Month: June 2014

Control of the Senate just got more important

by David Atkins

The Supreme Court struck down recess appointments made with less than a 10-day break in Senate business:

The Supreme Court on Thursday dealt a significant blow to executive power, cutting back on the president’s power to issue recess appointments during brief breaks in the Senate’s work.

The court ruled unanimously that President Obama had violated the Constitution in 2012 by appointing officials to the National Labor Relations Board during a short break in the Senate’s work when the chamber was convening every three days in short pro forma sessions when no business was conducted. Those breaks were too short, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in a majority opinion joined by the court’s four more liberal members.

Justice Breyer added that recess appointments remain permissible so long as they are made during a break of 10 or more days. But many experts say that if either house of Congress is controlled by the party opposed to the president, lawmakers can effectively block such appointments by requiring pro forma sessions every three days. Each house must get the approval of the other chamber for recesses of more than three days.

Still, Mr. Obama and the presidents who will succeed him avoided a far broader loss, one that could have limited recess appointments to breaks between Congress’s formal annual sessions and even then to vacancies that arose during those breaks. That was the approach embraced by the court’s four more conservative members.

Justice Antonin Scalia issued a caustic statement from the bench. “The majority practically bends over backwards to ensure that recess appointments will remain a powerful weapon in the president’s arsenal,” he said.

Honestly, recess appointments are antiquated holdover from the days before telecommunications and air travel. Allowing appointments during recess that cannot be accomplished during regular business should probably go the way of the telegraph.

That said, an obstructionist Congress will now have an even easier time not only derailing a president’s choice and agenda, but of hamstringing entire departments of government by simply not allowing appointments to be made at all. Which means that control of Congress is now an even bigger deal than it was before.

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Moron ‘o the day

by digby

This is just inexcusable:

“I want to tread lightly here,” Lauer said before launching into a question about why Barra got the CEO job, noting that she is extremely qualified.

“But some people are speculating that you also got this job because as a woman and as a mom because people within General Motors knew this company was in for a very tough time and as a woman and a mom you could present a softer image and softer face for this company as it goes through this horrible episode. Does it make sense or does it make you bristle?” he asked.

“Well it’s absolutely not true,” Barra responded. “I believe I was selected for this job based on my qualifications. We dealt with this issue — when the senior leadership of this company knew about this issue, we dealt with this issue.”

Lauer then asked Barra about her children, noting that her kids have said they will hold her “accountable for one job and that is being a mom.”

“Given the pressures of this job at General Motors, can you do both well?” he asked.

“You know, I think I can. I have a great team, we’re on the right path,” Barra replied. “I have a wonderful family, a supportive husband and I’m pretty proud of the way my kids are supporting me in this.”

Lauer interviewed Ford CEO Alan Mulally in 2009, and did not ask him how his job running the company would impact his role as a father to his five children.

I doubt if he’s ever asked a man that question. Neither has he ever asked them if they were chosen for their job purely as a PR gesture — and then asked if the question made them “bristle.”

I’d like to know who the people are who are saying that she was chosen for the job because she’s a mother and will present a “softer image.” Whoever they are, are even bigger morons than Lauer. Picking a woman obviously means their CEO will be subject to idiotic questioning about her personal life implying that she can’t the the job done because she is so tuckered out from making peanut butter sandwiches and folding gym socks. As Lauer perfectly demonstrated, no one in their right mind would ever pick a woman as CEO for a company in trouble for PR purposes. The only good reason to do it would be because she’s really good at the job.

Update: Oh bullshit.

The Tea Party’s “constitutional scholar”

by digby

My piece for Salon today discusses the right wing’s very own “constitutional scholar” David Barton, who is still in there influencing the Tea Party despite having been completely intellectually humiliated by real historians:

But the good news in all this is that  the Tea Party fire is pretty much burned out and we don’t have to worry too much about this crazy stuff, right? After all, today they’re just a group of libertarian isolationists who want to work with the left to take our country back from the wealthy elites. (And, who knows, maybe there really are a few like that out there.) But the makeup of the Tea Party remains the same as it ever was; it is simply the latest iteration of the far right. And as religious right expert Sarah Posner adroitly observed:

[T]o understand why the Tea Party resonates with the religious right and vice versa, one must understand how the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party movement is driven by a fundamental tenet of Christian reconstructionism: that there are certain God-ordained spheres – family, church and government – and that government has exceeded the authority God gave it, to the detriment of church, family and the individual, whose rights, both Tea Partiers and religious right-ists maintain, are granted by God, not the government. 

