Month: October 2013

“I think we need less polarization and divisiveness during a civil war”

by digby

Haha, TNR “found” an early edition of the Politico Playbook from 1863.

Here’s an excerpt:

NOT-S0-GREAT EMANCIPATOR: “Lincoln Proclamation Stirs Controversy,” by Jethraux VandeHei: “Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was bound to rile opponents who already viewed the president as high-handed and arbitrary… Senior White House officials assert that Lincoln has the authority to free slaves under the Constitution’s war-making provision. But Congressional Democrats have vowed to hold hearings, which could put border-state Republicans in an awkward position…. Lincoln is risking his presidency and his reputation on the uncertain notion that future generations will eventually appreciate the end of slavery.”

WEST-WING MINDMELD: This shows a direct, decisive president, something that will improve Lincoln’s ability to get his agenda through Congress

FORMER GEN.-IN-CHIEF GEORGE MCCLELLAN, on MORNING JEHOSEPHAT: “Lincoln has flip-flopped once again on emancipation…. Washington politicians are doing an end run around the Constitution… I think we need less polarization and divisiveness during a civil war. A leader needs to stand up to extremists and reach out across the aisle. Lincoln has not led.” 1864 TEA LEAVES: “I am not ruling anything out, but I’m not ruling anything in.”

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If you want to reduce “dependency” then pay higher wages

by David Atkins

Bill Maher calls it right:

When it comes to raising the minimum wage Conservatives always say it is a non-starter because it cuts into profits. … You might think that paying people enough to live is so self-evident that even crazy people could understand it. But you would be wrong. …

Michele Bachmann is not only against raising the minimum wage, she is against having one at all. She wants said “… if we took away the minimum wage … we could … virtually wipe out unemployment … because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” …

And naturally Ted Cruz agrees. Ted Cruz thinks it’s a good thing that when his Cuban father came to America he was paid fifty cents an hour to work as a dishwasher. …

When did the American dream become this pathway to indentured servitude, this economic death spiral where workers get paid next to nothing, so they can only afford to buy next to nothing, so businesses are forced to sell cheaper and cheaper shit?

Consider the fact that most fast food workers whose average age by the way is 29 … are on some form of public assistance which is not surprising. When even working people can’t make enough to live they take money from the government.

This is the question the Right has to answer. Do you want smaller government with less handouts or do you want do you want a low minimum wage because you cannot have both. If Coronel Sanders isn’t going to pay the lady behind the counter enough to live on, then Uncle Sam has to. And I for one is getting a little tired of helping highly profitable companies pay their workers.

We don’t have a dependency problem, we have a wages problem. We don’t have an entitlement problem, we have an inequality problem. We don’t have a supply problem, we have a demand problem.

It’s pretty easy to figure out, really.

h/t Egberto Willies at Dailly Kos

When complaining backfires

by digby

Ooops:

A survey released Monday by Bankrate.com shows awareness and interest in the plan is growing among key demographics. The poll found 51 percent of all those surveyed — Democrats and Republicans alike — say the House Republican attacks and troubled launch of the Obamacare website have made them more interested in the new medical insurance plan. Only 4 percent say they’re less interested.

The poll was conducted between Oct. 17 and 20, immediately after the government shutdown and while media attention was shifting to the many technical problems with the Healthcare.gov website.

Interest in the plan is especially high among younger people who are needed to make the plan’s economics work. Nearly 60 percent of so-called “young invincibles” age 18 to 29 said they wanted to know more about the ACA. Because people this age use less healthcare than other groups, their insurance payments help subsidize the healthcare costs of others.

All the media attention also seems to have made up for what has been considered a lackluster effort by the government to make people aware of the ACA. Around 64 percent of the uninsured said they were now curious about it, the highest rate of any group in the survey

I’m going to guess that wasn’t part of the plan …

Obviously, this doesn’t mean they will sign up or like the program but it seems they will at least know about it, which is the first step to implementation.

