Month: August 2014

Pand(er)with Rand

by digby

This is one of the fundamental reasons I cannot take all this talk about individual liberty and personal freedom among the libertarian set seriously. The only people on the planet who aren’t entitled to them are women — otherwise known as half the population on the planet:

[I]n an interview with the American Liberty Association, the potential 2016 presidential candidate said he believes human fetuses deserve personhood rights — a move that would completely outlaw abortion.

“It is a big issue for me. I tell people that really it is all about when life begins,” Paul remarked. “You know, I’m a physician. One of the things I would do in my job is to go into the pediatric nursery and I would examine babies that are one-pound babies, looking in their eyes to try to make sure they didn’t suffer from blindness from being born prematurely.”

“And the interesting thing is when you’re in the neonatal nursery and you’ve got a one-pound baby, everybody acknowledges that that baby has rights, the Bill of Rights applies to that baby and nobody can hurt that baby,” he continued. “It’s a one-pound baby. But a week before, even a full-term seven-pound baby has no rights, according to the way people are looking at it, and I think that is a big mistake.”

Paul noted that he had introduced legislation to Congress last year known as the Life at Conception Act. The bill would declare that human life begins at the moment of conception and extend constitutional protections to human fetuses.

So-called “fetal personhood” legislation would outlaw abortion, and could lead to prohibitions on many forms of birth control, stem-cell research, and in-vitro fertilization, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“I think, and I often say in my speeches, that I don’t think a civilization can long endure that doesn’t respect the rights of the unborn,” Paul concluded.

And if the incubators don’t like it they can always just give their children away after they’ve done their duty and birthed them — like the brood mares they are. What’s the big deal? They either close their legs or they go through childbirth and deal with the ramifications of their sin — by carrying a pregnancy to term and making a lifetime commitment or give the child away and deal with that. Their “feelings” about all this are totally irrelevant. After all, they’re just bundles of flesh designed by God to procreate and goddamn it, they’re going to do it come hell or high water. As George W. Bush said with such wisdom: “who cares what they think?” The person inside the vessel must be respected. The vessel, not so much.

* BTW: Paul invokes the stupendously nonsensical lie that “seven pound babies” have no rights. That’s the kind of propaganda that theocrats spread around to enact their agenda. But then the line between theocrats and libertarian Republicans is very, very faint. Why do you think they’ve bastardized the concept of “Religious Liberty” to mean the right to inflict your religion on others? It appeals to people who fashion themselves as libertarians but really only care about their taxes, guns and weed. Those are the non-negotiable items. Everything else is on offer.

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The New York Times invokes Cokie’s Law

by digby

One of the my little contributions to this old liberal blogosphere over the years has been the coining of certain phrases as shorthand for certain, shall we say, quirks in the elite establishments. One of the earliest was a criticism of the media called “Cokie’s Law.” It’s named after Cokie Roberts who famously said during the Lewinsky affair (about whether or not Hillary Clinton really blamed Bill’s rough childhood for his misbehavior):

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

This is a common rationale among the high priests of the Village to excuse their propensity to gleefully traffic in gossip, rumors and smears. It’s “out there” you see — they have no choice.

So imagine my surprise (not) to see one of the New York Times editors sputtering excuses for helping the wingnuts smear Rick Perlstein with absurd allegations of plagiarism:

“We wrote about it because it was out there and thought we could take it head-on in the story. We did that in the most responsible way possible, and put it in context,” Mr. Brink said.

Yes, he actually said that. Sure, there was little basis for the accusations and we didn’t independently verify them (beyond a “cursory” look by the reporter) but they had no choice since it was “out there.” Once again, one of the Village tabbies helps us understand how this works. During the same era Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan explained it to us:

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

You see, spreading malicious, partisan smears is the definition of responsible journalistic behavior. Or at least that’s what they tell themselves as they gleefully  accept some spoon-fed political slander from professional character assassins.

Luckily, the public editor Margaret Sullivan is having none of it:

Yes, the claim was “out there” but so are smears of all kinds as well as claims that the earth is flat and that climate change is unfounded. This one comes from the author of a book on the same subject with an opposing political orientation. By taking it seriously, The Times conferred a legitimacy on the accusation it would not otherwise have had.

And while it is true that Mr. Perlstein and his publisher were given plenty of opportunity to respond, that doesn’t help much. It’s as if The Times is saying: Here’s an accusation; here’s a denial; and, heck, we don’t really know. We’re staying out of it. Readers frequently complain to me about this he said, she said false equivalency — and for good reason.