This notion that the federal government – not only godless, but in flagrant violation of God’s will – is “tyrannical” and needs to be overthrown resonates from militias to the John Birch Society to the podiums of religious-right gatherings where Republican presidential hopefuls jockey for the support of the faithful. To fail to see the religious roots of the Tea Party mantra – or the ways in which it reverberates as a divine imperative – is to blind oneself to a fundamental feature of American conservatism.

Indeed. They’re still out there. In large numbers. In fact, the Christian Right remains the single largest faction in the GOP coalition.

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Smell the scandal. Smells like smoke!

by digby

Brian Beutler points out one of the defining characteristics of a bullshit right wing scandal:

No less a figure than John Boehner (who’s not a scientist) says the IRS’ version of events—that the emails were lost in a hard-drive crash and the backups wiped off the servers after six months, per the agency’s old protocol—”doesn’t pass the straight-face test.”

But here’s the thing nobody covering the latest incarnation of the IRS feeding frenzy can bring themselves to say clearly: It is unconnected to the “scandal” that gave rise to the feeding frenzy in the first place. And that reflects the basic illogic underlying the right’s embrace scandal politics. Republicans are no longer investigating allegations. They’re assuming the conclusion that a scandal is afoot, and working backwards to prove it.

Actually, this is a standard “smell test” scandal (also known as “where there’s smoke there’s fire”) wherein a coincidence or innocent explanation is used as proof that something nefarious must have happened because it’s “too good to be true.” Logic, facts, even simple chronology are rarely relevant. The hysteria takes over and it all becomes a vague melange of suspicion and innuendo until most people just assume something must have happened or so many people wouldn’t be talking about it.

And the press often eagerly plays along because it’s just so juicy.

Here’s my favorite explanation of how this works in the press from New York Times in 1994 called “Is the Press Being Too Hard On the Clintons — or on Itself?”

On balance, Whitewater looks like the garden-variety political scandal that no President since Roosevelt has escaped during his tenure, save John F. Kennedy, who died in office, and Gerald Ford, who served but a year. The primary issues dogging Mr. Clinton — the hints of political graft, sexual misbehavior, coverup — meet any modern journalist’s smell test. The admonitions that they are old news suggests, improbably, that Robert A. Caro’s juicy revelations about Lyndon Johnson’s rise to power would not be news were Mr. Johnson President today. They would make front-page headlines. L.B.J.’s era, like Harding’s, is an age of innocence passed.

If Whitewater coverage seems excessive it is because the scandal is unfolding in what has become a journalistic hall of mirrors. The explosion of news outlets — from the shrill “Hard Copy” to the ubiquitous CNN — has created a hunger for news, any news, to fill the electronic maw. Stories that are unfit for the breakfast-table press, especially about Mr. Clinton’s private life, now surface in the National Enquirer and its brethren and become the subject of soul-searching analysis by serious journalists. Stories the mainstream press stamp as serious — Mrs. Clinton’s stunning success in cattle futures, for example — become such ready fodder for Leno and Letterman and McLaughlin and Limbaugh that they soon become larger, and more irritating, than life.

“We’re like a too-powerful amplifier, running through old speakers,” said Tom Rosenstiel, the media writer for The Los Angeles Times. “Anything that runs through it comes back with feedback and distortion. There are just too many of us blaring too loud.”

And, there is another plausible explanation for Whitewater’s grate on some ears: Perhaps some columnists support Mr. Clinton’s policies and are offended by the ceaseless accusations. This new crop of analysts is a different breed of journalist, highly valued not for daily reporting but for the ability to express thoughtful opinions in attention-grabbing ways.

Mr. Clinton is not being pilloried with falsehoods. Putting aside White House fury over Newsweek’s report that Mrs. Clinton risked nothing in her $100,000 cattle-trading venture (she risked $1,000), investigative reports on the Clintons by mainstream journalists have by and large been accurate. Most backtracking has come from the White House.

One could argue, of course, that this is just egg beater journalism — froth whipped up by prize-hungry sensationalists. After all, who cares if Mrs. Clinton made a killing in high-risk commodities futures?

But as Mr. Nixon once said about hush money, that would be wrong. “It’s a great story, in part because of the incongruity of Ms. Politics-of-Meaning playing the commodities market, and in part because of the real suspicion that there’s more to it,” said Michael Kinsley, the omnipresent broadcast and print analyst who also calls himself a Clinton sympathizer. “If Barbara Bush had made $100,000 on the commodities market, do you think anyone would argue that it isn’t news?”