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Your daily “entitlement” death vigil

by digby

Everybody’s coming up with new reasons why we need to cut social security, Medicare and Medicaid. Paul Ryan, as you know, has decided that we need to cut them in exchange for some of the sequestration cuts to defense. And it appears that there might be some appetite among Democrats for that as well, if this article is to be believed:

Democrats have begun to telegraph a possible path forward in the coming budget conference, suggesting a possible compromise that would include trading a relaxation of the sequester for “permanent structural changes to mandatory programs,” according to a Senate Democratic aide. The thinking goes: Republicans could argue that they traded budget cuts that last only until 2022 for permanent changes. Just what Democrats would accept in terms of changes to mandatory programs is still murky, though; Democrats are being deliberately vague about what they might be willing to swallow.

“I know that Democrats are willing to compromise to get a deal, and I’m hopeful Republicans will as well,” Murray said recently.

Now other Republicans are getting on the bandwagon with lugubrious handwringing over sequestration and demanding that we rob the future to pay for today:

Despite strong congressional support for science, the future of the United States’ scientific initiative could be in jeopardy. But the real driving force behind the threat is often obscured in the media by short-term distractions. America’s national debt hovers dangerously close to $17 trillion for the first time in history. Any honest economist will tell you a government can’t afford to pay for everything. Governing is about making difficult choices.
We must set priorities and get our nation’s spending under control. To accomplish this we must reform entitlement programs. If we don’t, experts warn, future funding for other budget priorities, including scientific research, could be in jeopardy.

During the partial government shutdown in October, many in the scientific community expressed concern about its impact on federally funded research. As chairman of the House Science Committee, I take these concerns seriously. But over the long term, the temporary shutdown may prove to be the least of our worries.

It’s important to first put America’s scientific investments in context. Funding for U.S. science agencies comes out of what is referred to as the “discretionary” budget. Congress has more control over how this money is allocated than so-called mandatory spending, which includes entitlement programs. Discretionary spending makes up less than one-fifth of all federal spending. And nondefense research and development, R&D, is only a fraction of that.
R&D funding, as a percentage of the overall discretionary budget, has historically been incredibly stable, ranging from 10 percent to 13 percent over the past 40 years.

And federal research and development programs have always enjoyed broad bipartisan support: Shifts in political power between the parties have had little effect. But budget experts warn that growth in entitlement spending will squeeze this stable funding stream.
Excluding national defense, the government’s largest expenses are for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And spending on these programs is projected to skyrocket in the coming years largely because of the rising cost of health care and an aging U.S. population. Increases in entitlement spending will place enormous pressure on other budget priorities, including our nation’s science funding.

Actually health care costs are coming down and projections show that they will come down more if the health care reforms work as planned. But then I’m sure Lamar Smith assumes they will all be repealed eventually so that’s not an issue. And, as we all know, Social Security has its own dedicated funding stream which has absolutely nothing to do with funding for science and R&D, so that’s just a big pile of nonsense.

But we are seeing a sort of consensus forming around the sequester cuts being the new exchange for the slashing of the earned benefits programs. Whether that will fly with Democrats is uncertain, but it certainly looks like Republicans are happy to demagogue the current spending cuts to that end.

Blue America endorses Eloise Gomez Reyes for CA-31

by digby

We sent this to our members earlier today:

Every once in a while a grassroots leader emerges who is not only smart, hard-working and philosophically aligned with Blue America, but whose very life embodies the progressive American Dream. Eloise Reyes is one of those leaders. To spend time with her is to be inspired anew at the promise of what America used to mean and can mean again.

Eloise grew up in Colton California, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant mom and a Mexican American Dad (who didn’t know he was a US citizen as a child!) They were poor people who raised up a bunch of kids who became lawyers, police officers, business owners, public servants and college professors. All those kids worked in the fields alongside their parents, they studied hard and made their way into America’s middle class. Eloise became a lawyer, establishing her own private practice while devoting herself to long hours of pro-bono work with Legal Aid for many, many years. She became successful and gave back by becoming a committed grassroots activist working to make life better for her community and her country.

