Month: November 2013

The more things change, yadda, yadda yadda

by digby

It was such fun yesterday watching all the right wingers try to appropriate John F. Kennedy as the one true conservative just as they do whenever we honor Martin Luther King. It’s actually a good strategy to take credit for the things your popular enemies do that are in line with your agenda, so I don’t blame them. Democrats should do more of it themselves. (Reagan the peacenik! Newt Gingrich the environmentalist! George W. Bush the … patron of the arts?)

Unfortunately, the conservative economic mavens have Kennedy wrong. I have no way of knowing what he would do in today’s circumstances and neither do they. But we have a pretty good idea of how he thought about economics in his day, and contrary to Grover Norquist’s fevered tweet dream, it wasn’t a celebration of laissez faire capitalism. Last night Stephanie Kelton posted this fascinating excerpt from his speech on that subject at Yale in 1962, that’s well worth reading, if only to remind yourself that there is nothing new under the sun.

I’ll just excerpt this bit from the rest of the speech, which is absolutely true, (and also incredibly ironic considering what Perlstein wrote about yesterday.)

Anyway, this is great:

[T]he great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Mythology distracts us everywhere—in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs. But today I want to particularly consider the myth and reality in our national economy. In recent months many have come to feel, as I do, that the dialog between the parties—between business and government, between the government and the public—is clogged by illusion and platitude and fails to reflect the true realities of contemporary American society.

Some things never change apparently.

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Whither the fringe?

by digby

Now that the far right wacko-birds are fully ensconced in the congress, what can the wingnut fringe possibly have to fulminate about? Don’t worry, there’s always something:

Did President Obama and George Soros plot to murder 300 million Americans by dropping nuclear bombs? Yes! That is, according to right-wing activist Jim Garrow, who now claims to be a former intelligence officer. Erik Rush kicked off his radio show on Tuesday by reading from a Garrow article about how Obama planned to detonate nuclear weapons throughout the US until three heroes in the military stopped him.

You may remember that Rush thought Obama would nuke DC to justify an operation to bomb Syria…and that the president then orchestrated the Navy Yard shooting to stop the Navy from arresting him.

Now, Rush and Garrow say that Obama had plans to nuke Charleston, South Carolina, and other cities throughout the US.

But why?

To distract from Benghazi?

No! To let George Soros get even richer by betting against the US dollar.

Garrow also claims that “Bath House Barry” — after attempting to destroy the United States— will blackmail every politician, military leader and police officer in America to get himself a third term.

After 90 percent of the population has been eliminated, the only people left in the country will be the elites, including Obama and Valerie Jarrett, who will live in luxury bunkers.

If you think I just made that up, click here to hear it all over at Right Wing Watch.

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QOTW: Sherrod Brown

by digby

I didn’t want to let this comment from Senator Brown to Greg Sargent pass without comment because it’s really, really great that Democrats are finally starting to use this kind of rhetoric. Greg writes:

With Washington chatter centered on a “grand bargain” or at least a “mini bargain” that might involve entitlement cuts, expanding Social Security might seem like a dead end. But when I pushed Brown on whether Dems would rally behind the idea — after all, Chained CPI is in the President’s budget — he insisted Dems should not cooperate in allowing a “Serious” center-right consensus that equates “fiscal responsibility” with cutting entitlement benefits to reign unchallenged.

“The Serious People — with a capital S and a capital P — all have really good pensions and good health care and good salaries,” Brown said. “Raise the cap. There are ways we can bring a lot of money into Social Security. Some Democrats are a bit cowed by the Serious People.”

Brown argues that if Republicans push for Social Security benefits cuts as part of any deal, Dems should counter with the Harkin proposal to shift the terms of the debate in a Democratic direction. Democratic priorities, he said, should be centered on the idea that declining pensions and wages (and savings) are undermining retirement security, and added that the public strongly opposed gutting social insurance.

