Month: November 2013

What filibuster supporters don’t understand

by David Atkins

Senate Republicans have blocked against Obama nominee to the important D.C. circuit court through yet another filibuster. They don’t have a good reason to block the nominee outside of naked abuse of power. They’re doing it because they can, because not enough Senate Democrats stood up against the filibuster on judicial nominees. Now Senate Democrats are once again considering doing away with the filibuster at least for judicial nominees.

Opponents of fixing the filibuster are worried that disaster could strike if and when Republicans hold the White House and Senate again, if filibuster rules are weakened.

But this is foolish and shortsighted. For the next two years there is no danger as a Democratic President continues to hold the White House. Beyond that, the likelihood that the GOP will hold both Presidency and Senate is low. And if that should come to pass, then the American people should quite frankly get the government they voted for, without a continual run of judicial filibusters from Democrats (to say nothing of the fact that Democrats won’t be as obstructionist as Republicans in that situation, a fact that by itself creates a structural advantage for Republicans as long as current rules are in place.)

More than that, however, there is a political urgency at work. We are in a near permanent depression economy and climate change is nipping at our heels in a bad way. The nation, quite frankly, doesn’t have time to wait out the next two years watching Republicans obstruct absolutely everything, then sit tight as a Republican president himself gets obstructed by Democrats until 2020. The cost of inaction is far, far too high. The risk that Republicans take the Presidency and Senate in 2016 is far less than the risk to the country if nothing is done to break the legislative logjam.

Filibuster supporters tend to be complacent supporters of the status quo. Those in favor of a fix aren’t just aggressive partisans who want to get their way immediately. We’re cognizant that keeping the status quo is the most dangerous option of all.

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Here you go

by digby

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The pregnant elderly are in crisis

by digby

Where are the 67 year old expectant moms supposed to get their pre-natal care now?

I sure hope the AARP Medicare Advantage program covers birth control or I am so screwed.

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Elizabeth the Stalwart

by digby

Greg Sargent reports:

In remarks Warren just began delivering, she strongly endorsed the push to boost Social Security benefits — in keeping with Senator Tom Harkin’s proposal to do the same — and condemned the “Chained CPI” that liberals fear Dems will embrace in strong terms. From the prepared remarks:

“The most recent discussion about cutting benefits has focused on something called the Chained-CPI. Supporters of the chained CPI say that it’s a more accurate way of measuring cost of living increases for seniors. That statement is simply not true. Chained CPI falls short of the actual increases in costs that seniors face, pure and simple. Chained CPI? It’s just a fancy way of saying cut benefits.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics has developed a measure of the impact of inflation on seniors. It’s called the CPI-E, and, if we adopted it today, it would generally increase benefits for our retirees — not cut them.

“Social Security isn’t the answer to all of our retirement problems. We need to find ways to tackle the financial squeeze that is crushing our families. We need to help families start saving again. We need to make sure that more workers have access to better pensions. But in the meantime – so long as these problems continue to exist and so long as we are in the midst of a real and growing retirement crisis – a crisis that is shaking the foundations of what was once a vibrant and secure middle class – the absolute last thing we should be doing is talking about cutting back on Social Security.

“The absolute last thing we should do in 2013 – at the very moment that Social Security has become the principal lifeline for millions of our seniors — is allow the program to begin to be dismantled inch by inch.

“Over the past generation, working families have been hacked at, chipped, and hammered. If we want a real middle class — a middle class that continues to serve as the backbone of our country — then we must take the retirement crisis seriously. Seniors have worked their entire lives and have paid into the system, but right now, more people than ever are on the edge of financial disaster once they retire — and the numbers continue to get worse.
“That is why we should be talking about expanding Social Security benefits — not cutting them. Senator Harkin from Iowa, Senator Begich from Alaska, Senator Sanders from Vermont, and others have been pushing hard in that direction. Social Security is incredibly effective, it is incredibly popular, and the calls for strengthening it are growing louder every day.”

That sounds right to me.

