Month: February 2014

The GOP has officially retired the concept of hypocrisy — so there’s no benefit to calling them on it

by digby

This is why it doesn’t pay to pander to the right wingers. Since they have retired the concept of hypocrisy, there’s no way you can possibly win the argument — or embarrass them with their own inconsistency.

House Republicans on Thursday attacked President Barack Obama after word from the White House that his fiscal 2015 budget drops proposed cuts to Social Security benefits. The GOP also criticized Obama for a Medicare rule change that would squeeze drugmakers, pharmacies and health insurers.

The GOP criticism puts the party in the uncomfortable position of advocating budget cuts that would affect ordinary Americans, but resisting a move that may pressure big businesses.

The White House on Thursday confirmed that the budget Obama will present to Congress next month won’t include cuts to Social Security, which Obama put on the table last year in hopes of enticing Republicans to consider a “grand bargain” that included tax increases. A spokesman for Obama said Social Security cuts remain a possibility. [Huh????]

“This reaffirms what has become all too apparent: the president has no interest in doing anything, even modest, to address our looming debt crisis,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), in an email. “The one and only idea the president has to offer is even more job-destroying tax hikes, and that non-starter won’t do anything to save the entitlement programs that are critical to so many Americans. With three years left in office, it seems the president is already throwing in the towel.”

Obama proposed Social Security cuts in his 2014 budget by offering to link future annual cost-of-living increases to chained CPI. The measure would have saved the government money at the expense of Social Security recipients. House Democrats and progressive groups slammed Obama for the offer. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) called it “a shocking attack on seniors.”

Walden chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, which last weekclaimed seniors may lose Social Security benefits if they elect Florida Democratic congressional candidate Alex Sink, who has said she’d consider parts of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.

On Thursday, the NRCC put out statements criticizing House Democrats in close races over Obama’s proposed rule changes for the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, which would permit the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for the first time to take part in negotiations between insurance companies and pharmacies to lower drug costs and protect consumers.

The rule change, announced last month, would allow the government to press for lower prices, give consumers more choices and hold providers to account, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In one press release, NRCC communications director Andrea Bozek targeted Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.). “First Obamacare and now Medicare Part D, seniors are being thrown a one-two punch from Ron Barber and House Democrats who have supported this failed law and have kept the door open for even more harmful side effects,” Bozek said.

This is how they do it. It should be obvious by now that the Republicans will say that whatever the president and the Democrats propose is wrong and are perfectly willing to play both sides of the “entitlement” issue. It confuses the voters, which is a feature not a bug.

Best for Democrats to take this opportunity to move the goalposts and start offering the voters something to hang on to — like the promise of better benefits and more security in these increasingly insecure economic times. Who knows? Doing the right thing might even work.

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Some good news against dark money in California

by David Atkins

We’re not perfect here in California, but we do occasionally demonstrate what can be done when the economic royalists don’t have the power to block legislation:

SACRAMENTO-The Assembly approved a measure Thursday that would ramp up disclosure requirements for nonprofit groups and other organizations that spend money in California campaigns, a response to a infamous multimillion-dollar anonymous donation in 2012.

The measure, by Sen. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) would establish thresholds under which organizations would have to disclose their donors, such as when an organization receives $1,000 or more from donors for the purpose of making expenditures or contributions.

The bill would also require the Fair Political Practice Commission to post on their website lists of the top contributors to committees that raise $1 million or more to weigh in on ballot measures.
The proposal is part of a slate of campaign finance bills that were introduced after an $11-million donation by an Arizona nonprofit group made headlines in 2012. The money was sent to a California committee working to combat Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax proposal and support an initiative that would weaken labor unions’ political power.
An FPPC investigation found that by the use of nonprofit groups as a conduit illegally obscured the origin of the donation.

Republicans are whining that the measure will chill 1st Amendment rights. No joke. I suppose that when you start with the premise that all money is speech and that anonymous speech is protected in elections, one could arrive at the insane position that it’s OK to spend anonymous billions of dollars in elections.

But the most important lesson here is how important it is to disempower Republicans. California Democrats have a very slim hold on a 2/3 supermajority in the state legislature. This bill required 2/3 supermajority to pass the Assembly:

Democrats flexed their supermajority muscle to pass the bill, SB 27, which required a two-thirds margin, 54 votes, to pass. All 55 Democrats voted aye.

