Month: May 2014

The culture war ain’t over yet

by digby

Well, I suppose it’s how you define “culture war.” I wrote a piece for salon this morning about the news from Gallup that the country has become much more liberal on social issues, to the point where the conservative advantage has shrunk to only four points. (This does not include women’s rights, of course — that needle hasn’t moved much in decades.)

However, it’s worthwhile to take a closer look at how this trend may play itself out politically. One would expect that Democrats, being the allegedly liberal party, will reap the benefits of this greater tolerance on social issues. And the nascent force in the GOP, the libertarians, might also expect to gain some political salience within the party if certain professional pols decide there is some electoral advantage to adopting a less hardcore approach. (The Christian right, which makes up a much larger percentage of Republican voters, may have something to say about that.)

In fact, this trend toward “liberalism” should inexorably lead toward more liberal politics. But again, one has to wonder how the word is defined. If it’s defined strictly as a movement for social progress, then things are looking up for liberals. But if you define it more broadly in terms of economic justice then it may not be quite so clear. Take a look at that first graph again and you’ll see that the other line is economic issues, which also shows a shrinkage from the high of a 34-point advantage in 2010 down to a “mere” 21-point advantage today, so I wouldn’t start kissing random nurses in Times Square just yet …

I go on to discuss what should be an obvious fact, but isn’t: that liberals’ advantage on these social issues is just as likely to be used to obscure the Democrats’ centrist and conservative economic policies — much of it driven by the Big Money that now dominates politics. Read on …

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More welcome action: this time on climate change

by David Atkins

I’ve noted before that with the Obama Administration stymied on almost every front by the most radical GOP House in history, the President has been left with few options for making a mark in his second term beyond what he can accomplish by executive fiat. We could all wish that such action would prioritize judicial appointments and the use of the Justice Department to prosecute Wall Street. But action on climate change is also extremely welcome, and appears to be at the top of the President’s priority list:

President Obama will use his executive authority to cut carbon emissions from the nation’s coal-fired power plants by up to 20 percent, according to people familiar with his plans, and will force industry to pay for the pollution it creates through cap-and-trade programs across the country.

Mr. Obama will unveil his plans in a new regulation, written by the Environmental Protection Agency, at the White House on Monday. It would be the strongest action ever taken by an American president to tackle climate change and could become one of the defining elements of Mr. Obama’s legacy.

Cutting carbon emissions by 20 percent — a substantial amount — would be the most important step in the administration’s pledged goal to reduce pollution over the next six years and could eventually shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants across the country. The regulation would have far more impact on the environment than the Keystone pipeline, which many administration officials consider a political sideshow, and is certain to be met with opposition from Republicans who say that Mr. Obama will be using his executive authority as a back door to force through an inflammatory cap-and-trade policy he could not get through Congress.

People familiar with the rule say that it will set a national limit on carbon pollution from coal plants, but that it will allow each state to come up with its own plan to cut emissions based on a menu of options that include adding wind and solar power, energy-efficiency technology and creating or joining state cap-and-trade programs. Cap-and-trade programs are effectively carbon taxes that place a limit on carbon pollution and create markets for buying and selling government-issued pollution permits.

Most climate activists would note that even these changes aren’t nearly big enough or fast enough, but they’re certainly better than nothing, and there’s only so much the President can do without Congress.

And as far as legacy items go, how we deal with climate change today will almost certainly be at the top of the list of things future historians will look at when passing judgment on us.

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That time when Dana Priest explained what investigative national security journalism is

by digby

I know that Glenn Greenwald is a real jerk and all, but I wonder what people think about Dana Priest these days?  This interview is from 2006, just 8 years ago in the wake of her blockbuster investigative report that revealed the United States was running black site torture prisons all over the world:

If the president of the United States, who calls himself the “decider,” decides that it is not in the interest of the national security of the United States to have detention centers revealed, … who are you to decide otherwise? 