“The situation for seniors is only going to get worse, because the assault on pensions and wages is making it more and more difficult for a worker to save for the future,” Brown said. “Why are we having a debate over how much we are going to hurt seniors? The debate should be over how we should structure a pension for seniors that will help them. Why would we play on their playing field? Democrats need to play offense here. Force Republicans to say what it is they really want to do. Republicans just don’t like social insurance.”

That’s right. They don’t like social insurance. And sadly, the majority of elected Democrats, including our allegedly liberal president, have failed to grasp just how vital those programs are to millions of citizens. Instead they bought into the self-serving propaganda set forth by some of their wealthy donors that the richest country in the world can no longer afford to ensure that the oldest and sickest members of society can live in dignity. Even more infuriating, they continue to insist that they are only doing it to buy “credibility” so they can “get it off the table” at which point the conservatives will sing kumbaaya and allow them to advance a more progressive agenda. If there’s anything that’s been proven over the last couple of decades of Democrats balancing budgets, creating surpluses, slashing programs and shrinking deficits to be fatuous rubbish, it’s that.

This is the wealthiest nation on earth and we don’t bat an eye at the fact that we spend more than every other country combined, including Russia and China, on our military, much of it expanded in recent years because a small band of fanatics with box cutters and home made pressure cooker bombs have declared us their enemy. The idea that we must literally take food out of the mouths of babies, seniors and the disabled because we are “going broke” is so ludicrous under that circumstance that it isn’t worthy of discussion.

Good for Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren and others who are acting like real leaders rather than well-paid lobbyists for Pete Peterson. It’s long overdue.

Also too: Krugman

How Republicans are sabotaging the ACA, hurting the poor, and driving up costs for the middle class

by David Atkins

Joshua Holland at Moyers and Company has a great piece on how Republicans are driving up ACA costs across the board through their insistence that the poor get sick and die quickly:

The media have been buzzing with stories — many of them wildly exaggerated — of people facing higher premiums as a result of Obamacare. But there’s a story about rates you may not have heard: According to Jonathan Gruber, a leading health care wonk at MIT, all private insurance premiums in the 25 red states that are refusing to expand their Medicaid programs will be 15 percent higher as a direct result of that decision.

But those numbers don’t capture the human cost. The reality is that conservatives are complaining about insurance policies being cancelled and the ACA’s error-plagued exchanges at the same time as they actively work to keep millions of poor Americans from gaining coverage under the law’s Medicaid expansion.

The victims of Obamacare’s implementation problems being hit the hardest, by far, are those whose incomes fall between the federal poverty line and the eligibility cutoffs in those 25 states rejecting Medicaid expansion. Not only will they be left uncovered, they won’t even be eligible for the generous subsidies that people earning slightly more than they do can use to buy insurance. It’s brutally unfair. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 4.8 million poor adults may fall into that coverage gap — about twice the number of people expected to pay more for their insurance when their substandard policies are cancelled.

And it gets worse. In 40 states, adults without children are ineligible for Medicaid regardless of their income level. In 30 states, the parents of children who qualify for Medicaid may not be eligible themselves. All of these people would be covered under Medicaid’s expansion, but they’re being left high and dry in the 25 states who have rejected expansion. And while the problems plaguing healthcare.gov result from mismanagement and a contracting boondoggle, those red state lawmakers who refuse to expand Medicaid are inflicting this harm intentionally, based solely on their ideology.

In other words, they’re actively working to maintain America’s shamefully high rate of uninsured. And that comes with deadly consequences. Because, in this country, we do ‘let ‘em die’ – we let the poor and the uninsured die from treatable illnesses every day.

The level of cruelty and spite at work here is flabbergasting. It’s one thing in politics to hurt one constituency to benefit another. That’s not unusual, though the best public policy tries to achieve mutual wins for everyone.

But there’s literally no one who is helped by Republican actions. The poor, both white and non-white, are hurt by the failure to expand Medicaid. The middle class are hurt by higher premiums. The rich don’t see any direct benefit. Insurers stand to lose if fewer people buy into the exchanges. Republican politicians don’t even necessarily benefit either in primaries or in general elections: Medicaid expansion isn’t generally seen as a litmus test issue in Republican primaries, while the entire issue of Obamacare repeal is an unpopular net drag on Republicans in the general electorate.