You just have to laugh at the sheer volume of self-serving rationalizations in that piece. Has anything changed much since then? Not really. It’s bifurcated into a more partisan press, but truly it’s only a matter of time before one of their “smell test” scandals grabs the attention of ambitious mainstream journalists. (I’m going to guess it’s when Hillary Clinton really takes center stage…)

The good news is that Michael Kinsley is still in there, all these years later, illuminating the bankrupt ethos that drives much of modern establishment journalism. It’s nice to see that some traditions never die.

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If they’re free to harass pregnant women, we’re free to harass them right back

by digby

No more buffer zones:

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down Massachusetts’ abortion buffer zone law on Thursday, ruling in favor of anti-choice protesters who argued that being required to stay 35 feet away from clinic entrances is a violation of their freedom of speech. The decision rolls back a proactive policy intended to safeguard women’s access to reproductive health care in the face of persistent harassment and intimidation from abortion opponents.

“By its very terms, the Act restricts access to ‘public way[s]‘ and ‘sidewalk[s],’ places that have traditionally been open for speech ac­tivities and that the Court has accordingly labeled ‘traditional public fora,’ ” the opinion states. “The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted interests.”
[…]
The opinion in the case acknowledges that states have a legitimate interest in passing laws to preserve access to reproductive health facilities. They’ll just have to figure out how to do it with different policies that “burden substantially less speech.” The justices write that Massachusetts hadn’t tried out enough alternatives before enacting a 35-foot zone, and could have proposed narrower solutions like passing local traffic ordinances to prevent the obstruction of clinic driveways.

I guess I’m just obtuse in these matters. If a traffic ordinance is designed with the intention of keeping protesters away from clinics then it escapes me why it’s logically ok to do it when a “buffer zone” isn’t. I guess as long as you pretend it isn’t what it clearly is then it’s ok. What kind of principle is that?

This is obviously depressing from the pro-choice perspective. The anti-abortion zealots are just awful people, really. They have absolutely no problem treating these girls and women absolutely horribly while proclaiming themselves to be saints. It’s a truly disgusting display of cruelty in the name of God.

The only thing we can do to ensure that women can have agency in their own lives, obviously, is continue to fight for their rights. If women have to face these horrible people screaming in their faces and calling them killers the least we can do is stand beside them and scream back on their behalf.

Update: This is what women have to put up with:

And every step of the way they’re being screamed at and called murderers and killers.

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Wherein I sympathize with Erick Erickson

by David Atkins

RedState editor and super hardline conservative Erick Erickson is steaming mad over longtime incumbent Thad Cochran’s victory in Mississippi by reaching out to Democratic voters in the open primary. As a progressive activist who has strongly advocated for pushing the Democratic Party to the left through primary challenges and who detests both open primaries and jungle primaries, I have to say I sympathize with him. Erickson:

A Republican Party campaigning on making the Senate “conservative,” used liberal Democrats to preserve an incumbent Republican and defeat a conservative. The actual conservatives are the outsiders with the GOP establishment doing all it could to preserve its power at the expense of its principles.

The problem for those who call themselves Republicans is that it is harder and harder to say exactly what a Republican is these days. The great lesson from Mississippi is that Republican means, more or less, that if elected the party will reward its major donors, who are just different than the Democrats’ major donors. Policy differences are about different donors, not an actual agenda to shift the country in a different direction.

The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists, most of whom were on twitter celebrating their purchase.

Mississippi is a crystalizing election in that sense. Cochran is, for all intents and purposes, a marionette. His strings are pulled by staffers and lobbyists. They drop him onto the stage of the Senate and pull up a string to raise his hand. These puppeteers are so invested in keeping their gravy train going that they will, while claiming to be Republicans, flood a Republican primary with Obama voters to ensure their gravy train continues.

I hate to break it Erickson, but it’s not as if a hardline economic libertarian agenda is at all popular, and it’s even less popular when married to anti-immigrant xenophobia and antiquated theocratic values. Those big corporate lobbyist dollars are the only thing still keeping the GOP afloat. And even the tea party vs. establishment fight is really more about one greedy set of big money boys against a crazier, greedier set led by the Kochs than anything else.

Erickson also tries to pretend that the GOP’s distancing itself from ACA repeal is about big donor influence, rather than the fact that it’s increasingly political suicide. So, it’s not as if he’s less than delusional on many fronts even here.

Still, he’s right in one sense: the big money boys at the top have little and less respect for the rubes who actually make up the Party’s base. That divide between elite and grassroots is present on both sides, but it’s especially prominent on the Right because the Right has a longer cultural history of advancing its cause through intra-party primaries.

