Month: November 2013

Christie: the creep too many Democrats love

by digby

This is the sexist jackass too many guys I know in both parties thinks is a cool dude  — and every woman I know finds abusive:

This, on the other hand,  is the candidate the Democratic establishment ignored and starved of funds so that jerk could collect massive sums to use for his presidential race:

The Democratic party often refuses to support their own members on principle, so I guess that’s not a surprise. But you’d think they would have at least seen some value in helping Buono damage this creep who’s now going to be considered some kind of juggernaut going into the presidential election. I guess they like him too.

If you live in New Jersey please make a point of voting tomorrow and casting your vote for Barbara Buono. Chris Christie winning by 20 points is not good for America, particularly American women. Yuck.

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Misleading insurance companies? Say it ain’t so!

by digby

This is happening:

Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they’d identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she’d be covered.

A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.

But that’s not what she found. Instead, she’d be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.

Otherwise, she’d be automatically rolled over to a new plan — and, as the letter said, “If you’re happy with this plan, do nothing.”

That’s exactly what happened to me. The company phrased the letter in a way that clearly encouraged me to “do nothing” and pay twice as much. But here’s my question: who does that? I’d assume that most wealthy people are already buying expensive plans with good coverage so their’s shouldn’t go up any more than usual. (I’m making that assumption because the excuse my company gave was that my old policy didn’t fit the new law’s requirements.)But if that’s not the case and they’re even cancelling cadillac policies, maybe they figure rich people just pay without thinking. (I wouldn’t know how rich people deal with big new bills.) But anyone who isn’t wealthy is going to see that big new number and take action aren’t they?

I suppose there are some people who have their bills on autopilot or who don’t follow the news and don’t understand that something major has happened in the healthcare business that requires their attention. But for the most part, people who cannot afford to pay a lot more for health insurance are the last people on earth who are just going to passively accept their insurer’s word and start paying a much higher premium without looking around for alternatives. It’s a lot of money for an average person.

I think insurance companies are testing the market, trying to see how people react to these changes and hoping that a lot of their customers are confused or stupid and simply accept the huge increase in premiums. It’s an extremely cynical form of marketing. But this is the insurance industry we’re talking about here so nobody should be surprised that they are trying to find ways to game this coming and going. It’s certainly adding to the general sense of chaos. And they apparently figure that will work in their favor.

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We all know the system isn’t working

by David Atkins

There’s been a deal of discussion about this Chrystia Freeland op-ed in the New York Times. The general point of the column is that despite the political advantages accruing to the plutocrats, populism on both the left and the right seems to be in an upswing. There are a few bits of silliness and poor argumentation in it, but the final thesis is very good, and one that I’ve been writing about in various ways for years now:

Where does that leave smart centrists with their clever, fact-based policies designed to fine-tune 21st century capitalism and make it work better for everyone?

Part of the problem is that no one has yet come up with a fully convincing answer to the question of how you harness the power of the technology revolution and globalization without hollowing out middle-class jobs. Liberal nanny-state paternalism, as it has been brilliantly described and practiced by Cass R. Sunstein and like-minded thinkers, can help, as can shoring up the welfare state. But neither is enough, and voters are smart enough to appreciate that. Even multiple nudges won’t make 21st-century capitalism work for everyone. Plutocrats, as well as the rest of us, need to rise to this larger challenge, to find solutions that work on the global scale at which business already operates.

The other task is to fully engage in retail, bottom-up politics — not just to sell those carefully thought-through, data-based technocratic solutions but to figure out what they should be in the first place. The Tea Party was able to steer the Republican Party away from its traditional country-club base because its anti-establishment rage resonated better with all of the grass-roots Republican voters who are part of the squeezed middle class. Mr. de Blasio will be the next mayor of New York because he built a constituency among those who are losing out and those who sympathize with them. Politics in the winner-take-all economy don’t have to be extremist and nasty, but they have to grow out of, and speak for, the 99 percent. The pop-up political movements that come so naturally to the plutocrats won’t be enough.

One of the weaknesses of the column is that it gives far too much credit to the competency of neoliberal technocrats working out market-based Rube Goldberg policy contraptions (Exhibit #1: Affordable Care Act implementation). That aside, she’s dead accurate in that voters are smart enough to know that they’re being taken for a ride.

It’s not just progressives, either. As much as Tea Partiers are driven by racism, sexism, fundamentalism, Objectivism and a hatred of the Other, there’s something common to both Tea Partiers and progressives: an understanding that something very important has slipped away from the American middle-class experience, and a large distrust of the “elites” making policy decisions.