This is simply spite, cruelty and take-no-prisoners social darwinism writ large. It’s sociopathy codified into public policy. And it’s mainstream Republican lawmaking in 2013.

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JFK post script: Cronkite, Perlstein and more

by digby

There has been a lot of great documentary footage about the JFK assassination today.  I’ve been particularly interested in this CBS “live stream” of the footage in real time on the day.  I’ve been watching it off and on all day and it’s fascinating. (You can also see some of the highlights at the site.)

But this piece by Rick Perlstein about the posthumous invention of “Camelot” is a real blockbuster. He begins by talking about 1963:

The Life magazine dated November 22, 1963, which would have arrived on newsstands around November 15, featured a terrifying story by Theodore White, author of the groundbreaking bestseller The Making of the President 1960. Entitled “Racial Collision,” and subtitled “the Negro-white problem is greatest in the North where the Negro is taking over the cities—and being strangled by them,” it was a terrifying intimation of an imminent racial holocaust. The first of two parts, the conclusion second ran in the issue of Life dated November 29—which ordinarily would have appeared on newsstands on November 22 but was held back to put the martyred President Kennedy on the cover, and to include, inside, several thousands words of what must have been some very speedily written copy about his death. That second part was even scarier. It reported terrors like Adam Clayton Powell calling for “‘a Birmingham explosion in New York City’ this fall”; Communist infiltration of Martin Luther King’s inner circle; a civil rights group that feared it would be labeled “a front for the white man” unless a peaceful march was turned into “a violent putsch on government offices”; and that some protesters were calling for cash reparations for slavery—”There is a warning if such sin-gold is not paid by white Americans to black Americans, the ‘power structure’ is inviting ‘social chaos.'” And it quoted James Forman of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee reaching the following unsettling conclusion: “85% of all Negroes do not adhere to nonviolence.”

It felt like riots were breaking out everywhere.

On September 15, Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed by Klansmen, killing four little girls.

In Dallas, on October 24, United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson was shouted down, spat upon, and physically assaulted on the street by right-wingers.

In Saigon, on November 2, South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a U.S- backed coup.

And in Dallas, on November 22, President Kennedy was supposed to give a speech addressing the widespread feeling that America had become a very scary place, specifically as regarded the 1963 version of Tea Partiers, who had become so scary that many people presumed that they had been the ones that shot him…

But Jackie Kennedy didn’t want that reality to be the context for her husband’s martyrdom:

“Mrs. Kennedy wanted [Teddy] White to rescue her husband’s memory from these men. History should celebrate the Kennedy years as a time of hope and magic, she insisted. White sat mesmerized for more than two hours, listening t the rambling and disjointed monologue…. She sneered at the ‘bitter old men’ who wrote history.” (That’s me!) “Finally, she came to the thought that had become her obsession, a thought embodied in the lyrics of the the Broadway musical—Camelot. Over and over again, she and the president had listened to the words sing out of their ten-year-old Victrola…”

What came next is pretty damned astonishing, a nadir in the history of court journalism, sometimes that better belongs in the annals of the Kremlin. White retreated around midnight to draft his article in the maid’s room, “mindful that Life was holding its presses at a cost of thirty thousand dollars an hour. When he finished, Mrs. Kenendy took a pencil to White’s work, crossing out some of his words and adding her own in the margins. She hovered near the kitchen telephone—adamant that her Camelot portrayal remain the dominant theme—as he dictated the revised version to his editors.” The article came out. Arthur Schelsinger, baffled, said, “Jack Kennedy never spoke of Camelot.” One Kennedy hand said, “If Jack Kennedy heard this stuff about Camelot, he would have vomited.”