The Constitution does not make the president of the United States the decider when it comes to the flow of information. That’s so fundamental to who we are as a country, that we have a press that is independent of the government. It’s not a perfect system in that we could make mistakes, but the alternative is that the government does decide what gets in print, and that would be revolutionary. That would make it impossible to do accountability stories. … 

Your story and a couple of others, like the [New York Times’] NSA [National Security Agency] wiretapping story, set off a determination by the government to really crack down. … 

Well, that’s a reflection of what they think the public should know. And this government tries very hard to control the flow of information, as we saw in the buildup in the war in Iraq. 

But every administration has wanted to control the flow of information. 

Right, but using the FBI to do so is a different level. Using the Espionage Act potentially is a different — it’s the quantum leap. I would say that it’s a misunderstanding of the role that the media plays in a democracy and in our country as a watchdog organization. … 

You have branches of government that are supposed to be checks and balances on one another. Theoretically you’re supposed to have that on intelligence with the intelligence committees. But the intelligence committees for years have been dysfunctional; I would say that they still are today. … 

The committees are handicapped to begin with, because unless you’re on the committee or have been a member of the intelligence community, you come to those committees with barely any knowledge of this whole secret world, which makes you less effective as a watchdog. 

And as you said, the committees say that they get briefings, although often it’s a select group. But … they don’t get briefings in writing very often anymore, and they can’t take notes. 

Right. By law, the executive determines whether they hold a special briefing, and then they only brief the chairman and the vice chairman without their staffs. It’s now called the “Gang of Four.” When they do a covert operation, they’re supposed to brief a “Gang of Eight,” which includes those four plus the four [House and Senate] leaders. But it devolved into briefing a Gang of Four on most sensitive things — interrogations, detentions, probably renditions also. And my understanding is they didn’t really give them much information. 

I don’t think they asked for much, either, because in post-9/11, I don’t think they really wanted to know. … It took the media a while to really want to ask these questions, too. The first year, we were mainly concerned — and I think rightfully so, given that you can only do so much — with who is Al Qaeda, and how did this happen? So it was over time, when we had the time and the wherewithal to start saying, “What are we doing about this?” …

I once naively assumed all members of the Fourth Estate saw their role that way. I was wrong.

Dana Priest went on to collaborate on a major Frontline investigation about the NSA called “Top Secret America” which, if you have not seen it, you should check it out online here. I’m pretty sure most of what’s revealed are things the government didn’t want you to see, so if you’re against that please don’t click though and allow yourself to be sullied by that information.

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Dear George Packer

by tristero

Dear George Packer,

First of all, get an editor, for crissakes. Too long by half.


Secondly, Snowden ain’t the story, never will be. NSA – that’s the story.

Third, Greenwald ain’t the story, never will be. NSA – that’s the story.

Finally, I dislike libertarianism as much as you do. But Snowden’s politics doesn’t change the story. Which in case you haven’t heard is the NSA – that’s the story.

Hope I was helpful.

Love,

tristero

Update by digby (sorry tristero — 2 days in a row!) 

More on Packer by Henry Farrell

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QOTD: Elizabeth Warren

by digby

h/t to @andrewamonti

It would be three times cheaper to house the homeless than leave them on the street

by David Atkins

While we’re on the subject of stupid and immoral decisions made by a cultish minority of vigilantes who place their own warped version of cosmic justice ahead of the common good, let’s talk about homelessness, too. Think Progress has the details:

Even if you don’t think society has a moral obligation to care for the least among us, a new study underscores that we have a financial obligation to do so.
Late last week, the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness released a new study showing that, when accounting for a variety of public expenses, Florida residents pay $31,065 per chronically homeless person every year they live on the streets.

The study, conducted by Creative Housing Solutions, an Oklahoma-based consultant group, tracked public expenses accrued by 107 chronically homeless individuals in central Florida. These ranged from criminalization and incarceration costs to medical treatment and emergency room intakes that the patient was unable to afford.
Andrae Bailey, CEO of the commission that released the study, noted to the Orlando Sentinel that most chronically homeless people have a physical or mental disability, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not people who are just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job,” he said. “They’re never going to get off the streets on their own.”

The most recent count found 1,577 chronically homeless individuals living in three central Florida counties — Osceola, Seminole, and Orange, which includes Orlando. As a result, the region is paying nearly $50 million annually to let homeless people languish on the streets.

