Month: May 2014

Freedom to say yessir

by digby

My piece at Salon today is about the open-carry zealots:

Imagine you’re sitting in a restaurant and a loud group of armed men come through the door. They are ostentatiously displaying their weapons, making sure that everyone notices them. Would you feel safe or would you feel in danger? Would you feel comfortable confronting them ? If you owned the restaurant could you ask them to leave? These are questions that are facing more and more Americans in their everyday lives as “open carry” enthusiasts descend on public places ostensibly for the sole purpose of exercising their constitutional right to do it. It just makes them feel good, apparently.

It makes them feel free. How about you?

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The top 1% are just stealing the money from the people who actually do the work

by David Atkins

I explored some of the consequences of prioritizing assets over wages this weekend and how that choice has negatively affected the economy. A new study shows just how precipitously wages have declined over the last two decades:

The 10 most common occupations in America — with retail sales at the top — now make up one-fifth of total U.S. employment, according to the recently released Occupational Employment and Wages report for May 2013. Significantly, the average annual pay of seven of the top 10 in 2013 is down from 1999 when adjusted for inflation.
The top two jobs out of those 10 were the same in 2013 as they were in 1999. Those two, retail sales and cashiers, make up 6 percent of the workforce, up from 5.4 percent in 1999. The third largest, food preparation and serving workers, moved up from ninth in 1999. That job also includes fast food.

The economy is broken. Note that wages for the most common occupations have fallen even as the stock market has exploded upward. All the advantages are accruing to the very top of the income scale.

The people at the top aren’t working any harder or smarter than they were before. They’re just stealing more of the money, and it’s about time we took it back for the people who actually do the work in this country.

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Start when you’re young

by digby

This article about saving for your retirement when you’re young is very good. This is even better:

If you can possibly do it, do it grasshopper.

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Missouri shows again that the craziest conservative ideologues are in the statehouses

by David Atkins

Missouri Republicans really, really hate the government, and they’re willing to bankrupt the state and override vetoes to let you know just how deep their hatred goes:

The Missouri House acted quickly Tuesday to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a tax-cut bill that is estimated to cut the state’s revenue by about $620 million a year when fully implemented.

The House obtained the exact number of votes needed — 109 — with the help of one Democrat, Rep. Keith English of Florissant. He joined all of the chamber’s 108 Republicans.

The House joined the Senate, which voted 23-8 on Monday to override the governor’s veto, which he issued last week.

House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka, was jubilant. “Today, we showed Missourians why they elected a Republican supermajority to the Missouri legislature: we pass important, conservative policies,” he said in a statement after the vote. “Updating our tax laws is an essential, pro-growth reform which will improve our economy by allowing small businesses, farmers, and families across our state to keep more of their own money. Our high tax rate has been harming our economy, making our state less competitive and resulting in thousands of Missourians leaving our state for low-tax states like Florida and Kansas.”

Nixon swiftly condemned the General Assembly’s action, along with education groups, while business groups lauded legislators’s decision.

The wingnuts ascendant in Missouri are dragging the state into the same failed death vortex as the rest of red America. And in case you thought the GOP national fever was about to subside any time soon, remember that the statehouses are the farm team for the Congress and Senate. If you want to see the future of a political party, look to its statehouses and you’ll get a pretty good idea. Democratic state legislators are leaning more and more progressive as grassroots activists take a greater role in the local selection processes. The Republicans, meanwhile, are doubling down on the nuttery.

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Court disaster

by digby

I will never understand why the administration would agree to nominate a cretin like this:

In an April 10 letter that surfaced Monday, Michael Boggs, a nominee for a U.S. district court judgeship in Georgia, told Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that he left out details in his January questionnaire to the committee that he didn’t think were necessary or that weren’t readily available. Now, Boggs said, he has “located and exhausted new resources” to provide senators with more information about his background.

The 26-page addendum lists bills that Boggs sponsored, and votes he took while serving in the Georgia House from 2000 to 2004. It also cites speeches he’d given. While it’s not unusual for a nominee to provide supplemental materials to the committee, it’s notable that Boggs provided, in his original paperwork, a lengthy description of the kinds of bills he sponsored as a state legislator but left out contentious legislation on abortion, gay marriage and religious freedom, which appear in his addendum.

Among the bills that Boggs sponsored, but didn’t mention in his original paperwork: A constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, legislation to feature the Ten Commandments in all of Georgia’s county courthouses, and multiple bills related to abortion, including one that would create “Choose Life” license plates and another that would impose tougher restrictions on minors seeking abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.