It goes on to show just how corrupting this ended up being. What we know of the Village today really began in earnest with the press’ agreement to go along with the fatuous notion of an American Camelot in the middle of one of the most tumultuous times in its history.

He also makes another important observation about how the press corps works: in one way or another they are always fighting the last war. In this case, it’s Teddy White feeling bad about his naked partisanship in 1960 (and becoming alarmed by America’s youthful hooliganism, no doubt) and going to great lengths to make it up to Nixon in 1968. And guess where that little bit of journalistic malpractice led?

Perlstein concludes:

Indeed it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. (Read Tim Crouse’s Boys on the Bus for the full story.) Call it Camelot’s revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long—because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

Don’t let that be forgot. For who knows what latter-day sycophants and suck-ups in the media might let our leaders get away with next.

Word.

Update: Also, here’s a very interesting back and forth between Rick Perlstein and James Galbraith on the question of whether Kennedy really was committed to getting out of Vietnam.

It’s been a great day for history buffs, that’s for sure.

Update II: On the other hand, the circumstances of the assassination aren’t weird enough to defend this nuttiness.

The feminist filibuster defense

by digby

I’m pretty sure he just did this so he could talk about raping women because otherwise he’s just babbling incoherently:

LIMBAUGH: “Forget the Senate for a minute,” he said on his radio show. “Let’s say, let’s take ten people in a room and they’re a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women. Right? The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the 10 to change the rule.”

Limbaugh continued his analogy by saying that “every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it and there was, you know, two guys.”

“Well, the guy that kept proposing that women be raped finally got tired of it,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five. And the women said, ‘you can’t do that.’ ‘Yes we are, we’re the majority, we’re changing the rule.’ And then they vote. Can the women be raped?”

All it would take at that point, Limbaugh said, “is half the room. You can change the rule to say three. You can change the rule to say three people want it, it’s gonna happen.”
“There’s no rule when the majority can change the rules, there aren’t any,” he said.
And the only reason behind the Senate invoking the “nuclear option,” according to Rush, is that President “Barack Obama can’t get what he wants democratically.”

Is there a “democratic” way to rape women? I’m confused. I think maybe Rush has been hitting the little blue babies again.

Luckily, a leading Democratic talking head shot right back:

If the Senate, which has the constitutional right to make its own rules, decides that it wants to require a super-majority vote to pass certain bills such as tax bills — and they can do that. They can write those rules all day long — such a rule would not infringe on presidential power. But to do so when it affects a presidential power, which takes us into a separation of powers issue, like the appointment of judges, that is unconstitutional, in my layman’s view.

Oh, I’m sorry. I got that mixed up. That was Rush Limbaugh back in 2004. I guess he didn’t think filibustering was all rapey back then. Simpler times …

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Gobbling up inflation

by David Atkins

You might not be aware of it if you don’t travel in wingnut circles, but there is a cottage industry on the right insisting that the government is hiding the real inflation rate. They’re wrong, of course. But they believe as they do because they just know intuitively that soft money policies must lead to inflation despite poor consumer demand (remember, they’re not that bright) and that if it’s not showing up in the official data then it must be hidden somewhere.

Whenever you see an argument about this topic, you’ll see conservatives constantly talk about how much more expensive the prices of groceries are to prove their point, though they rarely provide specific statistics to back it up.

Well, it turns out that no, there’s not really even significant inflation on that front. In fact, Thanksgiving dinner is cheaper this year than it was last year.

Here’s a tidbit of news that economists don’t pay enough attention to: The cost of your Thanksgiving dinner has dropped for the first time in three years.

The average cost of a full turkey dinner for 10 people will be $49.04, which is 44 cents lower than a year ago, according to an annual survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group. Last year’s tally of $49.48 was the highest in the 28-year-old survey’s history.

Cheaper turkeys pulled down most of the cost — a 16-pound bird costs $21.76, about 50 cents lower than last year. Sweet potatoes, whipping cream and pumpkin-pie mix will set you back a bit more this year, but cranberries, dinner rolls and cubed stuffing won’t.

