Month: December 2013

Why is Fix the Debt so darned happy?

by digby

Here’s the latest my ongoing series documenting the unseemly glee with which Republicans and Democratic centrists are greeting this budget deal:

The Senate has an important vote on the budget deal tomorrow. Tell key senators to support it now http://t.co/NtlpH2s9Gg
— Fix the Debt (@FixtheDebt) December 16, 2013

I’m sure they are sad that they couldn’t get at the Holy Grail (Social Security) but any day they’re able to slash spending on the poor and middle class and keep the government from raising taxes on rich people is a good day, amirite?

*Annual fundraiser happening right now:

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Tea Party group unironically posts racist picture from video game meant to mock racists

by David Atkins

This image is from a video game called Bioshock Infinite:

Bioshock Infinite is one of my favorite games, and one I’ve been meaning to review at some point for an entry in my video game Saturday series. The original Bioshock was a mocking take-down of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, set in a failed libertarian city at the bottom of the ocean. Bioshock Infinite is the third game in the series. It’s set in an alternate turn-of-the-century floating city above America called “Columbia”, run by a preacher named “Father Comstock” who rules with a combination of hardcore racism, oppressive theocracy and a heavy dose of American exceptionalism. This painting is found in a building run by a group that venerates the spirit of John Wilkes Booth. Notice George Washington holding the Ten Commandments as racist caricatures cringe in defeat. It would be fairly difficult even for a Tea Partier to fail to notice the mocking irony in the image.

But apparently not the good Christian folk at the National Liberty Foundation Facebook page boasting almost 95,000 likes, which posted it entirely without irony on its page.

Game site Kotaku picked it up and the ridicule has been relentless since.

It’s awfully difficult for Tea Partiers to claim they aren’t driven by racism when they wholeheartedly embrace over-the-top racist propaganda designed to make fun of them.

It’s holiday fundraiser time …

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QOTD: @billmon1

by digby

Relying on econ growth alone to hold down unemployment (and thus inequality) is like a cancer cell assuming its host will live forever.— billmon (@billmon1) December 15, 2013

Happy Birthday — to the best thing America ever produced

by digby

In my humble opinion anyway.  Today in history:

The first Congress of the United States approves 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and sends them to the states for ratification. The amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were designed to protect the basic rights of U.S. citizens, guaranteeing the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and exercise of religion; the right to fair legal procedure and to bear arms; and that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved for the states and the people.

Influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Bill of Rights was also drawn from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason in 1776. Mason, a native Virginian, was a lifelong champion of individual liberties, and in 1787 he attended the Constitutional Convention and criticized the final document for lacking constitutional protection of basic political rights. In the ratification process that followed, Mason and other critics agreed to approve the Constitution in exchange for the assurance that amendments would immediately be adopted.

In December 1791, Virginia became the 10th of 14 states to approve 10 of the 12 amendments, thus giving the Bill of Rights the two-thirds majority of state ratification necessary to make it legal.

I’ve often felt that our vaunted constitution isn’t all that — there’s a reason why in the vast democratization that’s taken place around the globe in the last century that nobody has adopted it. But the Bill of Rights is one of the best political documents in human history, a distillation of the enlightenment principles that (supposedly) guide our civilization. It’s not perfect — a certain, shall we say, vagueness has caused us some problems. But if, as a society, we could agree to honor the spirit of it, we could keep ourselves from the worst kind of government excesses and the natural negative incentives that occur when humans and power intersect. It’s an excellent guideline if only we can keep the natural authoritarians from turning it into an epistemic minefield.

So, give old George Mason and the rest of the boys a big round of applause today. The American Constitution is an experiment of dubious achievement in many ways — and very often a great exercise in hypocrisy. But the Bill of Rights is something special and Americans have a right to be proud of its intentions.

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No words

by digby

You see things like this and you start to wonder about those Biblical prophesies …

There are no words. Winter in #Homs #Syria – once a great city, now a wasteland pic.twitter.com/TTAiUPWVuk via @abumuqawama @borzou @RamiAlLolah
— Clarissa Ward (@clarissaward) December 11, 2013

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RIP Peter O’Toole

by digby

One of the all time greats:

The character of Alan Swann was evidently fairly close to his real personality. This profile from a few months back is vastly entertaining:

I followed the waiters into O’Toole’s bedroom with trepidation. The scene had changed. The bed was now empty, the bathroom door ajar. There were bubbles – lots of bubbles – lapping against the carpet, a wall of steam and an overwhelming sickly smell.

“Peter? Everything okay?” I enquired nervously. “Your breakfast has arrived.”