Eloise benefited from a strong family and a strong society that went out of its way to offer opportunity and security to people like her — and she’s committed to making sure that society is available once more to future generations. Eloise is running for congress against a cookie cutter Democrat named Pete Aguilar who is backed by the DC establishment — a Democrat so inept that he came in third in California’s jungle primary to two Republicans in this deep blue district in the last election. The result was that the progressive majority had no Democrat on the ballot for congress when they cast their votes for President Obama in massive numbers. Why the DCCC thinks it’s a good idea to back someone who couldn’t do better than that in a presidential year remains a mystery, but they are doing it. And Pete Aguilar could lose this seat again.

This seat can be won by a Democrat next time quite easily — if the right Democrat is on the ballot. This is a deep blue district and if the party succeeds in getting their malleable, empty suit (who doesn’t even speak Spanish!) on the ballot to face the incumbent Republican, it’s just as likely that the progressives in this district won’t bother to vote. But they will vote for Eloise Gomez Reyes, who is extremely popular and known to be committed to the progressive values of her community. She is someone the people in California 31 relate to as one of them — because she is one of them.

And she is one of us, too. Here’s Eloise on the Chained-CPI:

I grew up in a family where everyone did their part to make ends meet. My brothers, sisters and I all worked the onion fields alongside our parents to help pay for our school clothes. I understand what it means to work your whole life, pay into Social Security and expect to live out your final years without having to make critical choices between food or medicine or rent. It’s simply wrong to try to balance the budget on the backs of our seniors, veterans and the disabled.

I’m running for Congress to make sure that never happens to anyone in San Bernardino, Upland, Redlands or anywhere else in America. Whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat who proposes it, “chained CPI” is just another way of saying “benefits cuts”– and I will always hold Congress accountable when it comes to keeping the promises we have made to our seniors.

Imagine what it would be like to have more Democrats like Eloise in Congress, leaders who would step up and proudly declare their opposition to cuts to the very programs that allow working Americans like her parents and her to take chances in their lives, change jobs, start businesses, get advanced degrees, knowing that their risk is mitigated by a society that provides some minimum level support if and when you become too old or sick to work.

Eloise Gomez Reyes will commit to preserving the very best of the American promise. She knows how valuable it is. She’s lived it.

Blue America is proud to endorse her for the congressional seat in California’s 31st district and we hope you’ll join us by donating what you can to her campaign here.

The etiquette police report for duty

by digby

Ah decleah Miss Mellie, quick go fetch the smellin’ salts! Young Master Chris Cilizza is like to faint dead away:

Mitch McConnell, political arsonist? In Alison Lundergan Grimes’ first ad in the Kentucky Senate race, a narrator accuses Mitch McConnell of “light[ing] the house on fire and then claim[ing] credit for putting it out”. As those words are said, there is a house on screen being incinerated. Literally.

Excuse me while I loosen mah corset! I can hardly breathe …

Yes, it begins already. Democrats are being “nasty.”

But you have to just love this observation from inside the DC bubble:

This is a very process-y ad. Aside from the arresting visual, the script focuses on procedural matters — noting that McConnell has called himself a “proud guardian of gridlock” and adding that he has “blocked” the Senate over 400 times. Count us as generally skeptical that these sorts of process arguments work. Yes, people in Kentucky likely know that McConnell is the top Republican in the Senate but are they engaged enough to grasp the filibuster/hold rules? And given the conservative nature of the electorate in Kentucky, is being seen as a blockade for President Obama’s legislative priorities all that bad a thing? (To return to point #1, it’s uniquely possible that this ad was made and aired with a focus on the national Democratic donor base.)

Yeah, pay no attention to the fact that virtually everyone but the hardcore Tea Partiers are disgusted with Republican tactics (er… “processes”) even, I’d guess, Kentuckians. And I would guess that if there is any population in the country that knows Mitch McConnell is one of the big boys in charge of that disgusting behavior it’s his own constituents. No, they may not know all those important details about “holds” and “cloture” that inside-the-beltway wags do, but they know damned well that McConnell is an important member of the Republican leadership and they know that the Republican leadership has been acting like asses.