That 2/3 supermajority is in danger of falling away this year if grassroots progressive activists don’t pound the pavement registering voters and bringing Democrats out to the polls. Here in Ventura County, AD44 is the top pickup opportunity for Democrats in the state, a pickup we’ll need if we lose any of our embattled Democrats elsewhere in the state. That’s why our county Democratic central committee is working to register 10,000 new Democrats and organize a massive field effort to bring Democrats out to the polls.

These things really matter.

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The kindness of strangers

by digby

When an 11-year-old boy sat at a bus stop without a jacket in Oslo, Norway, hidden cameras captured a series of very special moments. 

The experiment was filmed by the Norwegian branch of the SOS Children’s Villages International charity as part of a campaign to provide warm clothing for displaced children in Syria, according to The Nordic Page.

In the video above, the majority of bystanders offer their coats or gloves to the boy.

If you would like to join this campaign, you can find the way to do it, here.

Via Huffington Post

Fox Freakout ‘O the day

by digby

They’ve been rending their garments all day about this:

An Obama administration plan that would get researchers into newsrooms across the country is sparking concern among congressional Republicans and conservative groups.

The purpose of the proposed Federal Communications Commission study is to “identify and understand the critical information needs of the American public, with special emphasis on vulnerable-disadvantaged populations,” according to the agency.

However, one [Republican] agency commissioner, Ajit Pai, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece Wednesday that the May 2013 proposal would allow researchers to “grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.”

He also said he feared the study might stifle the freedom of the press.

“The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch,” wrote Pai, appointed to the FCC’s five-member commission in May 2012 by President Obama. “But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.”

Because any study inevitably leads to repression. Everyone knows that.

I am the first one to criticize the administration for its policies toward the press. They have a bad record. But honestly, conducting a study of what stories news stations are broadcasting seems pretty benign to me.

To the right wing this is just evidence of more gestapo tactics to get them to shut up — the mere presence of a researcher will lead to self-censorship out of fear of the FCC yanking their license (on what basis they don’t say.) That seems pretty far fetched to me. But then the wingnuts are still obsessing over the IRS non-scandal, insisting that they were specifically targeted despite the fact that all the evidence shows all political groups were targeted regardless of partisan or ideological affiliation.

But then, victimhood is all they’ve got really — a shocking story of an oppressed minority of vastly wealthy white men and the willing vassals who serve them. And there is no doubt that this is a story that’s getting out. Fox and talk radio flog it day in and day out.

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“Could there be abuses?…I am looking you and the American people in the eye and saying: There are not.”


by digby

I find this amusing if unsurprising:

The National Security Agency was worried about their image when the 1999 blockbuster Will Smith film Enemy of the State was released. In an interview with CNN in 2001, then-NSA chief Michael Hayden invited the cable news network to profile the agency in part because of the movie.

The film revolves around attempts by Congress, pressed by the National Security Agency, to pass a bill which would expand the agency’s surveillance powers. Rogue NSA agents kill a U.S. congressman who opposes the bill in a park, only to realize they were recorded by a bird watcher. The bird watcher, chased by the NSA, passes the information along to Will Smith’s character — and Smith’s character then finds his phones tapped, clothing bugged, house burglarized, among other attempts by the agency to get Smith.

“I made the judgment that we couldn’t survive with the popular impression of this agency being formed by the last Will Smith movie,” Hayden said in the interview, which aired in March 2001.

You can see why he was concerned.  Of course we didn’t know then what we know now …

“It has to be somewhat a secretive agency, and right in the middle of a political culture that just trusts two things most of all: power and secrecy,” Hayden continued. “That’s a challenge for us, and that’s why, frankly, we’re trying to explain what it is we do for America, how it is we follow the law. Could there be abuses? Of course. Would there be? I am looking you and the American people in the eye and saying: There are not.”
[…]
Interestingly, Hayden also said in the interview the NSA had “not spied on Americans since the ’70s, after it was found to be eavesdropping on Jane Fonda, Doctor Benjamin Spock, and other anti-Vietnam war activists. Hayden also said reports the NSA exchanged industrial espionage against European companies was “absolutely not true.”

This was before 9/11, of course when the proverbial gloves came off.

One of the big differences between today and the bad old days of the Hollywood Blacklist is that the government is much more subtle than it used to be in the way it coerces and manipulates the industry. It doesn’t hold hearings (so far) demanding to know if screenwriters are anarchists or terrorists and making them stand up for their rights at great personal cost, sending the message to the studios that employing these potential traitors would rain down some big problems on them. It cajoles filmmakers into toeing the party line by giving them “special access” to classified information that shapes their perceptions and providing them with equipment and locations that save huge amounts of money. (See: Zero Dark Thirty)

Or in this case, after the fact, to try to stroke someone they saw as a critic:

In an interview with New York Magazine in 2013, Enemy of the State screenwriter David Marconi said he met with the Department of Defense after his film was released.