“I think…” Long dramatic pause. “I think… I think… Lazarus is slowly rising from the dead,” he announced mischievously, spitting out each syllable with exaggerated voice projection, volume and enunciation before appearing through the mist like an apparition.

He was naked, had an oversized powder puff the size of a Frisbee in one hand and was liberally covering himself and the room with Penhaligon’s Bluebell talcum powder.

“Autograph, boys?” he asked the trio of stunned waiters.

This Lawrence of Arabia collector’s edition is awesome, by the way.

Update: This profile by Gay Talese back when LOA was first released is also a gem.
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More stories of America’s throw-away people

by digby

The Sacramento Bee has been reporting this hideous story of Nevada putting its mental patients an greyhound buses and shipping them to other states with no resources for months. It’s a truly harrowing tale that says a whole lot about our health care system in this country. Here’s just one of the stories:

Spencer moved to Las Vegas from Fresno in 2010 hoping for a new start. He found an apartment and work as a driver, and later at a private mental health treatment facility.

“I did my best. But behind the scenes I was battling these issues,” Spencer said.

Last summer, at 47, his health started failing, and depression set in. He checked into Harrah’s on the Vegas Strip, fashioned a noose out of a bed sheet and tied it to the shower bar.

Then he heard a housekeeper’s cart rattling down the hall.

“If I do this,” he remembers thinking, “I’m going to traumatize someone else.”

He left the room and made his way to a hospital, which sent him to Rawson-Neal, southern Nevada’s main psych hospital. That was on Aug. 26, 2012. There, Dr. Jacob Manjooran wrote:

“He states ‘I hate life and people.’ His mood has been very depressed for about 2 months, he has nightmares. … Has made six suicide attempts. …

“His only child, a son aged 22, died from drug abuse 2 months ago. Currently homeless. … Nephew and an uncle committed suicide.”

The staff gave him antidepressants and therapy. But mostly, he sat. A notation in his chart says: “William is ‘tired of being left alone with my thoughts’ and feels that the staff is uncaring.”

On Sept. 18, as Rawson-Neal prepared to release him, he was asked whether he’d like to return to Southern California, where he grew up. He wanted to stay in Vegas. He especially didn’t want to go anywhere near the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale. A note in his file says Spencer “discussed feeling very scared about being back in Glendale where he has numerous memories of bad relationships and worries that he will be back at square one.”

The staff persisted, telling him California has much better services, and gave him a discharge plan. It was a cruel joke: “The patient is being discharged to Pasadena, CA, where he will be enrolled at the Passage Ways Program.”

Pasadena is next door to Glendale, the place he feared going. But he said a Rawson-Neal social worker assured him that Passageways was expecting him and that he’d get treatment there.

On Sept. 19, the hospital sent him by cab to the Greyhound depot in downtown Las Vegas and paid $66 for a ticket for the 1:35 a.m. bus to the Greyhound depot on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.
At the Greyhound counter, he asked why the bus wasn’t going to Pasadena. The clerk answered that bus didn’t stop in Pasadena. With no clue how he would get from L.A.’s Skid Row to Pasadena, he called Rawson-Neal.

Whoever he spoke with at Rawson-Neal offered him no help, except to suggest that he call Passageways when he arrived in Los Angeles and ask to be picked up, or call 911. He knew he could walk away from the Vegas depot, but had no other place to go and decided to take the Rawson-Neal social worker at her word.

As the bus crossed the desert, however, he became anxious. At a stop in Riverside, he gathered up his few coins and phoned Passageways. The Passageways receptionist had no idea who he was, had no beds, and would have no way of picking him up if he arrived in L.A.

Ryan Izell, a director at Passageways, told me he was unaware of anyone calling from Rawson-Neal trying to arrange care for Spencer. The service’s limited funding is reserved for people in Pasadena, and there aren’t enough shelters for the “hundreds of individuals who are homeless in Pasadena,” Izell said.

He ended up walking into a police station and a kindly cop took him to a hospital.

There are hundreds of these stories some of which have ended in tragedy, with innocent people being killed at the hands of some of these mentally ill individuals. And apparently this has been going on for decades.

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Secret nudging or just plain obstruction? The Sunstein legacy.

by digby

Here’s just a little something for certain people to ponder before they defend the administration again on grounds that the only reason it has been so stymied in delivering the promised “change” is the miscreant Republicans:

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

Some agency officials were instructed to hold off submitting proposals to the White House for up to a year to ensure that they would not be issued before voters went to the polls, the current and former officials said.

