Month: February 2014

Conservatives can’t have it both ways on ID requirements

by David Atkins

Republicans don’t just want poor people to have to show an ID to vote. They also want them to have to show an ID to feed themselves:

A dozen House Republicans say people who use federal food stamps should be required to show a photo ID when they use their electronic benefit cards (EBCs) to buy groceries.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) introduced the SNAP Verify Act, which is aimed at reducing the amount of fraud that he said is leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted food aid each year. Salmon said the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), informally called the food stamp program, is aimed at helping people in need, and that Congress must ensure those benefits are not being diverted.

“It is the duty of our elected officials to protect the integrity of this program and discourage abuse from those who seek to game the system,” he said. “My bill simply requires the photo identification of authorized users of SNAP electronic benefit cards at the point of transaction.”

Salmon said a recent Government Accountability Office report found that $2.2 billion in food stamp benefits were improperly handed out in 2009. He said current law requires efforts to ensure food stamps are only given to eligible people, but said there is no requirement that recipients show their ID when buying food.

There is something to be said for this idea in theory. Unlike with voting where there is essentially no voter fraud, SNAP fraud does exist. It’s frankly not even close to the top of the priority list given the mindboggling amounts of money being stolen and wasted through Wall Street and the Pentagon, but the idea that waste and abuse should be curtailed wherever it exists is a bedrock principle of good government.

The problem, of course, is that many people in the United States cannot easily get a government ID, largely due to disability, or the need to hold multiple jobs, or cuts to hours and locations of government services in poor comunities, or transportation problems, or language barriers, or some combination of all of the above. And, of course, the people likeliest to have trouble obtaining an ID are also the people likeliest to need the SNAP program. Which functionally means that forcing people to show an ID to receive SNAP benefits means that many people and their children will be forced into starvation.

It’s true that most other major democracies around the globe do require an ID card to vote and to receive benefits. But those countries also make sure that those IDs are automatically provided to every citizen and very easy to obtain.

But the deeply paranoid black helicopter crowd on the Right is terrified that if everyone is provided a national ID card, then the government will round everyone up and put them into FEMA internment camps or something. So they strongly oppose the federal, easily provided national ID card system that most other sane countries implement.

They don’t get to have it both ways. If they want people to have to provide ID, they need to make sure that everyone is able to get an ID, and they need to make it a federal program in order to prevent tampering by the states. In other words, they need to put up or shut up.

Or they could admit that they simply despise poor people, and want to starve and disenfranchise them. Either one works.

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Incentives for authoritarian overreach

by digby

If this doesn’t show exactly what the incentives for the drug war are, I don’t know what will. Josh Holland reports:

It’s well known that people of color are overrepresented in America’s prisons relative to their share of the population. But a recent study finds that they make up an even larger share of the populations of private, for-profit prisons than publicly run institutions.

According to Christopher Petrella, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley who conducted the study, this is not an accident — it’s about private firms selecting the least expensive prisoners to manage and leaving costlier populations in the hands of state correction systems.

Why would African American and Latino prisoners be cheaper to incarcerate than whites? Because older prisoners are significantly more expensive than younger ones. “Based on historical sentencing patterns, if you are a prisoner today, and you are over 50 years old, there is a greater likelihood that you are white,” Petrella explained to BillMoyers.com. “If you are under 50 years old — particularly if you’re closer to 30 years old — you’re more likely to be a person of color.” He cited a 2012 report by the ACLU which found that it costs $34,135 per year to house a non-geriatric prisoner, compared with $68,270 for a prisoner age 50 or older.

“I came to find out that through explicit and implicit exemptions written into contracts between these private prison management companies and state departments of correction, many of these privates — namely GEO and CCA, the two largest private, for-profit prison companies — write exemptions for certain types of prisoners into their contracts,” Petrella said. “And, as you can guess, the prisoners they like to house are low-cost prisoners… Those prisoners tend to be younger, and they tend to be much healthier.”

You’ve got to love the fact that these private prison corporations are able to write certain prisoner specifications into their contracts. Makes it so much easier for the legal system to know who to imprison doesn’t it? And if there’s one thing that’s very clear, these prisons need lots of young, healthy people to fill their cells in order to make a profit. And they need them to be people who aren’t going to create the kind of fuss that might be made if they ran around the suburbs gathering up nice, healthy young white people:

But why are older prisoners more likely to be white? Petrella explains that “up until the mid-1960s or so, two-thirds of the US prison population was what the Census Bureau would consider non-Hispanic white. Today, that’s totally inverted — about a third of all prisoners around the country are white and around two-thirds are people of color. And the chief explanation for that trend is the so-called drug war, which disproportionately impacts people of color.“

I don’t now why I’m shocked by this, but I am. It’s been clear for a long time that the private prison industry is corrupt. It’s a terrible problem. But I hadn’t seen this particular correlation between the drug war and the profits of the prison industry before and it’s very illuminating.