“The Department of Defense asked me to come down and speak to them after the film came out. I met CIA guys and NSA guys,” Marconi said. “I found them all to be very professional. They were very focused on the mission and on defending the country. I didn’t walk away with a sense that any of them were malevolent. But some of them also had a very myopic view—here’s what you do, and you sit at your computer and you do it.”

That translates into yet another kind of myopia. This is from that more recent NSA field trip for certain reporters and commentators:

[T]he best example of this cognitive dissonance is one specific exchange late in our day on campus. One official described the difficulties he had while speaking to school groups about the NSA, and his inability to convince students that Snowden was a “bad guy” who had done serious harm to U.S. national security. He asked us how he could more compellingly and convincingly make that case to young people. Bewildered, we asked why the merits of the surveillance programs turn in any way on whether Snowden’s a patriot or a traitor. Even President Obama has conceded that the public debate we’re now having is “welcome,” regardless of where we end up as a result.

But the NSA official’s reply seemed to suggest that these two perspectives are mutually exclusive—that we must choose between Snowden and the NSA. If we believe Snowden is a bad guy, then the NSA must be right. And if we believe he acted in what he thought were the best interests of the country, the NSA must be wrong.

The premise of the question suggested that we would all be better off if the American public were still as ignorant about the surveillance programs disclosed as a result of Snowden’s action. For the NSA, the problem appears to be about the need to respond to transparency and not the substance of the programs themselves (or the fact that they were authorized in secret).

In the end, this is the most entrenched problem I encountered during my visit: the NSA remains committed to the idea that, because a surveillance program will be much more effective if no one knows about it, it necessarily follows that the public should remain ignorant of it. Therefore, the NSA’s programs must be approved and implemented in secret unless and until the next Snowden reveals them.

That cloistered environment of secrecy and intrigue naturally leads to a certain kind of paranoia. And that’s a very dangerous thing for a powerful government spying agency. They don’t even know what they’ve become themselves. They’re just doing a necessary job.  Nothing to see here.

As an aside, I wonder where these guys think Hollywood gets its image of the evil spymasters manipulating the government and the people for their own ends? After all, Michael Hayden, Keith Alexander and James Clapper have been the public  faces of this agency.

Ah.

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Vergara and the billionaire attack on schools and teachers

by David Atkins

There’s a big battle going on that could change the face of education in America for the worse. It’s called Vergara vs. California, and the implications of a negative decision in the case could be devastating. Karoli at Crooks and Liars has a good write-up on it:

David Welch is a billionaire with a mission, which is to pretend that it was so difficult to fire “bad teachers” that he needed to fund a lawsuit led by a high-powered legal team, “for the children.”

That lawsuit – Vergara vs. California– is now underway in downtown Los Angeles, with lead attorneys Theodore Boustros and Theodore Olsen of anti-Proposition 8 litigation fame.

The goal? To destroy current negotiated protections for teachers, like tenure and fair hearings for misconduct, on the basis that such protections for teachers harm the civil rights of disadvantaged children in the school system. The entire theory is so utterly cynical you’d think it was ripped right from the pages of the Koch foundation, and maybe it was. But it’s playing out in a city with a lot of education issues that have nothing to do with teacher tenure or unions…

Welch is funding this incredibly expensive lawsuit through an organization by the name of Students Matter, which is a subsidiary of — wait for it — StudentsFirst.

The heart of this lawsuit really centers around whether or not the state has adequately funded its schools. Since Proposition 13 passed, it has not, and as funding decreased and teachers’ resources were taken from them, the quality of California public schools has declined. Teacher tenure has nothing to do with this. It seems laughable to me that the same billionaires who fork over millions to Teach for America to intentionally plant ill-trained future hedge fund managers in public schools for a year or two are somehow arguing that teacher tenure is the reason underprivileged children’s education suffers.

Where is their concern for the poverty of these children, for their health, for their neighborhoods? Where are they worried about the impact school closures have on their educations?

No, once again it’s all about teachers, because this is not a lawsuit about tenure. It’s a lawsuit about breaking teachers’ unions.