The delays meant that rules were postponed or never issued. The stalled regulations included crucial elements of the Affordable Care Act, what bodies of water deserved federal protection, pollution controls for industrial boilers and limits on dangerous silica exposure in the workplace.

The Obama administration has repeatedly said that any delays until after the election were coincidental and that such decisions were made without regard to politics. But seven current and former administration officials told The Washington Post that the motives behind many of the delays were clearly political, as Obama’s top aides focused on avoiding controversy before his reelection.

The number and scope of delays under Obama went well beyond those of his predecessors, who helped shape rules but did not have the same formalized controls, said current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
[…]
But Ronald White, who directs regulatory policy at the advocacy group Center for Effective Government, said the “overt manipulation of the regulatory review process by a small White House office” raises questions about how the government writes regulations. He said the amount of time it took the White House to review proposed rules was “particularly egregious over the past two years.”

Previous White House operations have weighed in on major rules before they were officially submitted for review. But Jeffrey Holmstead, who headed the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation in the George W. Bush administration, said the effort was not as extensive as the Obama administration’s approach.

“There was no formalized process by which you had to get permission to send them over,” Holmstead said, referring to rules being submitted to the White House.

The recent decision to bring on Democratic strategist John Podesta as a senior White House adviser is likely to accelerate the number of new rules and executive orders, given Podesta’s long-standing support for using executive action to achieve the president’s goals despite congressional opposition.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Action, said he’s concerned about the real-world impact of the postponements in the first term.

“Legal protection delayed is protection denied,” Blumenthal said. “I’ve spoken to officials at the top rungs of the White House power structure and at OIRA and we’re going to hold their feet to the fire, and we’re going to make sure they’re held accountable in a series of hearings.”

The officials interviewed for the ACUS report, whose names were withheld from publication by the study authors, said that starting in 2012 they had to meet with an OIRA desk officer before submitting each significant rule for formal review. They called the sessions “Mother-may-I” meetings, according to the study.

The accounts were echoed by four Obama administration political appointees and three career officials interviewed by The Post.

The general thrust of this article is that the delays were purely political. And maybe they were but I can’t imagine why Republicans would object. They hate regulations. But that focus misses the point. All during the first term, the administration believed that regulation should be slowed.

The following is from a Think Progress piece back in April about Cass Sunstein, the man at the center of regulatory power in the White House, a very close friend and confidant of the president:

In his new book, “Simpler: The Future of Government,” Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes about his nearly four years as President Barack Obama’s “regulatory czar.” As the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (known as “OIRA”) within the Office of Management and Budget, Sunstein oversaw the regulatory output of the many agencies of the executive branch. Rules on worker health, environmental protection, food safety, health care, consumer protection, and more all passed through Sunstein’s inbox.

Some never left. A group of Department of Energy efficiency standards, for example, have languished at OIRA since 2011, as has an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule to finally reduce exposure to the silica dust that sickens workers every year.

In his revealing book, Sunstein tells us why: It is because he, Sunstein, had the authority to “say no to members of the president’s Cabinet”; to deposit “highly touted rules, beloved by regulators, onto the shit list“; to ensure that some rules “never saw the light of day”; to impose cost-benefit analysis “wherever the law allowed”; and to “transform cost-benefit analysis from an analytical tool into a “rule of decision,” meaning that “[a]gencies could not go forward” if their rules flunked OIRA’s cost-benefit test.

Assertive intrusions into agencies’ prerogatives — prerogatives given by law to the agencies, not to OIRA — were necessary, Sunstein insists, because otherwise agency decisions might be based not on “facts and evidence,” but on “intuitions, anecdotes, dogmas, or the views of powerful interest groups.” In Sunstein’s account, OIRA’s interventions also ensured “a well-functioning system of public comment” and “compliance with procedural ideals that might not always be strictly compulsory but that might be loosely organized under the rubric of ‘good government’.” No theme more pervades Sunstein’s book than the idea that government transparency is essential to good regulatory outcomes and to good government itself.

The deep and sad irony is that few government processes are as opaque as the process of OIRA review, superintended for almost four years by Sunstein himself. Few people even know OIRA exists; in fact, the adjective that most often appears in descriptions of this small office is “obscure.” Even fewer people know that OIRA has effective veto power over major rules issued by executive-branch agencies and that the decision as to whether a rule is “major” — and thus must run OIRA’s gauntlet before being issued — rests solely in OIRA’s hands. Most people, I would venture to guess, think that the person who runs, say, the Environmental Protection Agency is actually the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. But given OIRA’s power to veto rules, the reality is otherwise: In the rulemaking domain, the head of OIRA is effectively the head of the EPA.