In fact, it’s becoming clear that this privatizing of state security functions is a very real and present danger to our constitutional liberties in a number of different ways. Here’s an excerpt of a recent interview with Edward Snowden that speaks to this issue:

INTERVIEWER: How does a young man from Elizabeth City in North Carolina, thirty years old, get in such a position in such a sensitive area?

SNOWDEN: That’s a very difficult question to answer. Um, in general, I would say it highlights the dangers of privatizing government functions. I worked previously as an actual staff officer, a government employee for the Central Intelligence Agency, but I’ve also served much more frequently as a contractor in a private capacity. What that means is you have private for-profit companies doing inherently governmental work, like targeted espionage, surveillance, compromising foreign systems. And anyone who has the skills, who can convince a private company that they have the qualifications to do so, will be empowered by the government to do that and there’s very little oversight. There’s very little review.
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INTERVIEWER: You worked for the NSA through a private contractor with the name Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the big ones in the business. What is the advantage for the U.S. Government or the CIA to work through a private contractor to outsource essential government functions?

SNOWDEN: Contracting culture of the national security community in the United States is a complex topic. It’s driven by a number of interests between primarily limiting the number of direct government employees, at the same time as keeping lobbying groups in Congress — typically from very well-funded businesses, such as Booz Allen Hamilton — the problem there is, you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind.

The result of that is what we saw at Booz Allen Hamilton, where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time, with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing. The government didn’t even know they were gone.

Privatizing security functions puts a profit motive into it. Does this look like a good idea?

… Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report’s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly. Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.

JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.

All those national security contractors do exactly the same thing. Here’s one from the  “Chertoff Group” you might recognize:

That’s not to say that the danger of the security state itself doesn’t present equal challenges.  But the unfortunately reality is that private industry and government are working together under certain incentives in the security realm, both in terms of power and money, that threaten the Bill of Rights. This is what happens when our leadership forgets that their oath is to protect the constitution rather than to protect the people. They are not the same thing  — once one decides that the people must be kept “secure” by any means necessary, the constitution is no longer relevant.

I think Justice Antonin Scalia spelled that out pretty clearly.

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The new right wing “truth”: the health care system was great until Obamacare ruined it

by digby

I retweeted Ann Coulter’s ridiculous claim that her friend in California had “died from Obamacare” the other day with the sarcastic comment “sure she did.” I live in California. I know how this system works. I navigated it myself. And there was no circumstance I could think of under which that could be correct.

Politifact fact checked her story:

We don’t know the name of the woman (beyond Julie), the type of coverage she had or anything about her medical history, and Coulter did not respond to our request for more information. But the claim that someone “died from Obamacare” because Blue Shield “completely just pulled out of California” is something we can fact-check.

It’s obviously misleading to say someone died from Obamacare in the same way someones dies from cancer or a car accident. Hospitals in the United States are required to treat patients whether they have health insurance or not.

But more germane to this particular fact-check is Coulter’s assertion that the woman found herself without insurance because Blue Shield pulled out of the state of California.

That did not happen.

Blue Shield of California: Still in business

Some insurance companies stopped writing health insurance policies in the individual market in California, but not Blue Shield of California.

The not-for-profit insurer competes with for-profit insurer Anthem Blue Cross and Kaiser Permanente. It continues to be a big player in the individual marketplace, which is what we assume Coulter is talking about, as well as the state’s health exchange, Covered California.

Like other insurers across California and the country, Blue Shield of California could no longer offer some health insurance plans because they did not include “essential health benefits” required by the Affordable Care Act.

These plans could not be grandfathered in under the new law. Blue Shield of California sent letters to 119,000 customers in September notifying them their current plans would end “but we can still have you covered in 2014.” PunditFact obtained a sample cancellation letter from the company.

The letter explained Blue Shield would offer new plans that include the minimum health benefits required by the health care law, such as emergency services, prescription drugs and preventive care.