Progressives see that elite in the boardrooms of big corporations and on the yachts of their CEOs. Tea Partiers see that elite in clueless do-gooder academics and government officials sitting high in their ivory towers. As Thomas Frank has been pointing out for years, Tea Partiers happen to be very wrong about who is to blame for the decline in middle-class power, but they’re not wrong about the fact that they’re losing.

As jobs disappear from the landscape permanently never to return and as wealth consolidates into fewer and fewer hands, tinkering around the edges of the system and setting up over-complicated public-private schemes just aren’t going to work. Corporations aren’t just going to create jobs if there’s no demand for products, the magic of technology isn’t going to create enough jobs to replace the ones that are destroyed, and only so many people can start their own businesses or become independent contractors. Nor, realistically, are the middle classes of industrialized nations going to accept being slowly ground into poverty as the billionaires like Pete Peterson would prefer. It’s not generally poor people who have been destitute for generations who foment revolution: it’s people who have known better times and suddenly been impoverished.

Conservatives, being more authoritarian and distrustful of “others” by nature, can’t fathom that the rules of the game might be broken. It’s much easier for them to believe that some evil villains in government ivory towers are taking things from them and giving them away to poor people who don’t look like them. Progressives, for their part, tend to look at the better economy of the past and tell themselves that everything will be OK again if we just institute more protectionism and higher tax rates on the wealthy.

That answer does hit closer to the mark, but it still isn’t adequate. Both sides are taking on faith that they can return to that great economy of the post-war era, and that evil forces conspired to take it away from them.

But that’s not really true. Mechanization, globalization and deskilling conspired to take away jobs while shuttling all the wealth to the top of the chain. More than ever before, the natural rules of capitalism are leading to this result. Leaving the rules of the game in place while simply taxing the dwindling number of outsize winners, isn’t a good or sustainable long-term solution. And, of course, pie-in-the-sky libertarian fantasies aren’t workable, either.

The proper path forward is to determine what the economic rules should look like in this brave new world of vertical integration, mass mechanization and Big Data. What is the bargain between a society and its people when there simply aren’t enough jobs for its people, and when economic growth often depends on mutually assured environmental destruction?

Neoliberals certainly don’t have an answer for this question. But then, most partisan progressives and conservatives don’t have workable ones, either.

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This is America


by digby

Chris Mooney has posted an interesting take on that “personality map” that everyone’s been talking about.

After administering a battery of personality tests to more than a million and a half Americans across the country, the study divides us up into three psychological regions: The “friendly and conventional” South and Great Plains; the “relaxed and creative” mountain states and West Coast; and the “temperamental and uninhibited” East Coast and New England states.

He puts the results into a political framework:

Granted, not every state with a “friendly and conventional” personality voted Republican in the last election, and there are some oddballs and outliers in other regions, too. But the overall trend is clear. The residents of more liberal and more conservative states differ in personality: In how open their residents are to new experiences, and in how much they prize order and stability in their lives.[…]

In other words, there’s a huge ideological sort going on, probably much of it driven by Open people leaving to be closer to other Open people—so they can all hang out at coffeehouses and complain about the Tea Party—and more traditional people staying behind where they prize family and community. And this, in turn, likely explains a substantial part of the US’s growing political polarization. Or as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt just put it on our newly launched Inquiring Minds podcast, “For the first time in our history, the parties are not agglomerations of financial or material interest groups, they’re agglomerations of personality styles and lifestyles. And this is really dangerous….If it’s now that ‘You people on the other side, you’re really different from me, you live in a different way, you pray in a different way, you eat different foods than I do,’ it’s much easier to hate those people. And that’s where we are.”

I’ll buy that except for Jonathan Haidt’s incorrect analysis there at the end. This is anything but new.

Here’s the map with the different personality types:

Here are some other maps:

Slave states – Free states

Union vs Confederacy

2008 electoral map

2008 electoral map by population

The country has been divided roughly along these lines for a very long time and when you compare that map of the civil war era with the new “personality” map I think you can safely conclude that this is not the first time those divisions have been pretty personal and pretty nasty. The idea that we’ve just now become polarized along lines that are “not agglomerations of financial or material interest groups” but are now about “agglomerations of personality styles and lifestyles” is nuts. It’s always been about culture. This is America.

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If this happens I will truly believe the Rapture is upon us

Texas tea party activists eager to send another firebrand in the mold of Ted Cruz to the Senate have launched a movement to draft evangelical historian David Barton to run against Sen. John Cornyn.

Barton, who hosts a daily radio broadcast, has wide name recognition and respect on the religious right as a Constitutional scholar dedicated to restoring the America the Founding Fathers envisioned, though his scholarship on that point has been widely discredited in the world of academia.