Erickson frets (or threatens) that as the divide grows stronger, conservative voters may not actually show up and mobilize for GOP candidates. That fear tends to be overblown on the Right, but if angry tea party activists want to sit home and allow a Democrat to gain a Senate seat in Mississippi of all places, far be it from me to tell them otherwise.

Erickson closes:

I continue to oppose a third party. I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That’s not much of a platform.

No, it isn’t. It would genuinely be nice if the hardline Right would actually get serious about opposing “crony capitalism” and the influence of money in politics. A coalition of liberal and conservative states could in theory be enough to push forward a Constitutional amendment on the subject. It’s not going to happen, but I’m happy to challenge them to put their money where their mouths are and make the attempt.

Erickson is right about the negative influence of his side’s big money donors, and the fact that his party is simply a front for giving those donors what they want.

That said, he might want to consider whether the party he would like to see empowered has any viability outside of a few rural and Southern pockets of the country.

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They represent half the population, folks.

by digby

Kathy Geier has a nice piece in the Baffler today about the new and exciting Democratic economic initiatives to support women:

The main women’s economic policies the White House supports are the following: an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the passage of the anti-discriminatory Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, (exceedingly modest) increases in funding for child care and job training programs, expanding a few of those ever-popular tax credits for working families, and the usual terrifying-sounding public-private “projects” and “initiatives.”

And by the way, there’s also “Making Progress Toward Solutions for Paid Leave.” You’ll notice that the latter doesn’t include actually enacting a national paid leave policy. As White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett explained earlier in the week, a paid leave program would require raising taxes. For Obama and other anti-paid-leave Democrats like Hillary Clinton, such an action would be unthinkable, apparently.

Other national Democrats are bolder. Late last year, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced a paid family and medical leave bill in Congress. But on the whole, the Democrats’ economic agenda for women is disappointingly tepid. There are many economic policies the Dems could be advocating, but are not—including pay equity legislation, an executive order to improve low-wage federal contractor jobs, and yes, a comprehensive child care system.

Unfortunately, given the anti-feminist, anti-labor extremism of today’s Republicans, it’s unlikely that even the mildest items on the Democrats’ work-and-family agenda will be enacted any time soon. That the Democrats are loudly talking up work-and-family issues after over twenty years of neglect is a hopeful sign. If they talk the talk, then maybe eventually they’ll walk the walk.

And I would suggest they walk a bolder walk. Yes, you can go with baby steps and hope that you get through some incremental change that adds up to something bigger over the long term. That would be the traditional way of legislative progress. But I don’t think that’s how it works anymore. You have to propose policies that are way outside the mainstream discourse and hope that when the right flings it back in your face it lands a little to the left of where it started.

Still, this is a good political issue and a necessary political cause. So good for them.

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Scott Walker: martyr to the cause

by digby

All you have to do is read the breathless editorials in the Wall Street Journal characterizing the Wisconsin “John Doe” case a a violation of “civil rights” to know that Scott Walker’s troubles are being used as a test case to blow the lid off of what’s left of our campaign finance laws.  I wrote about it here and here for Salon. I think Walker might be collateral damage …

This piece in the Huffington Post spells out how that will likely play out:

Following Randa, the Supreme Court could find it unconstitutional to apply anti-coordination rules to issue advocacy in state and federal campaigns. This would essentially “eviscerate campaign contribution limits” across the country, Hasen told HuffPost.

There are national groups ready and willing to take advantage of another Supreme Court strike against campaign finance law.

In the 2014 midterm elections, groups controlled by the Kochs, including Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, have already spent tens of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democratic candidates in Senate battleground states. These ads are generally designed to meet the standards for issue advocacy.

In a world where the circumvention of coordination rules “should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” as Randa wrote, the Koch-linked groups could coordinate messaging in these issue advocacy spots and plan advertising buys with the campaigns they support. In effect, federal candidates and their campaigns would be able to direct the operations of groups that can accept checks for $10 million or $20 million from secret donors.

The hits just keep on coming.

The only bright spot in all this is that it’s likely to take Scott Walker down in the process. All this dirty laundry may end up being scrubbed but it won’t remove the odor of corruption that’s clinging to Walker and his pals.

Yes, the economy is still broken. But it’s not about GDP.

by David Atkins

Consumer spending is still weak–but it may be that reduced spending on healthcare is a big reason why:

The economy contracted at an annualized rate of negative 2.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. In other words, the economy in the first three months of the year actually shrank. The contraction is worse than expected: forecasters were predicting it would be just negative 1.8 percent. And to give you a sense of scale, GDP fell by 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, at the depths of the recession. In other words, this is an ugly number…

The fall off in consumer spending— technically known as personal consumption expenditures—is what few people expected. When the BEA’s second estimate of GDP found that the economy had contracted at negative 1.0 percent, investors kept calm for two reasons: the nasty winter had slowed economic activity in a couple major sectors (housing, etc.) and consumer spending was still strong. Now, the latter reassurance is gone.