If a customer took no action after reading the letter, he or she would be automatically enrolled into a new plan recommended by Blue Shield. This was meant “to ensure that no one experienced a lapse in coverage,” said spokeswoman Mia Campitelli.

The letters went to 57 percent of the insurer’s individual market customers, she said. For two-thirds of the people who lost their plan, the recommended option was more expensive, the Los Angeles Times reported.

This scenario was similar for 300,000 Florida Blue customers last fall. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said affected customers were “going to lose their individual coverage because of Obamacare. Now those people next year, they don’t have health insurance.” But PolitiFact Florida rated that claim Mostly False because they were not losing coverage unless they opted out.

Most of these Blue Shield of California customers were given the chance to temporarily extend their old plan until the end of March 2014 because the state’s insurance regulator determined they did not give customers 180 days of notice. About 15,000 people decided to take the extension, Campitelli said.

For a customer to be without Blue Shield coverage after getting the letter, he or she would have had to contact Blue Shield to cancel the recommended plan. Campitelli said the company would not have a number for how many people chose to drop Blue Shield until open enrollment ends after March.

Trouble with the website?

Coulter said her friend’s sister tried to get Obamacare but couldn’t get through the website. (That’s assuming she canceled her Blue Shield coverage.)

But if the woman was looking for new coverage in California, she would not have needed to access the troubled federal marketplace, healthcare.gov. California is one of the states running its own insurance marketplace.

Covered California wasn’t perfect. But it worked. There shouldn’t have been any problem in getting on. And it wasn’t hard to get someone on the phone either. So that’s bullshit.

This woman would have had to personally cancel her policy to be without insurance. That’s how it worked here. In fact, I’m in the process of trying to straighten out the fact that my old insurance didn’t receive my cancellation and they’re trying to bill me for January even though I had new insurance. (Thanks Obamacare!) You can’t actually “get cancelled”. The worst that happens is that you get put into a more expensive plan. At which point anyone with a brain will go on the Covered California web-site and search for a cheaper one. And if you make too much money for subsidies, you could go shopping with the insurance companies directly.

Whatever happens, the only way you find yourself without any coverage is if you cancel your policy or fail to pay your premium.

Our ruling

Coulter said a friend’s sister “died from Obamacare” because she was “thrown off her insurance plan, you know Blue Shield completely just pulled out of California.”

We’re not fact-checking whether someone died. We’re looking at the circumstances Coulter presented.

Blue Shield did not pull out of California, and the company did not leave people without insurance. In fact, customers were allowed to keep their existing insurance plans through March. If the basic facts of Coulter’s story are accurate, the woman in question elected to drop insurance coverage.

Whatever the story of Blue Shield, saying someone died “from Obamacare” is incendiary and grossly misleading.

Coulter’s claim rates Pants on Fire.

The problem is that people who want to believe this will believe it no matter what. I suspect every Republican will soon have a story about someone dying or losing a limb or whatever, because in their minds all untimely deaths are now caused by a terrible health care system that was once perfect and has been ruined by Obamacare.

I don’t know how long it will take to change that.

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Sistah Souljah who?

by digby

I honestly don’t know if I can take it. Charlie Pierce leads me to this little bit of Village wisdom by Matt Bai — and it makes me want to start drinking way too early:

Should she ultimately run again, Clinton might actually do herself a greater service by holding her ground. When we talked about Clinton, David Axelrod, the strategist who spent a career running campaigns against the establishment before guiding Obama to the White House, told me: “The quickest way to authenticate yourself, and the hardest thing to do, is to be willing to put yourself at risk by standing up for things you believe, even if it means taking positions every once in a while that people don’t see as the smart political move.” Which could mean that the real way to prove you’re not just a projection of the status quo isn’t necessarily to mouth tired condemnations of the establishment, but rather to speak hard truth to the partisans who indict it.

This is actually presented as a creative and unique approach for a Democrat to take. Evidently Bai was still sucking on his juice box when this little phrase was coined. (Axelrod certainly wasn’t):

Sister Souljah (born Lisa Williamson, 1964) is an American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer. She gained prominence for Bill Clinton’s criticism of her remarks about race in the United States during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton’s well-known repudiation of her comments led to what is now known in politics as a Sister Souljah moment.

Bill Clinton invented the process, although I have to give President Obama a lot of credit for polishing it into something much more subtle. (Here’s Ta-Nehisi Coates on that subject.) I’m fairly sure that Hillary Clinton is aware of such stale tropes even if Matt Bai and David Axelrod are still laboring under the delusion that an Democratic candidate can win the vote of someone who’s primary concern is that the hippies are taking over the country. Sheesh.