Also too: pay no attention to the fact that Kentucky has a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Attorney General and that it’s one of the only red states that’s successfully implementing Obamacare. Who knows, Kentuckians might be getting health insurance and think that shutting down the government so they can rest on their conservative principles wasn’t such a hot idea.

But never let that stand in the way of scolding a Democrat for being too harsh (and in this case accusing them of doing it to get the rabid dog Democrats to give her money.) The Village etiquette police in the political press never fail to rap a Democrat’s knuckles for being too rude. And unfortunately, the Democratic leadership usually panics and follows suit. I hope Grimes doesn’t listen. This is a good ad.

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QOTD: Lowell Weicker

by digby

From an interview with former Republican Senator Lowell Weicker:

Q: You mentioned your own “purge” from office. What’s your assessment of Sen. Lieberman’s record in Congress?

Weicker: I know I’m not supposed to comment on my fellow senators or congressmen, but I think Lieberman was a god-awful United States senator. I think that he was all over the map as to what his beliefs were. And very much, by the time he got out of politics, I think was totally irrelevant to the needs of the people of the state of Connecticut. I think everybody should understand, and I fully acknowledge, that Joe Lieberman beat me — but with the help of William F. Buckley. So you had a sort of a maverick fight a Democrat — but one who owed a lot to conservative Republicans.

The day Al Gore picked Lieberman to be his running mate, I nearly lost it. It just couldn’t have been worse. And when I saw Lieberman on TV during the Florida recount handwringing over the military ballots, I figured maybe he was still answering to William F. Buckley.

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Where did the Republican political acumen go?

by David Atkins

It’s hard to describe to political activists who cut their teeth during the Obama era just how intimidating Republicans were during the early 2000s. Conservatives had forced or persuaded a Democratic president to declare the era of big government at an end, to smash welfare, to deregulate Wall Street and pass free trade agreements one after the other. Then Republicans managed to elect an obvious fool to the White House, staging a remarkable display of partisan dominance on the Supreme Court. After 9/11, most progressives were so cowed by the Bush Administration that the majority of online activists at the time only dared go by pseudonyms. Karl Rove was the genius mastermind who sent George W. Bush back to the White House and maintained GOP control of Congress. It was only Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing disaster of Iraq that started to really tarnish the Republican brand. Well, that and the push to privatize Social Security, a misstep that Bush quickly backed away from one he and his handlers realized how harmful it was to them.

But again, it’s hard to overestimate how much we all walked in fear and awe of the Republican political achievement, even as we despised their ethics and their policies. Even to this day, much of what progressive organizers do is attempt to catch up in various ways to the institutional dominance of the right on many levels, replicating its successes in moving the national political conversation farther to right on economic issues decade after decade.

Which leads us to today. Those who came of age in the era of Obama have always seen Republicans as incompetent fuddy duddies lost in a bygone era, saved only by the vast amounts of corrupting money they have to throw into the political machine.

But those of us who have been around longer are often genuinely confused. Still shellshocked by the Bush years (and the Reagan and Clinton years, for that matter), we often find it hard to decide: have the Republicans just gone crazy, or are they crazy like a fox?

Are the Tea Partiers actually destroying the GOP brand, or are they sneakily moving the Overton Window to allow for Medicare and Social Security cuts to seem sane by contrast?

I myself am wary, not sure what to believe on any given day. But increasingly, it just seems that Republicans are on a ship without a captain or a rudder. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some brilliant maneuver that will show the masterful strategic thinking behind their tactics, but I don’t think it’s coming.

Take, for instance, the politics of Obamacare at the moment. Republicans just got through seriously damaging their brand by shutting down the government for two weeks, making Obamacare more popular in the bargain. They still need to do something to win over minority, youth and women voters or their goose is cooked by the next redistricting or sooner. One would think that Republicans would want to be coming up with some “replacement” plan for Obamacare that would help cover young people, women and minorities. Far be it from me to offer them any ideas, but if I were a Republican strategist right now I would be looking at ways to wedge parts of the Democratic base away from one another, offering revenue neutral subsidies to core voting groups I needed by offering to remove less popular subsidies to smaller Democratic-aligned groups I’ll never win. The last thing I would be doing is fighting a law with high marks from Latinos while running ads to encourage young adults not to get health insurance. Sociopathic policy aside, that’s just very bad politics.