But this may be a case of bad news that’s not so bad—and maybe even good. The reason why consumer spending fell is that health care spending decreased by 1.4 percent in the first quarter. In fact, in the BEA’s second estimate, health care spending contributed 1.01 percent to the growth rate. Under the third estimate, it subtracted 0.16 percent. In other words, health care spending went from a strong contributor to GDP growth to a detractor from it—all in a quarter when millions of Americans gained health insurance.

Former Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag was one of the only ones to see this steep drop off in health care spending coming. But even he was surprised by Wednesday’s numbers. “Here’s what’s truly astonishing, which is that in the first quarter of 2014, there were millions more insured people and total spending fell by 1.4 percent on an annualized basis in real terms,” Orszag said. “It’s almost mind-blowing.”

This is one of those cases where GDP growth is not actually the best indicator of social health. There are a lot of things that people can spend money on that don’t contribute to people’s well being. For instance, a family that saves its money, has one parent at home to take care of the kids and remains healthy because the nearby river isn’t polluted by a slag-producing factory, contributes far less to the GDP than one whose parents both work outside the home at a polluting factor and pay for daycare and medical care for a cancer-striken child.

GDP growth is an awful way to measure social and economic health, and it’s not what we should be looking at. It’s much better to have a slower-growing, more equal and fairer society than a fast-growing unequal and unfair one. It just turns out that boosting the working and middle classes is also a better way to stimulate growth over the long term.

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Watch what you tweet


by digby

According to the Huffington Post, police are using sophisticated data mining tools to track everything anyone says on social media, using crude search words like “bomb” (which could return millions of potential hits every Monday when people talk about the week-end movie openings.) But I’m sure they love this new toy and are constantly thinking up new ways to use it.

I think this sums up the potential problem with this quite nicely:

“The problem is if you don’t have a specific law enforcement purpose for using the monitoring tools,” said Keenan. “Why are you monitoring tweets? What type of information are you going to be collecting? How long are you going to retain it? That has to be addressed before you employ the technology.” 

Two years ago, privacy advocates found the Department of Homeland Security was monitoring social media sites to track public reaction to negative news about the U.S. government.

Now, it’s true that twitter is a public medium which means that nothing you say on it is truly private. You know that going in. But do you feel good about the fact that government agencies are hiring private contractors to monitor it for the opinions of citizens? Any chance that could go wrong in some way?

Here’s what the DHS was found to have been doing:

According to the documents, the department’s Office of Operations Coordination and Planning awarded a contract in 2010 to Fairfax-based General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems. The company’s task is to provide media and social media monitoring support to Homeland Security’s National Operations Center (NOC) on a “24/7/365 basis” to enhance DHS’s “situational awareness, fusion and analysis and decision support” to senior leaders.

“The language in the documents makes it quite clear that they are looking for media reports that are critical of the agency and the U.S. government more broadly,” said Ginger McCall, director of EPIC’s open government program. “This is entirely outside of the bounds of the agency’s statutory duties, and it could have a substantial chilling effect on legitimate dissent and freedom of speech.”

But John Cohen, a senior counterterrorism adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said that in his three years on the job, during which he has received every social media summary the NOC has produced, he has never seen a report summarizing negative views of DHS or any other governmental agency. Such reports, he said, “would not be the type of reporting I would consider helpful” in forming an operational response to some event or emergency.

Well that’s good. He sounds like a very solid, trustworthy guy so we can all relax about it. And as long as you don’t blog, tweet or post anything on Facebook that might look suspicious to law enforcement (whatever that might be to the individuals involved on a given day) you have nothing to worry about anyway.

Well, unless you happen to be someone who raises suspicions with your googling habits:

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

After interviewing the company representatives, Suffolk County Police Detectives visited the subject’s home to ask about the suspicious internet searches. The incident was investigated by Suffolk County Police Department’s Criminal Intelligence Detectives and was determined to be non-criminal in nature.

The authorities rousted them pretty hard for that.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. …

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

I looked it up too. It never occurred to me that simply seeking such information could get me in trouble. But then again, I didn’t know that tweeting the words “white powder” could raise suspicions of terrorism either. Live and learn.

Now this incident sprang from a tip from the man’s employer, so it’s not an example of surveillance run amock. It’s an example of how police now find that simply using certain words or seeking information is cause for suspicion. Just saying.

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