Here’s the video:

Ho hum, another record stock market high in a terrible economy

by David Atkins

More record highs for the stock market today, boosted by record corporate profits. This, even as many major economists are talking about a permanent mild depression economy.

This is very confusing to conservatives. They don’t understand how it’s possible for corporations and rich people to be doing so well, and yet the real economy remains so bad. Progressives are not confused. It just means everything conservatives believe about the economy and growth are dead wrong.

In a normal and sane world, the evidence might lead people to question whether giving all the money to rich people and boosting asset values at all cost might not be the best policy to help the economy.

But then, we don’t live in a normal or sane world.

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Oh just let them die then

by digby

This is just sad:

And to think it only took passing health care reform to change people’s minds.

It’s one thing for people not to like the ACA.  That’s fine.  We’d expect a large minority to hate it simply because it’s a Democratic Party program.  And, as we know, there are a whole lot of progressives and liberals who don’t like it because it seems like a very complicated and wasteful way to get more people covered when we know there are better methods out there.

But that’s not what the question is asking.  The implicit question is whether people believe that all people are entitled to have health care. After all, there is no other mechanism but the government that can ensure that everyone is covered. People have decided that everyone is not entitled to coverage.

It’s not that they don’t understand that we are already paying for the uninsured through emergency room care or that people are going broke if they get sick or that those with pre-existing conditions can’t be covered at a reasonable cost unless we get everyone into the insurance pool. We’ve had a non-stop seminar on all of this since 2007 at least and none of it is beyond the average person’s comprehension. They know.  They’ve decided against it.

Maybe they don’t fully accept the ramifications of their attitude, but this is basically it:

The old “there but for the grace of God go I” has been replaced by “let ’em die!”

h/t to RY

A Walmart Thanksgiving Message

by digby

The new noblesse oblige — vastly wealthy employers running in house charity food drives for their own hungry workers:

Fun fact: Collectively, the Walton family is worth a combined total of $150 billion, valuing them as the wealthiest family in the world. In 2011, six members of the Walton family had the same net worth as the bottom 30% of American families combined

h/t to LOLGOP

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ACORNing the navigators

by digby

One thing the Democrats have going for them with this Obamacare rollout controversy: the Republicans. They are inevitably so completely over-the-top with their criticism that they force at least half the country to defend the program even if they don’t want to.

This, for instance, makes me want to hit someone:

Cornyn called on the Obama administration to shutter the navigator program altogether, citing Sebelius’s testimony and a video by the conservative activist group known as Project Veritas, which is overseen by James O’Keefe, which purportedly shows a navigator encouraging one of their clients to lie on their insurance application.

O’Keefe, you might remember, was responsible for the deceptively edited video that led to the resignation of an Agriculture Department employee (and litigation against Andrew Breitbart, who published it) and other notorious gotcha videos.

“It is simply astounding that the administration is urging the American people to give their Social Security numbers and sensitive personal information to people who have not been properly vetted,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor. “We need to also dismantle the navigators program before it unleashes a wave of fraud and corruption.”

Rubio has also gotten in on the action. He introduced legislation Nov. 7 that would, among other things, require background checks for navigators. In a Miami Herald op-ed last week, he further stoked fears of fraud and malfeasance on the part of navigators — though he had no specific examples to give.

The exploitation of innocent Americans by felonious navigators was simply, in Rubio’s words, inevitable.

“As time goes on, we will inevitably see more cases of people fraudulently posing as navigators, collecting personal information and then exploiting innocent victims,” he wrote. “This is a recipe for people falling prey to fraud, identity theft or gross incompetence by those operating as Obamacare navigators.”

I think the answer to this controversy is to arm all the navigators. Then the GOP would be forced to leave them alone.

The fact is that this is all about something very, very ugly. To right wingers, “felons” is a code word for African American. O’Keefe’s hoaxes are always about African Americans. Much of the right wing antipathy toward “government workers” stems from the fact that the government employs many African Americans. This is what they do. In fact, it’s so woven into right wing anti-government philosophy that I’m not sure that most of them are even consciously aware of it. (Cornyn and O’Keefe certainly are — Rubio might just be too dumb.)