These stupid accusations have been dispatched by many fine people by now and I don’t think anyone’s taking them seriously. But if the publishers of the Perlstein book assumed hat the New York Times would do “responsible journalism” in this they really need to understand just how they define that: “it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not — it’s out there.”

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He had one hell of a verse

by David Atkins

This scene had one hell of an impact on me as kid:

To me, it’s the most important question in life: “What will your verse be?” You can enrich yourself and live only for your own pleasure and aggrandizement if you wish. But was it a verse worth telling? Did it have meaning to anyone but you?

Robin Williams had one hell of a verse. He meant something. He still does.

Can you see the problem here? #Ferguson

by digby

This is the mayor of Ferguson responding to questions:

He was asked about the officer who called protesters “animals.”

“The officers did their best. They’re only human,” he said.

Maybe “human” should be in quotes too, at least as regards the officer who yelled that.

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Thanks for the memories

by digby

Robin Williams has died. This one’s hitting me hard. No one on the planet made me laugh harder than he did.

I’ll just put this one of The Birdcage up for now — I just watched it again recently and he and Nathan Lane killed me. Williams played the straight man (as it were) but he couldn’t help being funny:

It appears he suffered from depression and may have taken his own life. For some reason that doesn’t surprise me although it makes me very sad. There was always a melancholy running underneath the manic genius.

He made a great movie about mental illness many years ago. An amazing performance:

RIP

Also too:  He was a real Hollywood liberal — you know, the kind they hate more than anything. The truly funny ones.

“It’s time to bring back trust busting”

by digby

Blue America has endorsed Zephyr Teachout for Governor of New York. This message explains why:

It’s Time to Make Comcast Political

by Zephyr Teachout

My name is Zephyr Teachout, and I’m running against Andrew Cuomo for Governor of New York in the Democratic Primary. I probably don’t need to explain why to a group of progressives like you– but there is a good reason why many of the Governor’s most ardent supporters are Republican donors and elected officials: he delivers Trickled-down Republican economic policies as well as any Republican Governor in the country.

But progressive anger at Cuomo isn’t the reason my candidacy is resonating. It’s resonating because I’m saying something Democrats haven’t heard in a long time. And that is the following: It’s time to bring back trust-busting.

I use as my example that I’m going to stop Comcast from buying Time Warner cable, at least in New York. I don’t want a New York where every street has a Bank of America and a Duane Reed, and nothing else. We need an economy full of small businesses, immigrant businesses, and small farmers. And that can’t exist unless the Democratic Party becomes the home of trustbusters again, like it was under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, JFK, and Woodrow Wilson.

Andrew Cuomo is the Governor of New York, and he takes a lot of money from large powerful interests and then hands out tax credits to them. It’s a Reaganomics model of financial monopoly capitalism. But the problem here isn’t just Cuomo, it’s that people like Cuomo dominate the Democratic establishment. Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, and so on and so forth, these people believe in a world where powerful economic interests control our lives and fate through monopoly power, and their partners in government help structure those monopolies. Political corruption and economic monopoly are two sides of the same coin– too much concentrated power in too few hands.

I’m running in the Democratic primary because we have to break this cycle. We have restore our economic and political liberty. That means ending government corruption and breaking the excessive power of private kingdoms like Comcast that force all of us to kiss the ring to get something like internet and cable service.

Today, Democratic leaders, even some of the good ones, believe that Wall Street creates wealth, and that the role of the government is to protect those monopolies and then kick some of the resulting wealth to the middle class or poor. Their debate is whether to kick back a little, or a little more. Ultimately they think the role of government is to serve charity, not justice.

I believe the basis of wealth creation comes from ordinary citizens who have access to opportunity, and infrastructure. It’s the immigrant restaurant, the neighborhood lawyer or baker or farmer, these are the people that build the society we love. Democrats need to represent them, Democrats should make sure that they have power, and that justice doesn’t mean charity. It means balanced markets, competition, and flourishing small businesses.

When Ronald Reagan first started running California, he made some very significant policy shifts that echoed throughout the country. For example, he started charging tuition for California’s formerly free college system. His policy resonates today as student debt tops $1 trillion, and more importantly in an army of young people who are essentially indentured servants. New York followed California’s lead, and a once great public higher educational system is on life support.