Under Sunstein, this small, virtually unknown office wielded extensive power, in fact the greatest power in the Executive branch aside from the Commander in Chief function. And while everyone in the Democratic establishment was wringing their hands about how the Big Bad Republicans just refused to allow the poor president to do what he knnew was right, Sunstein, presumably with the full permission of the president, basically slowed the regulatory state to a trickle. Read the Think Progress article for the full indictment.

The president clearly would like his administration to be seen as transformational and he would like his legacy to be among the pantheon of great liberal leaders’. But it’s going to be pretty hard to square that goal with the one overarching theme of his tenure: secrecy. From kill lists to NSA surveillance to harassing the press to regulatory bottlenecks, this administration has relentlessly touted transparency while being among the most opaque in history. It’s quite a feat. But it isn’t liberal. I’m not sure that having John Podesta issue a flurry of new regulations in the waning hours of the administration is going to be enough to change that fact.

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Why is Paul Ryan so darned happy?

by digby

Setting aside all the silliness about “getting to know each others passions” this interview with Patty Murray and Paul Ryan has all the hallmarks of a conman and his gullible mark — looking forward to a beautiful friendship:

Senate Budget Committee chair Sen Patty Murray, D- Wash., and her House counterpart Rep. Paul Ryan, R- Wisc., gave a vigorous defense Sunday of the budget agreement which they announced last week.

They said the accord showed that serious legislating is still possible even when the two parties appear to be deeply divided on matters of principle.

“It’s a step forward that shows that there can be other breakthroughs and compromise if you take the time to know somebody, know what their passions are, and know how you can work together,” said Murray in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

She added that “one of the things we had to learn to do is to listen to each other and to respect each other and to trust each other…. Either one of us could’ve taken out and blown up and killed the other person politically. We agreed from the start we wouldn’t do that. Very important to where we are today.”

Ryan seconded her view saying, “We spent a lot of time just getting to know each other, talking, understanding each other’s principles, and we basically learned that if we require the other to violate a core principle, we’re going to get nowhere and we’ll just keep gridlock.”

Ryan said that he and his Democratic counterpart were motivated by a desire to “make this divided government work, at least at a minimum, basic functioning level.”
[…]
Both Ryan and Murray voiced their hopes Sunday that the accord they designed — even if relatively small in its total budgetary effects — could create a foundation for future compromises.

Murray said, “If we just sit in our corners and yell at each other and that’s all we get rewarded for, we’ll never get to those big discussions about tax reform, or strengthening our entitlements, or how we fund things in the future, or immigration reform, or any of the other really big challenges of our country. So, what we’re trying to do is bring some respect to the word ‘compromise.’”

“You gotta, you know, crawl before you can walk before you can run,” Ryan said. “I’m hopeful, as a Ways and Means (Committee) member as well, that we can start moving tax reform legislation.”

Ryan said that in the first quarter of 2014 the House Ways and Means Committee would “be advancing tax reform legislation because we think that’s a key ingredient to getting people back to work, to increasing take-home pay, to growing this economy.”

But discord remains between the parties on whether – as Democrats want – tax reform should be done in a way that raises new revenues, or whether, as Republicans want, tax reform should be revenue neutral and simply be intended to achieve a leaner, more efficient tax system.

“We’ll have to disagree” on that point, Ryan said.

Uh huh. But surely such good friends can figure out something, don’t you think?

Meanwhile, in case anyone’s laboring under the illusion that the wingnuts think Ryan screwed the pooch, think again. He’s the reason they voted for it. And he’s very much still one of them:

After a week in Washington that had laid bare many of the familiar dividing that separate elected Republicans and their party’s insurgent, conservative wing, Ryan made nice with many of the groups that had mobilized in opposition to the budget agreement he forged with Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray.

“I think these taxpayer groups are indispensable to keeping taxpayer interest accounted for, keeping people accountable,” Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said.

“And we sometimes have difference of opinions on tactics,” he added. “We all believe the same thing with respect to our ultimate goal.”

The House overwhelmingly approved the Ryan-Murray budget on Thursday with bipartisan support, though 62 House Republicans and 32 Democrats voted in opposition to the measure. The Senate is expected to take up the budget, which would stabilize government operations through late 2015, on Tuesday.

Though the budget proposal won over most House Republicans — due, in part, to the sway Ryan holds among fiscal conservatives — it did so over the objection of groups like the Club for Growth, Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity. Each of those groups had urged lawmakers to oppose the budget because it set spending levels above “sequester” caps. Those groups had alerted members that they would tally votes for purposes of yearly “scorecards” that can often prove influential during GOP primary fights in House and Senate races.