This is ACORN nonsense and I hope the Democrats have enough chutzpah to tell these Republicans to pound sand this time. Unfortunately, they never seem to learn this lesson.

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Revolutionary sausage

by digby

Here’s a fascinating interview with historian Kevin M. Sweeney about the history of the Second Amendment which shows, once again, that so much of what we think we know is just not so:

Q: Your essay in the book The Second Amendment on Trial [forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press] is critical of the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun in the home for self-defense. What did District of Columbia v. Heller get wrong?

A: Heller [argues that the Second Amendment] is all about self-defense, and the preferred method of self-defense by Americans is a handgun, which flies in the face of the fact that the Second Amendment was about the militia. [The decision also assumes] that the militia was an unchanging and all-inclusive organization of citizen soldiers. That was not true.

We tend to talk about “early American” as this time of no change from the 1620s to the 1800s, and homogeneous from the coast of Maine to the piney woods of Georgia. But for most of that period, a united country did not exist. Neither Delaware nor Pennsylvania had a permanent militia. Virginia and Maryland had select militias, in which not all males were expected to serve. In the 1600s, the militia was largely but not exclusively armed with the firearms of private individuals. By the 1750s, the levels of private firearm ownership went down, and it became necessary, in some instances, for colonial governments to provide firearms. Heller assumes that militia arms were all privately owned arms.

The concerns that led to the Second Amendment were not the fear that the government would go around taking people’s firearms—I mean, most of these were firearms that the government didn’t want. [The founders] wanted some reassurance that states could arm the militia if the federal government did not. This is largely a debate that has been missed. But it’s clear that James Madison and many other Southerners who had poorly armed militias wanted the federal treasury to arm them.

Q: So how did those concerns transform into what we have as the Second Amendment?

When Madison drafted the original version of what became the Bill of Rights and introduced it to Congress, it read:

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

The House drops the “well armed.” The Senate apparently attempts to go further: There seems to be a move in the Senate to prohibit the federal government from arming the militia, because they don’t want the federal treasury getting hit for this.

The Federalists were throwing some rhetorical bones to the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists wanted another convention to rewrite the Constitution, and they had been sort of bought off by promises that there would be amendments. There are certain rights in those first amendments—no excessive bail, trial by jury—you can trace back to the Magna Carta. But the Second Amendment, let alone the Ninth and 10th Amendments—God knows what they mean. They were just rhetorical, to quiet the Anti-Federalist critics. But I do think it’s clear that it’s about the militia. The Second Amendment is about self-defense? I just think that barely passes the laugh test.

American politics has always been about compromise between our two main factions, whatever their names are in a given moment. It often creates a bit of a mess. This one is killing people.

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QOTD: Jeff Bryant

by digby

I think this defines the problem for us:

Both Obamacare and Common Core are policies driven by good intentions but flawed in their implementation because of neoliberal execution that relies too much on private enterprises acting with the same good intentions — healthcare insurers for the former and education testing and publishing companies for the latter. And now the Democratic party and “big government” are taking the blame.

And the conservatives are laughing gleefully at the prospect of rewarding these same entities even more with a scheme to “privatize” everything because it will be more “efficient.” It’s a beautiful scam.

Update: Robert Kuttner has the same message in this scathing analysis of the Obamacare rollout:

At the time the law was passed, administration leaders and many commentators compared the Affordable Care Act to Social Security and Medicare. The analogy was never apt. These great achievements are public public programs, efficient to administer and testament to the fact that government can serve social objectives far more effectively than the private sector.

Obamacare, by contrast, is the inefficiency of “public-private partnerships” at its worst. It is a public subsidy for the private insurance industry. No fewer than 55 separate contractors were hired to design the software. Yet though it is not a true public program worthy of the name, Obamacare is being used to discredit government.

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