In other words, what happens in our biggest states resonates deeply across the land. We need our own people in charge, progressives who believe in democracy, not just on important social questions like choice, but also on core economic questions like cable monopolies, infrastructure, and energy. This is why we are Democrats. This is why we believe. In New York, Democrats remember that FDR was our governor, because we are standing on some of the things he built. The biggest thing Andrew Cuomo ever built was a housing bubble. And we remember that too.

It’s time for a new generation of Democrats, not in age but in spirit, to repudiate the corporate financiers. Liberty is our right as Americans, both negative liberty in that government should not punish the innocent, but also positive liberty in our right to have housing, medicine, education, and economic opportunity. That’s why I’m running. That’s what the Democratic Party used to stand for, and that’s what we’re going to make it stand for again.

And so, again, my name is Zephyr Teachout, and I’m running against Andrew Cuomo for Governor of New York in the Democratic Primary.

I think that says it all.

You can contribute here.

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Back in Iraq

by digby

In case you were wondering:

The U.S. government has begun to funnel weapons directly to Kurdish forces fighting Islamist militants in northern Iraq, deepening U.S. involvement in a conflict that the Obama administration had long sought to avoid.

The arms pipeline, which one former U.S. military official described as a trickle, opened in recent days as the Kurds’ pesh merga fighters have struggled to stem advances by Islamic State forces that have swept across northern Iraq.

The weapons are being supplied by the CIA, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Obama administration has not publicly acknowledged the spy agency’s involvement.

Clearly that’s one of those “good leaks.” Why they’re leaking it instead of just coming out and admitting it, however, is just bizarre.  But then, that’s the CIA for you. It used to be an intelligence service. Now it’s a secret army.  But without all those unpleasant military rules.  And it operates with a secret budget. Very convenient.

BTW: to those complaining that I haven’ written about Iraq, I have. Several times over the week-end.  In a nutshell, I think it’s necessary to extend humanitarian aid to the Yazidis.  I think helping the Kurds at this point is worth doing — they have been allies for a long time and treated badly by the west. I think the government genuinely wants to help them. But lets not kid ourselves that this would be happening if it weren’t for the oil that’s at stake. That’s what tips this into action. (As Ann Coulter says, “why not go to war for oil?  We need oil.”) It’s embarrassing for everyone saying that this is all about humanitarianism to pretend that oil isn’t in the equation.

Also too, beware of the sensational propaganda.  There’s a long history of this, particularly in Iraq. ISIS is a bunch of bloodthirsty religious fanatics who are trying to create a new state in the middle east.  With oil. They are awful people.  But let’s not lose our minds here and assume they are evil supermen who can breathe fire.  And especially don’t fall prey to the fear that they are coming to kill us all in our beds next month.  I’m sure they would love to attack the west.  But at the moment they’re very busy with their small army and a lot of American made weaponry, trying to kill people right there in the middle east. There’s no need to get ahead of ourselves.

I think what astonishes me the most is how easily people slip into the hysteria of 9/11 again, even after all these years. We lost our heads then, and I guess I always understood that to some extent. It was scary and shocking. I honestly didn’t think we would lose it again after such a long time and the terrible experience in Iraq. (Watching people on TV rending their garments and screeching that we have to “do something” because they’re coming to get us, Oh my God,  is exasperating.)

Within that context, I think the president’s so-called doctrine of “don’t do stupid shit” makes sense. ISIS is a group of very bad actors but they aren’t martians invading from outer space. Obama’s more measured and mature response is the right way to handle this. These panic artists like Dianne Feinstein, waving her hands wildly and screaming statements like “”it takes an army to defeat an army” and “we must use our military strength and targeting expertise to the fullest extent possible” is fatuous nonsense. As is the idea that if we had only gone into Syria we could have stopped them in their tracks. Maybe. But  more likely we would have saved them some time and effort in getting our weapons from the hapless Iraqi army. We would have been handing them nice, shiny new ones directly.

Obviously, things could spin completely out of control. They usually do once the switch on the fighting machine is turned on.  But for now, Obama’s keeping it together. We’ll see what happens.