Pierce points out what should be obvious to anyone but which the cognoscenti seem congenitally unable (more likely unwilling) to understand:

The Democratic “populism” people so seem to fear is about two years old — a but longer, if you date it from the rise of the Occupy movement — and it hasn’t shown yet that it is generally ready to exert power within Democratic politics. But its power is building, and its popularity is increasing, and if Clinton gets convinced that the way to go is to “stand firm” against it, proving to God alone knows who that she is a serious Leader with Leadership, a genuine political reaction to the depredations of the private banking sector will pass a’glimmering. That not only will be bad for Democrats, it will be extremely bad for the country. It will pitch the Democrats back into the position whereby the really smart people congratulate the Democrats for standing firm against anything that might result in a political advantage.

They are astonishingly comfortable in that position. It is, after all, where the money is.

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Criminalizing journalism: a little bit of history repeating itself

by digby

For the people who think that we need not worry our pretty little heads about members of the press being labeled by high level government officials as traitors and criminals for doing their job, this piece by Amy Davidson in the New Yorker might be of interest:

A military lawyer had identified forty-one highly classified state secrets revealed in a single article. Senior officials were telling everyone who would listen that the journalists’ revelations had made the country less safe and put lives at risk—the reporters were simply traitors. The Russians might be behind it, and who knew what secrets the journalists would hand over if they weren’t immediately apprehended. Their publisher was already in Cuba, or maybe just headed there on a plane—anyway, he was a fugitive. A call was put in to a military attaché in Spain, to ask him to arrange to have another journalist stopped at the border; a soldier thought to be his source was arrested. The country’s leader mocked the media outlet involved: “You’ve got a publication that prints a half a million copies and systematically engages in treason—to make itself some money.” And not just a little treachery: “an abyss of treason.” The whole thing was “just plain ugly.”

It does sound awfully familiar doesn’t it? But it’s actually a blast from the past:

This was the Spiegel Affair, big news in 1962; Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was the national leader saying that the journalists, at what was then a relatively new German newsweekly, were a bunch of greedy traitors… The strands connecting the Spiegel and Snowden affairs are many and instructive—and are a reminder, above all, of why press freedom is worth fighting for.

When a government calls journalists traitors the questions should begin, not end. A lesson of the Spiegel Affair is that claims need to be subjected to some skepticism. The Spiegel publisher, Rudolf Augstein, was not anywhere near Cuba, though, as it was the autumn of the Cuban missile crisis, it would have been quite a moment. He was already in the custody of the German police; the official who’d said otherwise, no less than the Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss, had been lying, left and right, about pretty much everything. Strauss was angry because a Spiegel cover story had embarrassed him—which was his definition of damaging national security. He’d made up the Cuban part to make it all sound like espionage. He wanted to make sure that Augstein’s reporter, Conrad Ahlers, was seized in Spain—an arrest that, a German official later said, was “somewhat outside of the law”—and to justify sending dozens of police officers to tear through the Spiegel offices late on a Friday night, seizing typewriters and screening calls. They also arrested the editor in chief, then searched his home, taking away drawings his children had made.

That reference to being “embarrassed” is very important.  It happens to be the only negative national security result of the Snowden revelations anyone can point to. And it’s just as fatuous today as it was then.

I guess we should be relieved that this hasn’t gone that far in the US. It did, of course, happen in Britain when the government quite inanely insisted on destroying computer hard drives even though it knew very well that the documents had been distributed elsewhere.  Here in the US we’ve managed to uphold the First Amendment so far, but the government has been taking some extremely concerning positions in recent years in that respect.

This isn’t just about Mike McCarthy … er, Mike Rogers shooting his mouth off about reporters “selling stolen property” (without indicating, by the way, whether he finds media outlets like NBC, The NY Times or the Washington Post to be potentially guilty of receiving stolen property.) It’s important to keep in mind that this has been going on for some time. 

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to the Associated Press.

At a time when President Obama’s administration is under renewed scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, the Kim case provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one such probe.

Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” said First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin, who has represented the Associated Press, but not in the current case. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”

That was before Snowden’s revelations, which made some people completely forget themselves and start talking like those crazy Germans from 1962. Conor Friedersdorff ascribes this to the fact that Glenn Greenwald is combative and gets under the skin of the political, journalistic and national security establishment and I think there is a grain of truth in that. As it is with so much else in our current political life, many people are unable to separate their personal feelings about certain individuals from the work they are doing. That’s human, on a lot of levels, but as Friedersdorrf eloquently lays out, it’s especially dangerous and self-defeating for journalists, of all people, to join in that sort of primitive and immature mode of understanding how the world works. (I might also point out that it’s wholly beneath the president to even obliquely imply that this is all sensationalism as he frequently does … history will find those comments and he will not look good for having made them.)

But I don’t actually think that Glenn irritating the establishment is the main impetus for the attempted criminalization of journalism for the simple reason I discussed above: it was going on before Glenn became a household name. Indeed, this anti-First Amendment push has been something of a hallmark of this administration.

Today, Politico does a decent story on this subject as well, headlining it “the Snowden era of journalism” which I think is an apt way of putting it. It features the usual handwringing about the dangers of investigative journalism and in some cases the journalistic old guard sound remarkably like those German politicians. One cannot help but suspect that the real problem is that the new journalism is creating new gatekeepers, many of whom are not part of the Village and are not subject to the same incentives. But it makes clear, at least, that the old ways of doing this are evolving into something new and it’s important that everyone stop the pearl clutching about what was and figure out how to deal with what is.

There are only two ways this is going to go: the US will either recognize that the government must deal with a new transparent era of much less secrecy and more accountability or we will accede to living in a much more repressive, authoritarian state. The convergence of technology, globalism and paranoia in this moment will only logically lead in one of those two directions. Journalism has a vital role to play in all this and so far, there’s been enough courage and moxie among at least some of the media to step up to the challenge. With the glaring exception of some prominent celebrity reporters, McCarthyite congressmen and (especially) certain sinister members of the national security apparatus, there has been enough respect for the First Amendment to at least allow the debate to take place. This loose talk from the likes of Mike Rogers and James Clapper about criminalizing journalism is not a good sign. Let’s hope it’s just hot air.

Update: Speaking of courage and moxie:

Following several months of insinuation that he is a criminal or an accomplice to a crime, journalist Glenn Greenwald told Salon’s Brian Beutler that he plans to return to the United States, essentially on a dare. “I’m going to go back to the U.S. for many reasons, but just the fucking principle is enough,” Greenwald said. “On principle I’m going to force the issue.”

The mere fact that this principle is even up for debate should make every thinking person in this country nervous.

And as I said earlier, it should make all the media institutions in this country nervous. If Greenwald is guilty of “selling stolen goods” it’s very hard to see how they aren’t guilty of receiving them. Does the government really want to go down this road? Do Americans?

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The battle of fundamental ideologies cannot be averted

by David Atkins

It’s late and I haven’t been able to fully formulate my whole thoughts on the subject–that will likely be for a later post at some other time–but as Digby notes, depth of conservative depravity in fully owning the “screw the poor” stance marks something new in modern American politics. No longer is the pretense that they would like to help the poor, but that fiscal prudence or differences between “us” and “them” stand in the way. It’s not even about the best way to help people.

They’re literally taking the stand that if you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve to eat. If you can’t get a job, you didn’t try hard enough or grovel for low enough wages. If your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat, you should have gotten a better education. If you got a good education but your job doesn’t pay you enough to eat, you should have gotten an education in a different field. If corporate profits are at record highs and the obscenely rich are better off than ever in the meantime, good for them–they clearly earned it.

That’s a special kind of perverted and sick. Sick in the soul, sick in the heart, and sick in the mind.

But it also suggests another fundamental truth: this fight isn’t about who has the better policies to help 99% of Americans. The fight is about whether the other 99% deserve help at all.

You can’t come to a battle like this with a battalion of technocrats armed with white papers. This fight is one for the preachers, the philosophers, the orators and the visionaries. It’s not about how best to deliver healthcare, it’s whether people should have healthcare at all. It’s not how best to feed people, it’s whether people should even have food. It’s about whether anyone deserves human dignity except for those who were lucky or devoid of basic human decency enough to climb to the top of the corporate food chain and sit there seeking ever more exorbitant rents on the masses below even as globalization and mechanization grind them into the dust.

Technocrats can make some minor improvements around the edges of this system assuming they can hold the levers of power often enough and long enough. But as we’ve seen, there’s no guarantee they can do so, and no promise that the current system can be made to function on behalf of all the people even when they do.