Political analysts doubt he could take down a candidate as well-funded, well-known and widely endorsed as Cornyn. But they’re not willing to count out an insurgent from the right — not after watching Cruz come from nowhere two years ago. Barton has deep political roots, having spent nearly a decade as vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. He is a skilled orator. And he’s got the stagecraft down pat: He travels the country to deliver rousing tributes to patriotism, often in red, white and blue Western shirts.

I have been writing about David Barton for a very long time. Let’s just say that if he were elected he would make Ted Cruz look like Nelson Rockefeller by comparison.

And if the Tea Partiers back him we can certainly dispense with any notion that they are big believers in freedom and liberty.

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Believing your own hype Part XXIV


by digby

This is a pretty scathing indictment of the administration’s handling of ACA implementation. The theme of the piece is that the White house was so frightened of GOP opposition and obstruction that they refused to do the things that needed to be done to make the program work (which sounds like an underlying theme of the first term to me.)

Obamacare was a massive undertaking and I’m sympathetic to the idea that it was always going to be glitchy and problematic in the rollout. And it’s absolutely true that the Republicans starved it of money and did everything in their power to ensure that the thing couldn’t work right, for purely political reasons. But it’s something of a surprise to read that the neo-liberal technocrats of the Obama administration apparently just thought all this was going to come together without a certain set of skills and experience to make it happen. Experts tried to warn them.

One of my persistent gripes about the Obama team and its defenders was this sort of thing:

I get why it’s so appealing, but it has expressed itself in a very destructive way. It’s been a problem from the beginning.

The bullyboy strikes again

by digby

I’ve written many times of my shock and horror at watching Chris Christie browbeat a  teacher at a townhall meeting.  I know what I saw and it was an abusive jerk, one with serious problems.

Guess what? He did it again, just this week-end:

Today at the Rutgers game, where press coverage says Governor Christie was crowded by cheering supporters, a teacher dared to ask him why he characterizes our public schools as failing.

His body language and pointing finger tell us all we really need to know about his response. According to the teacher, his words were harsh, irate and incredibly disrepectful.

I asked him: “Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?” His reply: “Because they are!” He said: “I am tired of you people. What do you want?”

Here’s JerseyJazzman with the details. His followers are a bunch of jerks too.

Romney got a lot of things wrong, but figuring out that this psycho shouldn’t be near the presidency was one of the ones he got right. And New Jersey should vote for Barbara Buono on Tuesday before he hurts someone.

Update:  Also, that teacher he treated like dirt in the earlier confrontation, Marie Corfield?  She didn’t take his bullying lying down. She’s running for the state legislature. Vote for her too.

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Dianne Feinstein is a comedienne

by digby

I can’t stop laughing:

Feinstein says Snowden broke the law, when he could have privately reported his revelations to her committee.

Yes her oversight has been stellar. Just ask her colleagues Ron Wyden and Mark Udall who knew many things, disagreed with them, and were put in a metaphorical straight-jacket and ball gag as the NSA went about its business without any impediments whatsoever. Why would anyone think that the Snowden information would have ever gotten out through her committee — or that even those who wanted to get the information out would have been able to do anything but play charades on Sunday news shows? She’s quite the card.

Meanwhile, read this epic piece called “No Morsel Is Too Miniscule For The All-Consuming NSA” by the NY Times’ Scott Shane. In a nutshell, the NSA is out of control and only somewhat effective, none of which we would know about it if it weren’t for Snowden’s revelations. It’s pervasively powerful and secretive and yet nobody thought about the ramifications to our position in the world if the massive spying programs were revealed. (And to not anticipate that it was possible for these secrets to be revealed in this new cyber world in which we live is such malfeasance that everyone involved should be fired for that alone.)

And yes, “everybody does it.” But as James Clapper says in the article:

“There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.

I’m fairly sure we dwarf them too. And that is why we need to be concerned about this agency that operates completely in secret, with little or no accountability and with what amounts to an unlimited budget. (That 10.8 billion is just the tip of the iceberg.)Unfortunately, depending on Dianne Feinstein to keep tabs on it hasn’t worked out very well.

Right now I’m watching former NSA chief Michael Hayden (Fareed Zakaria calls him “Mike”) right now on CNN excuse spying on staunch ally Angela Merkel’s personal phone calls because Angela Merkel might be a liar and Tim Geithner could need to know that.  I’m not kidding.

HAYDEN: Well, I mean, look, there are a variety of questions. And here, Fareed, I’m just being illustrative. I mean I’ve not been in the room.