There is a far cheaper option though: giving homeless people housing and supportive services. The study found that it would cost taxpayers just $10,051 per homeless person to give them a permanent place to live and services like job training and health care. That figure is 68 percent less than the public currently spends by allowing homeless people to remain on the streets. If central Florida took the permanent supportive housing approach, it could save $350 million over the next decade.

This is just the latest study showing how fiscally irresponsible it is for society to allow homelessness to continue. A study in Charlotte earlier this year found a new apartment complex oriented towards homeless people saved taxpayers $1.8 million in the first year alone. Similarly, the Centennial State will save millions by giving homeless people in southeast Colorado a place to live. And in Osceola County, Florida, researchers earlier this year found that taxpayers had spent $5,081,680 over the past decade in incarceration expenses to repeatedly jail just 37 chronically homeless people.

Add to this abject stupidity the fact that there are over five times as many empty homes in America as there are homeless people.

Misguided conservative notions of moral hazard and cosmic justice are some of the greatest sources of harm in our politics. We could solve most of our problems. It’s just that there are a lot of nasty, selfish people who don’t want to see them solved.

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Bros fight back


by digby

There’s missing the point and then there’s missing the point:

On Tuesday, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze decided to air a series of pre-recorded skits in order to cast doubt on the statistics cited by the President, that one in five women have been sexually assaulted at college.

The Blaze’s Stu Burguiere claims in a Thursday blog post that the two studies that the Obama administration used for its sexual assault statistic, the Campus Sexual Assault Study and the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, are misleading.

Burguiere spends most of his time trying to debunk the 2010 study, arguing that the questions asked weren’t actually about sexual assault, which in turn led to inflated statistics.

“But, how do you figure out if someone’s been raped? One way would be to ask the person if they have been raped. But, why do that when you can ask misleading questions and try and figure it out for yourself!” he wrote. “The study asked questions like: ‘When you were drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent, how many people ever had sex with you?'”

The fun goes on from there.

It’s 2014 folks. I just thought I should remind everyone of that in case they thought they’d awakened in a time warp.

I’m glad to note that we’ve made a lot of progress during my lifetime. But I am continually surprised by how antediluvian the attitudes toward women remain, despite it all. Even the young libertarian Republicans, who are allegedly liberal on social issues (meaning gay marriage and marijuana legalization) are still throwbacks when it comes to women’s rights. This fight is a long way from over.

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Glenn Greenwald came in and trashed the place. And it’s not his place ...

by digby

To think critically is always to be hostile,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt declared in what turned out to be her last interview before her death in 1975. Pointing out that critical thought always challenges and undermines established rules and conventional wisdom, she added: “Thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.

Perhaps the following will explain why I’m highlighting that comment. It’s from an article by David Carr in the New York Times from last year in which he wonders, as I continue to wonder, how it is that people who call themselves journalists and liberal political commentators can be so dismissive of the Snowden leaks and the role of a free press in exposing such government activities. I certainly understand why government officials would take that line. But reporters? I’m still gobsmacked.

But I shouldn’t be. Here Carr quotes Bill Keller on why so many alleged journalists are hostile to Glenn Greenwald rather than the government that is operating in the dark with impunity:

“Stuff that used to happen in a sedate place with a kind of Robert’s Rules of Order have now turned into the World Wrestling Federation, with everybody piling into the ring and throwing punches,” he said. “There has been a tendency for people used to a more decorous world to bristle at the characters who have acquired prominence in this new world.”

Does that remind you of anything?

In Washington, That Letdown Feeling
By Sally Quinn

…. “It’s much more personal here,” says pollster Geoff Garin. “This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton’s behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern.”

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

“This is a company town,” says retired senator Howard Baker, once Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. “We’re up close and personal. The White House is the center around which our city revolves.”

Bill Galston, former deputy domestic policy adviser to Clinton and now a professor at the University of Maryland, says of the scandal that “most people in Washington believe that most people in Washington are honorable and are trying to do the right thing. The basic thought is that to concede that this is normal and that everybody does it is to undermine a lifetime commitment to honorable public service.”