I realize that this guy was part of a package deal they brokered with Georgia Senators but some deals just aren’t worth making.

The Obama legacy on the courts, aside from the two Supremes, is dreadful enough. There have been far too many vacancies and not nearly attention paid to how this will shape the future. But to actually appoint a far right wingnut is just too much. They need to withdraw this name. If it messes up their agreement, so be it.

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QOTD: wingnut twofer

by digby

We’ve got a couple of real winners today.First there’s the lovely Laura Ingraham spreading lies:

“The ambassador’s body was dragged through the street. Okay? It was beyond heartbreaking and beyond infuriating.”

Yes, that was terrible. Except it didn’t happen. ABC must be so proud of their new hire: lying right out of the gate.

And then there’s this incomprehensible weirdo from Tennessee:

Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory sign ups for “train rides” for Jews in the 40s.

Huh?

Getting the Village band back together

by digby

I missed this press briefing so I didn’t catch the classic Village behavior. Brian Beutler did. It doesn’t bode well, I’m afraid:

Last week, after Republicans pivoted to Benghazi in unison, The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein observed an interesting phenomenon.

When it came time to put White House press secretary Jay Carney in the hot seat, reporters for smaller outlets—whose correspondents are consigned to the back rows of the briefing room—were interested in real, unfolding dramas: Ukraine, the Affordable Care Act, the Snowden disclosures, and so on.

But when Carney moved to the big-name journalists at the front of the room, the only thing anyone seemed to care about was Benghazi.

Oh Lordy, here we go again. Beutler points out the irony in the fact that the only people who’ve been damaged by this Benghazi! story so far have been big name journalists like Lara Logan and Jonathan Karl, burned by their GOP sources in ruthless fashion. He analyzes the phenomenon correctly, I think:

It suggests that something other (or more) than a zest for producing informative news is driving them. Actually, I think it’s a few different pressures, none of which are new, but which in this case combine to create a perverse incentive to create a story where none exists.

There’s a Drudge-like effect that drives reporters to tackle stories that they know will become widely consumed news products. Drudge himself is much less relevant than he used to be, but his influence is still detectable every time the press corps gloms onto a story that’s already lighting up marquee ideological outlets. In the old days, conservatives depended on Drudge to push stories from the ideological margin into the mainstream. But as media has polarized—and as electioneering has evolved from convincing the undecided to simply rallying the faithful—a meme that mainly plays out on conservative outlets is good enough for the GOP.

There’s also a related pressure to prove bona fides to conservative referee-workers, as if they might possibly be satisfied and will eventually stop making unfalsifiable charges of liberal bias.

And separately, when they feel that their subjects have withheld information from them, mainstream reporters become consumed by a trade association–like mentality, where the relevance and news value of the information become less important than making a point about transparency and the consequences of freezing out the press. Here I sympathize up to the point at which the withheld information turns out to not have any bearing on the story itself, as is apparently the case with the latest Benghazi disclosure.

Put it all together, and you get this weird phenomenon where less-prominent beat reporters have their eyes on the balls that are actually bouncing in front of them, and the press corps’ celebrities are fixated on one that popped a year ago.

Deja vu all over again. This is the phenomenon we saw in play for years back in the 90s. It’s hard to believe they might be getting the band back together particularly since Benghazi is obviously a made for TV Clinton scandal. It must be some kind of sense memory.

The only thing that Beutler leaves out is the way these scandals are engineered to snowball without any real resolution but to snowball into to an “atmosphere of scandal” that keeps on rolling and getting bigger with each new addition. Benghazi! is just the beginning.

I had been hopeful that the mainstream media would have wised up by now but apparently not. I guess never.

Happy talk is bad politics for Democrats in 2014

by David Atkins

The usually excellent Eugene Robinson makes what I believe to be a significant misstep here:

Democrats, if you want to win in the fall, take some advice from Pharrell Williams: “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.”

The Mountie-hat-wearing pop singer’s infectious “Happy” should be the Democratic Party’s theme song for the midterm election. Despite Republican claims to the contrary, things are definitely looking up. Democrats ought to be clicking their heels and spreading the good news.

Friday’s announcement that unemployment fell to 6.3 percent was huge. The fact that the economy added 288,000 jobs in April — despite continued bad weather early in the month in parts of the country — suggests that the recovery has greater momentum than pessimists had feared. Economists were expecting decent numbers. These are great.

The stock market, meanwhile, is flirting with an all-time high. The Dow has risen about 10 percent over the past year; the S&P 500, more than 16 percent; the Nasdaq, about 22 percent . During President Obama’s term in office, the Dow has more than doubled. If he were a socialist, as his harshest critics claim, he’d be a truly lousy one.