But I mean, when we decided to intervene against Gadhafi in Libya, the Germans were very much opposed. They didn’t participate. And I’m sure a very legitimate intelligence question would have been do the Germans oppose us so strongly that they are willing to break consensus in Brussels and therefore deny you a NATO validation for this?

And then finally, again, I’m creative enough to think of Tim Geithner at some meeting in the last two or three years turning to his intelligence guy and saying, you know, I really need to know, in their heart of hearts, how far are the Germans going to go with the Greeks in preserving the Eurozone?

Now, those are all very legitimate questions. We could get an answer by direct dialogue. And I’m sure we did.

But, you know, sometimes there would have been more to the story. And I can imagine circumstances where, what I just described, those are legitimate intelligence issues.

I hope Merkel didn’t hear that.

Basically, he’s saying that everyone in this world is an enemy of the United States on some level and we have a right to treat them that way.  And I’m sure there are a lot of Americans who think that makes good sense.  But it scares the living daylights out of me. If the US government really believes that everyone in the world is our enemy then it only stands to reason that everyone in the world is going to think the US is their enemy, and not in some vague “they all do it” sort of way. I mean a real enemy. At least half the world already sees us that way and now we have idiots like Michael Hayden saying we don’t a believe a word our allies tell us so I’m sure their people now hate us too. Does any of this make us safer?

The fact is that the US has always spied and will always spy. So will all the other countries. But vast technological capability and unlimited resources available to this agency has led to the inevitable: if you build it, they will use it — and abuse it. And in its insularity this has obviously become a very foolish, myopic, hubristic agency,  filled with bureaucrats obsessed with “metrics” as is evidenced by their nauseating use of corporate jargon to explain their mission. (The “customers” of the NSA may be the CIA or Homeland Security, but the “boss” is supposed to be the American people. I see little evidence that the NSA thinks that’s true. They seem to think they’re “entrepreneurs.”)

Obviously, some of the NSA’s work is necessary. Shane’s article points to a number of missions I don’t think anyone would argue with. There are dangerous people in the world and being able to anticipate their actions is a good thing. But the NSA, with its nearly unlimited surveillance capabilities, has decided that everyone in the world is dangerous, including the American people, so they need to keep tabs on all of us. And considering the scope of their operations they don’t really have much to show for their work.

And yes, they are doing economic spying, but it’s very difficult to know in this global economy who these “competitors” are or who is supposed to benefit from it. CEOs and Shareholders in multi-national companies probably will. Wall Street can always use information, of course. (And there is one group of people — future defense and government contractor employees who are currently working for the NSA — who can definitely use such info.) But I’m going to guess that American workers won’t see much benefit from any of this and are probably losing out. In a world economy, the benefits of economic spying are unlikely to accrue to any single nation’s benefit.

Read the whole article for a nice overview of the latest document disclosures and the implications of it. America is the most powerful nation on earth and also insists that it lives by a certain set of ideals. It seems to me that it means our government needs to go to extreme lengths to ensure that we aren’t abusing that power and inviting more and more people around the world to see us as a threat. It doesn’t mean we pull down our defenses. But we can’t allow rogue agencies with unlimited budgets to run amok. Forget about it being a violation of our alleged ideals — clearly only liberal wusses care about such things. It’s actually creating greater danger for the American people.

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Factoid ‘o the day

by digby

What could go wrong?

TSA agents have confiscated 30 percent more guns from passengers, many of them loaded, in 2013 compared to last year. Most travelers say they “forgot” they had the firearm, which has made sociologists think the trend is a result of people being permitted to carry their guns virtually anywhere.

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Huckleberry and ladies

by digby

Huckleberry Graham knows as much about women and pregnancy as I know about Pokemon. Which is absolutely nothing. But that doesn’t stop him from using their wombs as a political football:

As he moves to introduce a bill in the Senate banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday the issue is a conversation a “humane” society needs to have.

“This is a debate worthy of a great democracy. When do you become you? At 20 weeks of a pregnancy, what is the proper role of the government in protecting that child?” Graham said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Despite concerns about the constitutionality of such a ban, the South Carolina Republican who is up for re-election, said he and other advocates would make the case to the Supreme Court that it’s a legitimate government interest to ban such abortions, making an exception for the health of the mother and cases of rape or incest.

“At 20 weeks, you feel pain,” he said. “The state, the government has a legitimate interest to protect the child at the 20-week period of development, because they can feel pain. That’s what a rational humane society should do.”

He also knows as much about what constitututes a “rational humane society” as I know about Pokemon. Which is absolutely nothing.

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