The main backers of the case against teachers are the ultra-wealthy magnates Eli Broad, Charles Schwab and Fischer family (owners of the Gap, among other things.) Billionaires have been aggressively funding education “reform” efforts for years under the theory that there’s nothing wrong with education that destroying teachers’ unions and privatizing education can’t fix. It’s important to remember that these are the same people who spent millions in 2012 trying to defeat California’s Proposition 30 to fund schools, and to pass Proposition 32 preventing unions from spending on elections while allowing corporations free rein.

Interestingly enough, however, StudentsMatter posted the following tweet saying they supported Proposition 30.

We support #LCFF and supported #Prop30, but more and better-distributed funding does not impact teacher quality. #VergaraTrial— Students Matter (@Students_Matter) January 27, 2014

But that’s a lie. we know that Eli Broad, one of the biggest donors to StudentsMatter, spent millions against Proposition 30. Had he succeeded, education in California would have gone into a total tailspin.

And that’s really the whole point here: destroy teachers’ unions, eliminate the possibility of the government being able to attract decent teachers, then use the resulting chaos to privatize the entire education system. The billionaires want to do this not only because private education is a big, booming business, but also because they want to change the way children are taught to make them more docile, pliable units fit for the brave new corporate workforce of the 21st century. That’s what the anti-Proposition 30 efforts were all about, and that’s what the Vergara case is all about.

It’s certainly not designed to actually help children. We already know what produces good results in education, based on examples around the world: 1) incentivizing adults to pursue a career in teaching by paying a decent salary, 2) teaching real critical thinking skills instead of rote memorization; and 3) properly funding education. As long as teachers can barely make ends meet and our society encourages every bright college-age student to try to become the next Wolf of Wall Street or SnapChat millionaire, we’re not going to be able to fix education–or anything in society for that matter. As long as we continue to preach the lie that anyone who can’t do advanced calculus is not only destined to live in poverty but ought to do so, we can’t fix education. And as long as we continue to believe that it’s more important to lower taxes on billionaires than to properly fund our schools, we can’t fix education.

We know how to fix education. But the billionaires aren’t interested in actually fixing education. They’re interested in profit. If they get their way, the country will be much the worse it.

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Helping Republicans pack the courts

by digby

I wrote about the Michael Boggs nomination to the Federal bench earlier, but it’s worth revisiting today as it seems likely to go forward. Remember, it isn’t just him, it’s three more totally unacceptable neanderthal wingnuts on the federal courts in exchange for a couple of moderates. This is a result of a “painstaking process of negotiations” — which the president obviously lost.

The White House has not backed down from the nominations, arguing that the deal was part of a long, painstaking process of negotiations that they don’t want to toss out the window. According to The Hill, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett told the Congressional Black Caucus at a meeting in early February that the administration wouldn’t be withdrawing the nominations. The Obama administration is also frustrated with what they see as inadequate recognition of the fact that the administration has nominated the most diverse slate of candidates for the federal bench in history — including one who would be the first openly gay black nominee —and that the Georgia delegation failed to weigh in on the process before the deal over the Georgia nominees was cut.

Just a reminder: Clarence Thomas is black. (Also, apropos of nothing, from Georgia.) Choosing more racial minorities, women and gays alone, while a worthy goal, is not enough for a Democratic president. This is especially true of one who has inexplicably failed to even nominate  enough judges to fill the available vacancies. It’s just inexplicable that he would agree to “deals” in which Republicans get to put more far right ideologues on the court after the previous president already packed it with them to the fullest extent he possibly could. If there is one area in which ideology, temperament and political philosophy simply must be taken seriously, it’s this one. If he can’t do any better than this, he should leave the seats unfilled and hope his successor is a Democrat who has better negotiating skills.

Now it must be recognized that the Senate, especially judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy, are clinging to their Senatorial prerogatives and that’s a problem. They don’t get a pass. But the administration should recognize that a major component of any president’s legacy is his federal court appointments and should not be so cavalier as to allow such far right ideologues to obtain lifetime appointment under his auspices.

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Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

by digby

It’s Frederick Douglass’ birthday today, which means it’s a really good time to play this YouTube of Danny Glover reading the famous 4th of July Speech. Douglass opened the speech by saying “do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”

My goodness, that was a very uncivil playing of the race card wasn’t it? And downright unpatriotic.  We’re good and “they’re” evil, right? After all, it only took a bloody civil war to end the practice of slavery long after the rest of the civilized world had abandoned it. But there has been progress. We don’t enslave African Americans anymore and we do allow them to participate freely in society — as long as they mind their ps and qs we don’t usually gun them down in gas stations.  We do imprison as many of them as we can but we’re not perfect.  Just exceptional.