The numbers prove that Obama is, in fact, a skillful capitalist who guided the economy out of its worst slump since the Great Depression. He accomplished this feat despite being saddled with a Republican opposition in Congress that reflexively opposes his every initiative — even those based on policies the GOP supported in the past.

Regular readers of this blog can probably outline what I’m about to say next in their heads, and they would likely be right.

The problem is, of course, that for most Americans happiness isn’t the truth. The economy may have added more jobs and that’s definitely good news–but most of the jobs the economy has created over the last few years have been McJobs, and wages are still stagnating. The wage situation is frankly awful.

The fact that the stock market is doing so well in spite of the economic travesties of the poor and middle class is no comfort or silver lining: it’s a huge part of the problem. Meanwhile, the people who think that Obama is a socialist were never going to vote for Democrats, anyway, so defending the president as an excellent capitalist is hardly a comfort.

It’s definitely true that the ACA has been far more successful than Republicans like to portray, and that Republicans have painted themselves into an ugly corner over it. But while the ACA has helped, healthcare costs for most Americans are still outrageously high and rising. The ACA is a bandage to a healthcare system that desperately needs surgery to remove the for-profit cancer.

If Democrats go into 2014 with happy grins talking about how wonderful everything is, they’re going to be in for a world of hurt. People know better, and any further down swing in the economy would be politically devastating to a political party running as if everything had been fixed and set back on track (which, of course, it hasn’t been.) A populist message is still the better course by far.

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DIY geniuses take elections into their own hands

by digby

These arrogant wealthy jokers are going to get taken to the cleaners so badly it’s almost worth it to watch them throw their money away:

Meet John Jordan. As National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher writes, Jordan runs his own vineyard, flies his own planes, cuts his own pop-song music video parodies (here he is with some barely clothed women in “Blurred Vines”)—oh, and he’s a huge donor to Republican candidates and committees. He raised and donated seven figures for Karl Rove’s Crossroads organization in the 2012 cycle. Last year, he went solo, pumping $1.4 million into his own super-PAC, the deceptively named Americans for Progressive Action, in an effort to elect Republican Gabriel Gomez in a Massachusetts special US Senate election. (Gomez lost by 10 points.)

Goldmacher visited Jordan at this 1,450-acre vineyard in northern California and came back with no shortage of juicy quotes and flamboyant details. For all his political giving, it turns out, Jordan doesn’t really like politicians:

“I’m not trying to spoon with them,” he says. “I don’t care. In fact, I try to avoid—I go out of my way to avoid meeting candidates and politicians.” Why? “All too often, these people are so disappointing that it’s depressing. Most of these people you meet, they’re unemployable… It’s just easier not to know.”

Jordan dishes on Rove and his Crossroads operation, which spent $325 million during the 2012 election season with little success:

“With Crossroads all you got was, Karl Rove would come and do his little rain dance,” Jordan says. He didn’t complain aloud so much as stew. “You write them the check and they have their investors’ conference calls, which are”—Jordan pauses here for a full five seconds, before deciding what to say next—”something else. You learn nothing. They explain nothing. They don’t disclose anything even to their big donors.” (Crossroads communications director Paul Lindsay responded via email, “We appreciated Mr. Jordan’s support in 2012 and his frequent input since then.” Rove declined to comment.)

Jordan’s thoughts on his super-PAC’s $1.4 million flop in 2013 offer a telling glimpse into the world of mega-donors, the type of people who can drop six or seven figures almost on a whim:

Jordan had blown through more than $1.4 million in two weeks on a losing effort—and he loved every second of it. “I never had any illusions about the probability of success. At the same time, somebody has to try, and you never know. You lose 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, so why not do it?” he says. “And I’ve always thought it would be fun to do, and I had a great time doing it, frankly.” Now, Jordan says that the Gomez race was just the beginning—a $1.4 million “potential iceberg tip” of future political efforts.

Who might Jordan support in 2016? He tells Goldmacher he hasn’t decided. But he was impressed during a recent visit by the subject of Mother Jones’ newest cover story, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez.

I like dissing Rove as much as the next liberal hippie. He was always overrated. But just like every lawyer and accountant I ever met in the movie business who was sure he could make a better movie than anyone else, these jerks look in the mirror every morning and see a political genius. They must be — otherwise they wouldn’t be so rich, amirite?

When they finally get tired of losing they’ll get bored and move on. But some people are going to get very rich themselves ripping them off.

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RIP Rhubarb

by digby

He was a very, very good boy

1996-2014