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QOTD: Dana Priest

by digby

Norman Solomon gathered statements from 14 Pulitzer Prize winners asking the government to drop their case against James Risen. This is one of them:

DANA PRIEST, Public Service, 2008 / The Washington Post; Beat Reporting, 2006 / The Washington Post:

If the U.S. government were so concerned about the information revealed in Jim Risen’s stunning chapter on a now 14-year-old CIA operation against Iran gone wrong, it would have moved quickly to resolve this matter eight years ago when it was first published. Instead, it seems obvious now that what officials really want is to hold a hammer over the head of a deeply sourced reporter, and others like him who try to hold the government accountable for what it does, even in secret.

As Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama classified more and more of the government’s actions over the last 14 years, denying the public critical information to judge how its democracy is faring, it has fallen to reporters like Risen to keep Americans informed and to question whether a gigantic government in the shadows is really even a good idea. We will all be worse off if this case proceeds.

Priest, you’ll recall, exposed the black site prisons, among other things. Would we be better off not knowing about them?

Here’s the statement from Trevor Timm at the Freedom of the Press Foundation :

Today, fourteen Pulitzer Prize winners have issued statements in support of journalist James Risen and in protest of the Justice Department’s attempt to force Risen to testify against his sources. Risen has vowed to go to jail rather than give up his source, but the Justice Department has steadfastly refused to drop its pursuit. On Thursday, many of the major US press freedom organizations will hold a press conference in Washington DC and deliver a petition with over 100,000 signatures to the Justice Department, calling on them to do the same.

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Wall Street discovers income inequality

by digby

Josh Holland highlights a very interesting report from Standard and Poor’s last week in which they discover that a small handful of rich people don’t seem to be able to spend as much money as hundreds of millions of working folks. Imagine that:

For many years there were some economists who argued that their discipline shouldn’t worry about inequality. Economists, they said, should focus on efficiency and growth, and leave the distribution up to the political world. But a research brief released on Tuesday by the Wall Street ratings agency Standard and Poor’s concludes that growth versus equality is a false choice. The authors argue that while some inequality may be desirable in a market economy — it spurs entrepreneurship and innovation — when those at the top take too large a share of a nation’s output, they tend to bank it rather than spend it. This ultimately hurts consumer demand and slows down economic growth. They also note that “higher levels of income inequality increase political pressures, discouraging trade, investment, and hiring.”

The point of the brief that made headlines this week is this: “Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the US is dampening GDP growth, at a time when the world’s biggest economy is struggling to recover from the Great Recession.”

That seems like a “no-duh” to me. But they also discovered something else that I don’t think has been quite as obvious, although it should be. They noted that people being too poor to live a middle class lifestyle will often borrow too much and otherwise be financially unstable — which leaves the economy susceptible to more dramatic economic shocks.

“As income inequality increased before the crisis, less affluent households took on more and more debt to keep up–or, in this case, catch up–with the Joneses,” the analysts write. “Further, when home prices climbed, these households were willing to borrow against their newfound equity–and financial institutions were increasingly willing to help them do so, despite slow income growth. A number of economists have pointed to ways in which this trend may have harmed the US economy.”

People aren’t just borrowing too much because they want to keep up with the Joneses. They just want to live a normal middle class life, raise their kids, send them to school, save a little for retirement but the 1% is hoovering up more and more of the wealth in this country at the same time that wages are stagnant for everyone else. Borrowing is a simple hope that somehow, some way the future will be a little bit better.

In case you were wondering, the report doesn’t endorse raising taxes or any sort of terrible redistribution scheme. But it does note that somebody should do something. Baby steps.

Meanwhile, party on boys!

Profit margins continue to get fatter.

Ever since the financial crisis, corporations have managed to deliver robust profit growth by offsetting the drag of weak sales growth with widening profit margins. These fatter profit margins come from cutting costs, which usually means getting more productivity out of a fewer number of workers.

Some market watchers have warned that there aren’t any more costs to be cut. But during their Q2 earnings announcements and conference calls, corporate America confirmed otherwise.

“S&P 500 margins expanded to a new historical high of 9.1%,” said Goldman Sachs’ David Kostin. “Margins exited the 50 bp range between 8.4% and 8.9% for the first time in four years. Trailing four-quarter margins expanded by 17 bp versus 1Q 2014. The Information Technology and Health Care sectors were the largest contributors to index level margin expansion. Margins declined for only one sector, Energy, while Consumer Discretionary margins were unchanged.”

And that’s not all. Based on the analysts’ forecasts of S&P 500 companies, those profit margins will average 9.3% for the year and then jump t0 10.0% in 2015.

Kostin, however, warns that those margin increases won’t come easily.

Yee hah!