange. That’s all.

Next I called Allison Denijs. She’d told Hannity that she pays over $13,000 a year in premiums. Like the other guests, she said she had recently gotten a letter from Blue Cross saying that her policy was being terminated and a new, ACA-compliant policy would take its place. She says this shows that Obama lied when he promised Americans that we could keep our existing policies.

Allison’s husband left his job a few years ago, one with benefits at a big company, to start his own business. Since then they’ve been buying insurance on the open market, and are now paying around $1,100 a month for a policy with a $2,500 deductible per family member, with hefty annual premium hikes. One of their two children is not covered under the policy. She has a preexisting condition that would require purchasing additional coverage for $800 a month, which would bring the family’s grand total to $19,000 a year.

I asked Allison if she’d shopped on the exchange, to see what a plan might cost under the new law. She said she hadn’t done so because she’d heard the website was not working. Would she try it out when it’s up and running? Perhaps, she said. She told me she has long opposed Obamacare, and that the president should have focused on tort reform as a solution to bringing down the price of healthcare.

I tried an experiment and shopped on the exchange for Allison and Kurt. Assuming they don’t smoke and have a household income too high to be eligible for subsidies, I found that they would be able to get a plan for around $7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter. This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they would have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market.

Allison also told me that the letter she received from Blue Cross said that in addition to the policy change for ACA compliance, in the new policy her physician network size might be reduced. That’s something insurance companies do to save money, with or without Obamacare on the horizon, just as they raise premiums with or without Obamacare coming.

If Allison’s choice of doctor was denied her through Obamacare then, yes, she could have a claim that Obamacare has hurt her. But she’d also have thousands of dollars in her pocket that she didn’t have before.

Finally, I called Robbie and Tina Robison from Franklin, Tenn. Robbie is self-employed as a Christian youth motivational speaker. (You can see his work here.) On Hannity, the couple said that they, too, were recently notified that their Blue Cross policy would be expiring for lack of ACA compliance. They told Hannity that the replacement plans Blue Cross was offering would come with a rate increase of 50 percent or even 75 percent, and that the new offerings would contain all sorts of benefits they don’t need, like maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth. Their kids are grown and moved out, so why should they be forced to pay extra for a health plan with superfluous features?

When I spoke to Robbie, he said he and Tina have been paying a little over $800 a month for their plan, about $10,000 a year. And the ACA-compliant policy will cost 50-75 percent more? They said this information was related to them by their insurance agent.

Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it. Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for, at most, $3,700 a year, a 63 percent less than their current bill. It might cover things that they don’t need, but so does every insurance policy.

Honestly, if these people are such ideologues that they haven’t even checked if they will benefit from the reforms before complaining about them on national television then fuck them. They can pay full market price and help subsidize the rest of us.

There are plenty of problems with the Obamacare rollout for people to complain about. It’s quite interesting that Fox feels the need to feature people who are lying. They seem to believe that they need to make everyone believe they’re going to be paying huge sums for their health insurance now even though the only people who are likely to see rate hikes are those who make too much money for subsidies.  AKA, the 1%.

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In which I get behind the Grand Bargain — well, a Grand Bargain

by digby

I love this idea from Ryan Cooper. (And I think they should definitely call it a Grand Bargain, too):

Robert Costa has an interview interview with Mitch McConnell, in which he describes his position on new tax revenues as follows:

“When the speaker has had conversations with the president over the last three years, they have always insisted on a $1 trillion tax increase — revenue scored by the Congressional Budget Office. That’s their demand for any major entitlement reform. But we don’t think we should have to pay a ransom to do what the country needs.”

Setting aside the ludicrousness of calling increased taxes a “ransom,” every single budget negotiation over the last three years has fallen apart over this point. Taxes have taken on almost totemic significance within the Republican party. They quite plainly will not agree to any rise in revenue (at least on the rich, which is what Democrats want), even if by making every millionaire pay an extra nickel they could somehow resurrect Ronald Reagan.

However, it might be possible to move past this point. The way to do it would be for Dems to ask for a different concession from Republicans, such as a huge boost in infrastructure spending to get the economy going again, and give them tax cuts in exchange for it.

Wouldn’t Republicans howl that this would increase the deficit? Maybe, but it’s also obvious that Republicans’ anti-deficit stance is 99 percent BS posturing. What’s more, the deficit really isn’t that big of a deal right now, as Ezra Klein says. In fact, the biggest problem with the deficit is it’s coming down too fast. All this austerity since 2011 has been a palpable drag on the economy, and if doubling the budget deficit would bring unemployment down a couple points, I’d make the trade in a heartbeat. What’s more, the US has a lot more fiscal running room than even three years ago — future budget projections have improved sharply, due to slowing health care cost growth.

This is exactly what we need!

I realize that a lot of Democrats have ludicrously convinced themselves that getting higher taxes will somehow “break” the GOP’s anti-tax spirit and (as with so many Democratic delusions) once we can get that done we’ll be able to enact our agenda with little resistance. Yeah. That’ll happen. (Just like Clinton’s surplus would lead to the whole country acknowledging that Democrats are the one true Fiscally Responsible party.)

Although his analysis is spot-on, I disagree a little bit with Atrios’s take on this in one small way. It’s true that they have proved over and over that they only care about deficits to the extent they can use them as a cudgel to make Democrats do their wet work for them. But it’s not that Republicans don’t care about killing Social Security and basically just want tax cuts and nothing more.  I think they just want tax cuts more than anything else. I believe they truly would love to privatize Social Security. It would make money for their richie riches and destroy a program that proves government is both efficient and necessary to virtually every citizen. At this point they’re happy to do whatever it takes to make old people suffer so they can prove their point. But no, they don’t want to trade higher taxes for that.

This idea of Cooper’s is a real win-win. The last thing we need in this economic environment is more austerity. This way, the GOP gets their tax cuts, which are stimulative — and that’s good! Democrats get infrastructure which is not only stimulative and directly creates jobs, it has a lasting value — which is good! It’s all good.

I sure wish someone with a bully pulpit would get behind it.

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The new “vital center” now that the traditional “moderates” have been purged

by digby

Chris Hayes noticed something that seems to have eluded almost everyone else: there are no “moderate” GOP House members:

I would also point out that as everyone praises Reid and Pelosi for their masterful shepherding of the notoriously inconstant Democrats through this last round, it’s undoubtedly a lot easier without a bunch of House Blue Dogs and the likes of egomaniacs like Lieberman and Nelson to gum up the works. There’s a lot of Village angst these days about the inability of the two parties to sit down together and throw back a few Old Fashioneds like TipnRonnie used to do, but I’m afraid it’s the natural outgrowth of the two parties finally dividing along the ideological lines that formed after the civil rights movement. It is what it is.

The good news is that the Democratic Party, which held on to its inappropriate reactionaries for far longer than the GOP held its liberals, will finally have a chance to at least fight to a draw on the major issues that separate the two parties. The bad news is that there is plenty of terrain for big bipartisan consensus around taking good care of the two parties’ most precious assets: their billionaire benefactors. I’m afraid that’s the only thing the “vital center” of our two parties agree on. And they are very much in agreement.

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