“This is a community in all kinds of ways,” says ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts, whose parents both served in Congress. She is concerned that people outside Washington have a distorted view of those who live here. “The notion that we are some rarefied beings who breathe toxic air is ridiculous. . . . When something happens everybody gathers around. . . . It’s a community of good people involved in a worthwhile pursuit. We think being a worthwhile public servant or journalist matters.”

“This is our town,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Democrat to forcefully condemn the president’s behavior. “We spend our lives involved in talking about, dealing with, working in government. It has reminded everybody what matters to them. You are embarrassed about what Bill Clinton’s behavior says about the White House, the presidency, the government in general.”

And many are offended that the principles that brought them to Washington in the first place are now seen to be unfashionable or illegitimate.

Muffie Cabot, who as Muffie Brandon served as social secretary to President and Nancy Reagan, regards the scene with despair. “This is a demoralized little village,” she says. “People have come from all over the country to serve a higher calling and look what happened. They’re so disillusioned. The emperor has no clothes. Watergate was pretty scary, but it wasn’t quite as sordid as this.”

You see, miscreants like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Hastings and Matt Taibbi break the rules by which all the friends in the political establishment live. The interlopers who “trash the place” are impolite and sometimes obnoxious and play by rules that are not approved by Village consensus. And one must assume that the arrival of the free-wheeling internet culture that spawned the likes of Greenwald is still very annoying to many of the respectable people who all cluster together in the media claques of New York and Washington.

Carr pointed out the serious problem this circling of the wagons brought to the important story of the NSA leaks, which even those who think Greenwald is a terrible pill mostly admit is a real story:

The reflex is understandable, but by dwelling on who precisely deserves to be called a journalist and legally protected as such, critics within the press are giving the current administration a justification for their focus on the ethics of disclosure rather than the morality of government behavior.

“I think the people in our business who are suspicious of Glenn Greenwald and critical of David Miranda are not really thinking this through,” said Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian. “The governments are conflating journalism with terrorism and using national security to engage in mass surveillance. The implications just in terms of how journalism is practiced are enormous.”

If the revelations about the N.S.A. surveillance were broken by Time, CNN or The New York Times, executives there would already be building new shelves to hold all the Pulitzer Prizes and Peabodies they expected. Same with the 2010 WikiLeaks video of the Apache helicopter attack.

Instead, the journalists and organizations who did that work find themselves under attack, not just from a government bent on keeping its secrets, but from friendly fire by fellow journalists. What are we thinking?

Many of these members of the press aren’t thinking, certainly not in the way Hannah Arendt spoke of it. Their hostility is aimed at the people who “misbehave” by breaking the social rules rather than the government that carried on a clandestine spy operation that is clearly running amock and is working overtime to restrict the very work they are supposedly charged with doing. And appallingly, in many cases, it’s simply because of what they see as a threat to their social hierarchy and their own clubby little rules of behavior.

Glenn Greenwald may be the biggest asshole on the planet (he isn’t, btw) but to even mention that, much less dwell on it when we are discussing something of such major importance betrays this pathetically provincial (and frankly somewhat adolescent) view of what matters in this world. If a critic cannot rise above his personal pique at an author’s personality and see the work through a lens not colored by resentment and bitterness then it’s probably best not to review it.

By the way, the New York Times assigned their top book critic, Michiko Kakutani, to review the book a couple of weeks ago, one without the agenda that Kinsley obviously had going into it. It’s a very different review. Interesting that nobody bothered to mention it when it came out.

Meet the “Mooch”

by digby

At Salon today I discuss the fact that both parties now have to deal with something even more vexing than the crazy hippies on the left or the looney tea partiers on the right: wacky wealthy donors:

This story in yesterday’s Politico about one wealthy egomaniac named Anthony Scaramucci, who’s bought the hype that being rich automatically assumes one must have great talent in all pursuits, illustrates the problem perfectly:

Scaramucci’s meteoric rise has tested traditional clenched-jawed mores in finance and especially in politics, where discretion and the ability to avoid attention are prized. The Mooch — who favors custom-made Loro Piana pinstriped suits and participated in a 2009 CNBC program called “Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich” that showed him walking by a golden harp in his living room — is not one to shun the spotlight. 