“Good Cop” Ryan explained that “Bad Cop” Boehner was just expressing his frustration that some groups came out against the plan before it was officially unveiled. But it’s all good now.

Onward to “tax reform” and as Patty Murray said “strengthening our entitlements”. All of which will be hailed as great bipartisan achievements regardless of what’s in them, simply because the government wasn’t shut down. See how that works?

Just a little reminder of what a “great deal” this was:

The “compromise” they ended up with was $1,012.

It’s perfectly understandable why Paul Ryan is so darned happy.  It couldn’t have worked out better from his perspective.

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Republican answers for a young urban Latino

by David Atkins

Joe Scarborough, speaking at the Reagan Library:

“We’ve got to make sure that we nominate a candidate like Reagan who believes that freedom and less taxes and less regulations and more opportunity are just as relevant to an 18-year-old Latino starting his career in South Central Los Angeles as it is a 65-year-old hedge funder in Greenwich, Conn.,” he said.

That sounds nice in theory, but one has to ask what messages he’s talking about that are supposed to appeal to an 18-year-old Latino from South Central. Let’s imagine some of these hypothetical conversations:

“You don’t need Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, you lazy moocher. Get a health savings account with all that money you’re not saving!”

Not likely to work.

“The reason your relatives can’t get ahead isn’t that there’s endemic racism and exploitation of service workers. They’re just lazy parasites! But if you go into a lot debt and major as an engineer, intern for a few years then take an awful job somewhere, maybe you can be out of debt by 40, if you don’t have kids too early!”

That’s not too appealing.

“You don’t want us to deport the grandmother who raised and fed you? Too bad–because RULES! Adios, abuelita!”

Ummmmm…nope.

“Upset that your nephew was killed in a drive-by shooting, and you want to do something about gun violence? Too bad. We need more guns, because maybe we’ll have to use guerrilla warfare to fight the U.S. military and the police in case they try to force Communist universal childcare and healthcare down our throats! Wolverines!”

That’s probably going to sound as crazy as it is.

“Student loan reform? Suck it up. Just work while you go to school. That $10/hour job will make a big dent in your $60,000 student loan. After all, *I*, your 60-year-old conservative better, worked for higher wages while going to school for $500 a semester, which makes me better than you somehow. Pull yourself up by your boostraps, bud!”

Better hope no one ever shows him an income inequality chart.

“More funds for public school? No, commie! If you have a kid, you should totally pay for private school. Get an education savings account to go along with that health savings account! Can’t put money toward either one? Well, then, you shouldn’t be buying extravagant things like a cell phone, or meat for your kids’ food. Rice and beans is all you need!”

I can’t imagine why he would vote for a Democrat after that kind of inspiration.

“You want a pension? Boo! Unions are bad. Your dad may be doing well in a union, but they’re really bad for you. And Social Security is a ponzi scheme! Get yourself a 401K or hope you don’t live to see 65!”

Again, that probably won’t work.

“You have gay friends who want to get married? No! Your sister can’t afford birth control? Too bad! Having doubts about what your conservative priest told you? Evil!”

He’s probably fairly angry by now.

“You don’t need higher wages. You need lower taxes! Oh wait–you’re poor? Sorry, 47%er. Your taxes should go UP so your billionaire boss’ taxes can go down. Anyway, you should totally become a super-rich entrepreneur. If the GOP wins, you’ll have even more money! Isn’t that cool? No?”

Tone deaf beyond words.

“Worried about climate change? Don’t worry, it’s a big hoax. Let us drill more oil and maybe you’ll get a job there! Oh, and don’t believe that evolution stuff, either. I don’t care what you learned in that LIBERAL college!”

That will surely persuade.

This is the problem for Republicans. They’ve bought into the idea that the conservative ascendancy took root because of the power of their actual ideas, rather than because they combined 1% money with the prejudices of a slim majority of the white middle class against their poorer, browner brethren.

Republican “ideas” have absolutely no appeal for young people, and particularly not for young people of color.

There are two only things that can save Republicans. The first is if Democrats tie themselves too closely to the corrupt Wall Street establishment and allow Republicans to portray them as crony capitalist tools of the wealthy elite. The second is if Democrats allow a libertarian Republican insurgency to flank them on commonsense issues like ending the drug war, enacting patent reform, protecting personal privacy and other issues that are both popular with the young and dear to the cyberlibertarian crowd.

If Democrats don’t make those fatal errors, there’s very little the GOP in its current incarnation can do about the demographic challenges they face. Their ideas are obviously terrible just at first glance.

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