But that’s not what will make the big changes we need. That will require a full ideological engagement that condemns the shriveled wickedness of modern conservative ideology for what it is, while offering transformative, aspirational and innovative answers beyond what the technocrats can deliver.

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Senator Warren asks the right questions

by digby

Asks regulators: “Does anyone on this panel seriously think that the government’s current enforcement for financial crimes is actually working in the sense of deterring future lawbreaking?”

The (non) answers are pretty funny. Or, to put it another way, incoherent.

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The Immoral Party

by digby

Wow, they really are not going to do it.

Democrats failed on Thursday to win enough Republican votes to reauthorize long-term unemployment benefits for more than a million workers cut off in December.

At least five Republicans needed to vote for the bill in order for it to advance, but only four did. The bill failed 58-to-40.

Even if the Senate eventually passes an extension of unemployment benefits, which seems unlikely, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have been unenthusiastic about holding a vote.

More than 1.7 million long-term jobless Americans have missed out on benefits since the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program lapsed on Dec. 28. Since 2008, the program had provided extra weeks of benefits to laid-off workers who use up the standard six months of state benefits.

Democrats tried to sweeten the deal by banning millionaires from receiving benefits. Thursday’s measure would have required unemployment claimants to certify they’d earned less than $1 million in the previous year; previously, there was no income restriction.

The bill’s cost would have been offset through “pension smoothing,” or allowing companies to make smaller contributions to employee pensions, thus earning higher profits and giving the government more tax revenue.

Congress routinely installs temporary federal benefit programs when the economy sours, then lets them expire when it improves. Democrats say that with an unprecedented 3.9 million Americans unemployed six months or longer, it’s too soon to drop the benefits.

But they haven’t found a way to win Republican support. Before Thursday’s vote, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged the bill had little chance of advancing. “Sadly, we’re going to face another filibuster,” he said.

Durbin listed some of the ways Democrats say they’ve tried to compromise, including by offsetting the cost of the bill with cuts to other parts of the budget and allowing Republicans to offer amendments during a vote last month. (Republicans have said the offsets were gimmicks and the amendment votes were rigged.) Durbin said that left only one possible explanation.

“The real reason the [Republican] political leaders in the Senate want to stop unemployment benefits is they believe unemployed people are lazy,” he said.

They are immoral bastards and if there is a hell, they are all going to it. And if there is such a thing as karma, they’re coming back as the single celled creatures they really are.

I think this may be a big moment. Refusing to extend unemployment benefits, food stamp cuts, the war on Obamacare really are an escalation in the partisan wars that goes beyond “culture” or region or even race (although that still plays a big part in it.) The GOP is now positioning itself as the official “fuck you” party, not even making the slightest attempt to appear to be “Christian” or “compassionate conservatives.” They’re not even deploying the usual trope about “the deficit” or “living within our means.”

It’s all the way down to the fundamental argument now: poor people deserve what they get. And if that is hunger, sickness and death so be it.

Not that we didn’t know that:

In fact, they’re so twisted, they’ve come to believe that they can declare up is down knowing that many millions of Americans will all nod in agreement:

“I believe it is immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployments [benefits] to people rather than us working on creation of jobs,” {Rep. Pete] Sessions said. “A job is the most important attribute, I believe, in a free enterprise system.”

“Creation of jobs” means giving millionaires and corporations more tax breaks, in case you were wondering.

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Virtually speaking tonight with yours truly at 6pmPST

by David Atkins

I’ll be on Virtually Speaking tonight at 6pm pacific to talk about assets, wages, and the increasing imbalance between labor and capital in the modern era. We’ll also be covering ideas in Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century.

If you’d like to call in, the number is (646) 200-3440.

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“In times of war, the law falls silent”

by digby

That’s right. And Justice Scalia says that’s perfectly normal:

“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime Q-and-A session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

“That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality,” he said.

And that means that when you are engaged in an endless Global War on Oceania … er … Terror, pretty much anything goes, right? Funny how that works.

We have been “fighting” a war of some kind every day since December 7, 1941. Our entire government is organized around that fact. We have seen the government exposed and excused for repeatedly violating constitutional principles in order to “keep us safe” from the Axis powers communist menace and now the terrorist menace for over 70 years. WWII had an explicit end, the Cold War simply petered out after 40 years or so. The War on Terror, being as it isn’t a fight against nations or even an ideology but rather a fight against a specific tactic will go on forever if they want it to. This is the basic challenge as long as the United States’ self-designated role is to be the global hegemon.

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