And I sure as heck wouldn’t be poking my fingers in the eyes of seniors, my most loyal voting bloc, by threatening Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, after punching themselves in the face by shutting down the government over Obamacare and “entitlements”, they’re doubling down on attacking the implementation of the website. Really?

Yes, the website is messed up and it’s somewhat embarrassing–though it should be much more embarrassing for neoliberal advocates of public-private partnership kludges than for traditional progressives. But the website is going to be fixed by the time the deadlines approach, which is incidentally when the majority of people will sign up.

But even in the worst case scenario where the website does stay broken, people in need of decent health insurance aren’t simply going to give up. They’ll do it the old-fashioned way by calling, faxing, scanning and going to offices in person if need be. Anyone who thinks they won’t, doesn’t realize the nationwide healthcare desperation that forced the legislation in the first place.

Which means that by the time of the next Congressional election in 2014, the website glitches will be a distant memory. Any Republican running on “Sure, you have much better health insurance than you did a year ago, but weren’t you frustrated at the glitchy website a year ago?” is going to get creamed.

Now, in the aftermath of a disastrous shutdown caused by the Tea Partiers, would be the perfect time for that fabled Republican rebrand to begin.

But it doesn’t like anyone is in control of the ship, or that there’s any master plan at work.

For progressives like me who operated in fear of these people for many years, the notion that they are simply wildly politically incompetent is very weird. Where did all their political acumen go, and how did it disappear so quickly?

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Softening the sequester

by digby

We more or less knew about this already, but this is another version:

At the end of a long White House meeting between Senate Republicans and President Barack Obama during the government shutdown, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) threw out a question: Would the president insist on raising tax revenue as part of a deal to soften the sequester?
Obama’s surprise answer: No, according to senators who were present and aides briefed on the discussion.

As formal talks open Wednesday, Obama’s response has given Republicans some hope they may be able to cut at least a narrow deal with Democrats to overhaul the sequestration cuts before the Dec. 13 deadline. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has even brought up the interaction several times in meetings with GOP senators since then, sources said.

But not to worry. He’s playing eleventy dimensional chess so it’s all good:

There’s just one problem: Obama’s position isn’t as simple as he made it sound. Obama responded that way because he did not want to nix options on a smaller package before the House-Senate conference committee work was even under way, according to a source familiar with White House thinking. It depends on the size of the deal, but the president would demand that any big package with entitlement reforms includes new revenue, the source said.

The mixed signal points up the challenges of the next round of budget talks, which may prove no more productive than the last one that resulted in a 16-day shutdown. The big fight this time is likely to be more about rolling back the sequester than Obamacare, and the parties remain sharply at odds over how — or even whether — to replace the across-the-board spending cuts.

I guess he’s just giving them a false sense of security. Or something.

It is just a teensy bit worrying that the White House has to step up and explain virtually every day now that just because it sounds like White House officials and the president are putting entitlements on the chopping block doesn’t mean they really are doing it.

“The president has been clear that any budget solution must have balance, which is why he has proposed a way to replace the sequester and achieve even more deficit reduction through a mix of revenues, targeted spending cuts and savings in entitlement programs,” White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said. “As the conference begins its work, the president will continue to insist that they are focusing on growing our economy and creating good jobs with good wages, because we can’t cut our way to prosperity.”

Needless to say, even if the president were to replace the sequester with “even more deficit reduction through a mix of revenues, targeted spending cuts and ‘savings’ in entitlement programs” which he continuously says he wants, it would be a massive sellout that would destroy any progressive legacy he might be thinking he’s going to have. As would any deal to cut benefits to vital social insurance programs that are already inadequate. Just saying.

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Twain wisdom

by digby

A little wisdom from America’s greatest writer:

That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
– “License of the Press” speech

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