No, the inflation isn’t hidden. It’s just not there. Just another nail in what should be the coffin of right wing economics.

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Baby steps to a taser ban?

by digby

Let’s hope so. Taser International lost an appeal in District Court today.  They were held liable for the death of a young man who’d been electrocuted with a taser to the chest. At the time of the incident they knew that shooting electricity directly into the heart could cause cardiac arrest and they failed to warn police officers of that.

Now, I think we should all be aware by now that tasers are anything but “safe.”  They kill people and there’s no way of knowing in advance whether you’ll be one of the unlucky ones who will die from them. And people are injured by them all the time, especially when they’re deployed on people who are already in handcuffs. You’d think this wouldn’t be an uncommon legal result but sadly, it is.

(The award was deemed excessive and it was remanded back to the original court for a new trial over damages, so who knows if Taser will feel any financial pain.)

My favorite part of this opinion is this:

TI contended that Turner was  contributorily negligent by failing to exercise ordinary care  for his own safety in instigating the dispute at the  supermarket, and in failing to comply with Officer Dawson’s directions after the police arrived at the scene.
The district court granted Fontenot’s motion and barred TI  from submitting its contributory negligence defense to the jury.  The court later explained that the statutory language at issue bars any recovery when the “[t]he claimant failed to exercise  reasonable care under the circumstances in the use of the product.” See N.C. Gen. Stat. 99B-4(3) (emphasis added).

The  district court also noted that the North Carolina product  liability cases addressing contributory negligence all involved  plaintiffs who actually had used the allegedly defective  products, and that, in this case, Turner did not “use” the  taser. Additionally, the court reasoned that:

Finding contributory negligence in this circumstance  would immunize [TI] from ever being liable for a  product defect. Police officers do not deploy a taser unless a suspect has acted at least unreasonably.Therefore, a person who has been tased would always be barred by contributory negligence from suing [TI].

I’m quite sure that Taser International was hoping for just that finding which, in everyday language, just means “they were asking for it” when they failed to comply with police officers. If they could get the courts to agree that by “getting themselves tasered” victims had caused their own deaths then Taser is off the hook forever. These courts were not convinced. Thank goodness.

I would just add, however, that there is ample evidence that Taser, by insisting its weapon is not dangerous or deadly, in spite of the many injuries and deaths that result from them, have given the police a sort of license to shoot people full of electricity on the thinnest of pretexts, so this belief that
“police officers do not deploy a taser unless a suspect has acted at least unreasonably” is just not true. They use them on deaf people who cannot hear the orders they’ve been given to comply. They use them on bedridden elderly women. They use them on little children. They use them on epileptics in the middle of a seizure. I’m sure they don’t mean to kill any of those people.  And maybe most of them don’t see these weapons as instruments of punishment (although they are.) One hopes that at some point soon a court will have a case that addresses this aspect of their use.

We can also hope that some day people in this country wake up to the fact that casually using electricity to force citizens to comply, often on the thinnest of pretexts and for no reason other than convenience, is un-American.  This case, for instance, featured a belligerent young man who’d just been fired for insubordination and refused to leave the premises. The police officer walked into the scene and immediately deployed his taser and when the young man didn’t drop instantly — and left the building with the taser prongs still attached to his chest — the police officer kept shooting him with electticity for more than 30 seconds.

It killed him, which proves that shooting electricity into someone’s chest can be deadly.(Duh.) But shouldn’t we ask ourselves whether this dangerous weapon needed to be deployed at all? Did this police officer feel his or others’ lives were being threatened? Could he have tried to calm the situation first?  Moreover, the reason they called the police was to get this person off the property. But when he did what they wanted, they kept shooting him full of electricity anyway.

Policing is a dangerous job, although no more dangerous than a lot of other jobs.  And it is an extremely important one to our society requiring a mixture of physical courage, psychological savvy and philosophical knowledge of the principles of our justice system. I think cops deserve every bit of benefits and perks they earn and I don’t begrudge them one single cent of their generous retirement and health benefits. But they have tremendous power and it needs to be carefully monitored. Tasers (and our culture’s casual acceptance of them as some kind of entertainment) have made too many of them lose their common sense and psychological skills. It’s made them lazy.