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Huzzah!No Grand Bargain in the budget proposal!

by digby

It shouldn’t take this much effort to keep a Democratic president from selling out the Democratic party’s signature achievements, but whatever it takes, it’s worth it:

The White House says President Barack Obama’s upcoming budget proposal will not include his past offer to accept lowered cost-of-living increases in Social Security and other benefit programs. Those had been a central component of his long-term debt-reduction strategy.

Officials said Thursday that those potential reductions in spending, included in last year’s Obama budget, had been designed to initiate negotiations with Republicans over how to reduce future deficits and the nation’s debt. But Republicans never accepted Obama’s calls for higher tax revenue to go along with the cuts.

One official said the offer would remain on the table in the event of new budget talks but that it would not be part of the president’s formal spending blueprint for fiscal 2015.

The official was not authorized to comment by name on the budget plan before its March 4 release and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

The decision to drop the cost-of-living proposal was essentially an acknowledgement that Obama has been unable to conclude a “grand budget bargain” with Republican leaders, even by including in his previous budget plan a benefit reduction opposed by many Democrats.

While Democrats will cheer the new decision, Republicans are sure to portray the White House move as abandoning any commitment to fiscal discipline.

Who cares? They’ll kvetch no matter what. And they’ll probably still run ads claiming that Democrats want to cut social security. But at least it won’t have the virtue of being true.

Now, how about proposing the raise benefits? If we want to kill this zombie once and for all, that should be the Democratic Party baseline going forward.

*I don’t know if it had anything to do with it, but the House of Cards plot line about devious Democrats muscling the congress into “entitlement reform” may have hit a little bit too close to home. The cynical callousness, the rank manipulation of the weak and guilt-ridden liberals, the claiming of victory for making people suffer all rang pretty true to me….

Tailgunner Mike

by digby

This man should be nowhere near government power. Not even close:

Like Andrew P. Napolitano, I cherish the First Amendment and the freedom of the press (“Dozen members on Capitol Hill keeping Snowden NSA secrets,” Commentary, Feb. 13).

However, Mr. Napolitano, a former judge, would do well to remember the words of another distinguished jurist, Justice Robert H. Jackson: The Bill of Rights is not a “suicide pact.”

Our government keeps classified information secret for a reason — because its disclosure will endanger our national security.

The vast majority of the classified documents stolen by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have nothing to do with civil liberties. The 1.7 million documents detail the vital operations of our Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force.

The man who stole them fled to Moscow, where the Russian government is all too happy to shelter him. Our military and intelligence services already feel the impact of his thievery: Our enemies have been tipped off to our sources and methods, placing American lives at risk.

Authoring or publishing stories in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times or any other genuine news outlet is legitimate journalism that is protected by our Constitution, but those who simply sell their access to stolen classified government information for personal profit are not journalists just because the buyer includes some of that information in a newspaper article.

Hawking access to stolen classified information for personal gain is not journalism.

We celebrate the freedom of the press, a principle enshrined by our Founding Fathers in our Constitution. The same men who drafted the First Amendment also recognized that, in the words of the Federalist Papers, “secrecy and dispatch” are essential to a successful foreign policy.

Other countries around the world — including China and Russia — do not extend similar freedom to journalists. Foreign governments watch, jail and sometimes kill journalists in an attempt to control all news, including news on the Internet.

The authoritarians who run those states have no desire to balance the freedom of the press with the national defense. In America, we have always sought to do both.

REP. MIKE ROGERS
Chairman
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

The Bill of Rights doesn’t have a little disclaimer that says anything about suicide pacts. And there’s a reason for that. That little out allows Mike Rogers, for all his paeans to “freedom”, to do exactly what he accuses his totalitarian Russkie and Chi-com enemies of doing. How convenient for him.

I don’t think I have to explain again why Rogers’ accusations about the enemy being “tipped off” by Snowden’s documents are completely fatuous. Neither do I have to explain why his nonsensical claims that freelance journalism is “hawking stolen goods” (not to mention the fact that Greenwald was a paid employee of The Guardian when they broke all the earliest stories.)Mike Rogers is not the arbiter of what constitutes journalism and neither does he seem to have the vaguest clue about how these stories have been vetted, written and published. It’s obvious that he is ginning up a case specifically against Glenn Greenwald, who he has decided is not actually writing his stories, apparently, but rather “hawking” the documents to highest bidder. When congressional committee chairman lose their composure to that degree, they can no longer be trusted.

His letter indicates such a high level of arrogance and delusion  that I think if there’s any danger to our country, it comes from the fact that this loon has access to America’s secrets.

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