In 2012, he boasted that he was “one of the top raisers” for Mitt Romney’s campaign, and about the time he spent at Romney’s New Hampshire lake house, while filling his Twitter feed with a mix of sensitive campaign finance information and a stream of backstage photos and glimpses of the Romneys and other top Republicans.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. The man’s high jinks make Donald Trump look like a prince by comparison.

And it isn’t just the Republicans.  In fact, “the Mooch” recently held a confab that featured top Democrats as well as Republican, including none other than President Obama’s right hand, Valerie Jarret.

Read on…

Sullivan vs Sullivan

by digby

Here’s just a small amusing observation about the brouhaha over Margaret Sullivan’s allegedly outrageous decision to criticize the sneering Michael Kinsley when people much better than her don’t believe it’s her place to do so. Yesterday Andrew Sullivan took to his blog to issue a scathing set-down of the New York Times ombudsman. Here is a piece of it, discussing the roles of the press being in conflict:

And that these are necessarily sometimes in conflict. But Kinsley is also pretty emphatic about what the press should do: “the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.” How can anyone read that review and conclude as Sullivan does that

Mr. Kinsley’s central argument ignores important tenets of American governance. There clearly is a special role for the press in America’s democracy; the Founders explicitly intended the press to be a crucial check on the power of the federal government, and the United States courts have consistently backed up that role. It’s wrong to deny that role, and editors should not have allowed such a denial to stand.

Seriously: can she read? Yes, Mike has a low view of journalism. But so low it’s unprintable? So low that the editors should have refused to allow him to express his opinion? Pious piffle.

The reason it’s amusing is because Andrew Sullivan says “Seriously: can she read?” when he is the one who has misread Kinsley’s passage.  Kinsley does not say that “the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay” is what the press should do — he says that’s what the government should do.

Here’s the full passage from Kinsley:

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.

Kinsley is clearly saying that the government should decide what the people should know and then should allow that information to be published with minimal delay:

“The private companies that own newspapers should not have the final say over the release of government secrets that decision must ultimately be made by the government”… “and so the process of the decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.”

There is nothing whatsoever in that passage to indicate the press has even the slightest agency in this.

This is really about whether or not you think the role of the press is to be adversarial toward power and whether or not you think the government’s powers should ever be restrained by the power of the press. It seems to me that we decided that a long time ago. We have allowed our government to operate much of the time in secret. They can classify mountains of information as being Top Secret and those who leak them are subject to incarceration. But we have also created a free press without any government power of prior restraint. What that says to me is that the design is purposefully adversarial, based in some ways on the legal system, in which “the truth” is believed to emerge from the two sides fighting it out and subjecting evidence to scrutiny by the court of public opinion. It’s like democracy — a really lousy system but better than the alternatives.

To say that the government should have all the power in this situation is the same as saying that prosecutors should have the final say in a murder trial. We don’t “trust” the government to always make the right decision in that case. Why would we trust it to do so in these national security cases? There has to be a test, at least once in a while to make sure they are doing what they say they are doing. And the way they rig the system with classification and oaths of secrecy in the “oversight” process makes the press the last resort to provide that test.

Update: Kinsley replied to Margaret Sullivan in an attempt to put her right in her place. But he certainly doesn’t succeed with this bizarre explanation:

I guess I wasn’t clear (though I don’t know how I could have been clearer). The government sometimes has legitimate reasons for needing secrecy but “will usually be overprotective” so the process of decision “should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.” Does that sound like I’m saying that news organizations “should simply defer”? Do the people on the other side of this argument believe that the government never has a legitimate need for secrecy? (Standard example: the time and location of the D-Day invasion.) Or do they believe, as I do and as I say, that occasionally the government is right to want secrecy and in those instances it should not “simply defer” to the press? And if so, how should it go about exercising that right?

Ooookay. If that’s what he “meant” I guess that’s what he meant. But what he wrote was obviously something completely different.

Update II: This piece by Jack Goldsmith ties up what I wrote up above.

Oh, and he “misinterpreted” Kinsley too.

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