In a free society you simply cannot give police the authority to force compliance with torture devices. I would have thought that was obvious but we seem to think that police having full discretion to use electric shock (as opposed to a nightstick)  is not a form of brutality. We’ve given the government permission to inflict pain on citizens without due process or really much of a pretext in the erroneous belief that it’s harmless. It’s anything but harmless, and not just because it can kill or injure.  It’s dangerous to Americans’ understanding of what freedom and liberty are supposed to mean in our constitutional system. Let’s just say that “if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about” wasn’t the original idea.

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The 2014 fine line

by digby

Greg Sargent reports that the White House is urging congressional Democrats not to plan their campaigns around how far they can distance themselves from Obamacare, which seems smart to me. They can’t run from it and so they need to find ways to explain to voters why they should give it a chance to work. Saying they voted for this or that Republican initiative won’t help them.

However, Greg also says that the White House is urging them to run on the economy, because it will work for them as it did in 2012:

The argument is that Dems must not let Beltway political spin wars pull them off of political turf that remains favorable to them:

Our data continues to show, unequivocally, that the nation’s economic health remains voters’ overriding priority. Even amid a cascade of news cycles focused on the Affordable Care Act, Syria, the government shutdown and the NSA, voters’ primary focus has never shifted from their economic well-being…We need to align Democrats with a future-oriented agenda that focuses on the issues that matter to families across the country — strengthening the economy, creating jobs, investing in education, promoting a living wage — and not getting caught up in inside-the-Beltway political dramas that have little bearing on their immediate well-being.

Benenson also insists his polling shows Democrats have the upper hand, if the argument over the economy is framed in this way:

In a forced choice question, just 39 percent of voters and 23 percent of independents agree: The way to get our country back on track is to get government out of the way and unleash the power of businesses and markets to create jobs by lowering taxes and eliminating needless regulations.

While 59 percent overall and 65 percent of independents agree with the alternate choice: The way to get our country back on track is to get the public and private sector working together to invest in manufacturing, technology, small businesses and education to create jobs our country needs and train our children to succeed in the new economy.

I think they can try to frame it that way and perhaps it will work. But that this memo had to be written also points out just how much harder a sell that’s going to be, at least for a while, since these same politicians will also be forced to explain the reasons for the rocky healthcare roll out. I’m afraid that if people were skeptical about government efficiency before, it’s going to take a while to put their minds at rest that the feds can execute big projects again. Obviously, if the health care bill is working well and people are happier with it by next year’s election this won’t be as much of a problem. But I think it’s quite likely it’s going to take a bit longer than that for people to lose the impression that this has been a big embarrassment. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that those who have to run in 2014 are going to be walking a very fine line on all this.

The good news (and bad news)is, as usual, that the right wing is batshit crazy and likely to overplay their hand. They’ve been very helpful that way. So there’s that.

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Headline ‘o the Day

by digby

From Politico Magazine:

Leaning Out

How Michelle Obama became a feminist nightmare.

That’s right. Apparently, being the right’s favorite pinata, every day being derided as a fat, stupid feminazi isn’t enough. She refuses to find her “inner wonk” and do important work, at least according to Michelle Cottle, who says feminists are upset she hasn’t used her platform the way they wanted her to.

Whatever. Considering that just telling kids to eat their vegetables makes wingnut heads spin around on their shoulders, I can’t even imagine what they would do to her for taking on some Hillary-level work as first lady. She’s never given any indication that she has further political ambitions and absolutely no reason to try to do something more “wonky” than working on kids issues. Which, by the way, was also Clinton’s main political cause when she was the first lady of Arkansas and the US. I don’t know when advocating for children became a feminist embarrassment but it didn’t used to be. Jesus, if they don’t do it, who will?

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