Month: January 2015

Jeb is the real deal

by digby

People keep saying that Jeb Bush will have a problem with the social conservatives because he’s allegedly so middle of the road. But that’s nonsense.

They know they can count on him:

On sustained, concentrated display, seen in thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of emails he sent, was Jeb the converted Catholic, Jeb the pro-life conservative, Jeb the hands-on workaholic, Jeb the all-hours emailer—confident, competitive, powerful, obstinate Jeb. Longtime watchers of John Ellis Bush say what he did throughout the Terri Schiavo case demonstrates how he would operate in the Oval Office. They say it’s the Jebbest thing Jeb’s ever done.

The case showed he “will pursue whatever he thinks is right, virtually forever,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida. “It’s a theme of Jeb’s governorship: He really pushed executive power to the limits.”

“If you want to understand Jeb Bush, he’s guided by principle over convenience,” said Dennis Baxley, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives during Bush’s governorship and still. “He may be wrong about something, but he knows what he believes.”

And what he believed in this case, and what he did, said Miami’s Dan Gelber, a Democratic member of the state House during Bush’s governorship, “probably was more defining than I suspect Jeb would like.”

Also too this:

[W]hile acknowledging that states should “have a right” to decide on the legalization of marijuana, Bush publicly opposed an amendment to legalize medical marijuana in Florida.

“Florida leaders and citizens have worked for years to make the Sunshine State a world-class location to start or run a business, a family-friendly destination for tourism and a desirable place to raise a family or retire,” Bush said before the November midterm election. “Allowing large-scale marijuana operations to take root across Florida, under the guise of using it for medicinal purposes, runs counter to all of these efforts.”

This won’t hurt either:

The Globe also spoke to some of Bush’s former classmates, who recalled a “physically imposing” young man who was seen as intimidating by some and a bully by others. Tibbetts recalled a story to the newspaper of an occasion during their boarding school days when he and Bush taunted a smaller student who lived in their dorm by sewing his pajama bottoms so that the student couldn’t put them on.

Bush told the Globe he didn’t remember the incident or any other bullying, and was surprised that some of his former classmates viewed him that way. “I don’t believe that is true,” Bush said, adding that it was more than 40 years ago and not possible for him to remember.

It isn’t the first time that allegations of bullying have surfaced about Bush’s high school years. Another classmate of Bush’s told Vanity Fair in 2001 that he remembered Bush as a bully as well, and that there was “a kind of arrogance” about him during his time at Andover.

These are considered plusses on the right. In fact, if Chris Christie looked different and hadn’t hugged Obama he’d probably be way ahead just on the bully level alone. But the bespectacled Jeb being seen as a bully type makes him far more attractive to the base. I’d bet they’ll make sure all the activists know about it.

He’s the real thing —just like his brother. Everyone in the beltway always wants to see the Bush family as a bunch of moderate Episcopalian Waspy Eisenhower Republicans but Poppy is a dying breed. (And frankly, he wasn’t that either.) They are Big Money Republicans who moved to Texas so they could be elected by the new GOP base that was centered in the South. They are now authentic wingnuts. Did we learn nothing from Junior?

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I’ve got some moral clarity for yah …

by digby

Again, I’m sure Americans don’t care about this and neither do the Europeans. But for all out love of “sending messages” the one place we seem to believe that nobody will notice hypocrisy and corruption is the Middle East. Where we are allegedly fighting a war for Western Civilization and Enlightenment values.

For ex-congressman and GOP strategist Vin Weber, Christmas came a few days early and from an unlikely source: the Qatari government. In December, three days before the holiday, the former Minnesota lawmaker and his lobbying firm, Mercury LLC, signed a lucrative lobbying contract with the Gulf State,receiving a $465,000 advance for the first few months of work.

Weber isn’t alone. Over the past year and a half, regimes throughout the Middle East, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates, have gone on what appears to be a shopping spree for former members of Congress. Compared to the rest of the world, Middle East governments have accounted for more than fifty percent of the latest revolving door hires for former lawmakers during this time period, according to a review of disclosures by VICE.

It’s not out of the ordinary for special interest groups to enlist retired lawmakers-turned-lobbyists to peddle influence in the U.S. Capitol. What’s unique here is that most special interests aren’t countries home to investors accused of providing support to anti-American militants in Syria or engaged in multi-billion dollar arms deals that require American military approval, as is the case with Qatar and some of its regional neighbors.

What’s also striking about the latest surge in foreign lobbying is that many of these former lawmakers maintain influence that extends well beyond the halls of Congress. Former Michigan Representative Pete Hoekstra, who used to chair the House Intelligence Committee, appears regularly in the media to demand that the US increase its arms assistance to the Kurds in northern Iraq. Writing for the conservative news outlet National Review, Hoekstra argued that, “the United States needs to immediately provide [the Peshmerga] with more than light arms and artillery to tip the scales in their favor and overcome the firepower of the Islamists.” In that instance and in others, Hoekstra has often not disclosed that since August 12th, he has worked as a paid representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which relies on the beleaguered Peshmerga militia for safety against ISIS.

Lee Fang has more at the link. I just don’t know what to say to this. It so obviously distorts the concept of “national interest” that it’s hard for me to even define what the national interest might be when people like this are in charge of protecting it.

Meanwhile, I’m a big fool for worrying about the US Government’s secret programs. Because it’s obviously all on the up and up. In fact, I’m exactly the same as an anti-vaccine activist. Or so I’ve been told.

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Something happening here

by digby

More specifically, there:

Tens of thousands of supporters of Spain’s left-wing protest party Podemos filled the streets of central Madrid on Saturday in an organised march six days after Syriza won the general election in Greece. Many of the those attending had begun their journey to Madrid from other towns in Spain in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Demonstrators began concentrating in Madrid’s Cibeles square—the nominal starting point of the march—at around 11 a.m., and soon filled the main streets leading to the nearby Puerta del Sol, the end point where the political rally and speeches took place

Podemos managed to fill the Puerta del Sol—frequently considered a test of a successful demonstration in Madrid—but calculations of the numbers of people in attendance varied between the 100,000 estimated by the police and the 300,000 estimated by Podemos.

At some point the worm turns. This could get interesting.

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They’ve got a new scare term and it’s a doozy

by digby

“Partial-birth abortion” was so successful at making people go “ick”, close their eyes and agree to ban it no matter what the scientific rationale or personal circumstances that they’re upping the ante: “dismemberment abortion” is the new campaign slogan:

In what could represent their next major effort to dismantle the protections under Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents are laying the groundwork for a new attack on reproductive rights that borrows a page out of their old playbook.

Several pieces of similar legislation emerging on a state level could be the beginning of a national trend. The measures are cloaked in emotional language about “fetal dismemberment” that’s reminiscent of the pro-life community’s successful push to enact the country’s first national abortion ban.

The first bill to use “dismemberment” language was introduced in South Dakota last year. Seeking to “prohibit the dismemberment or decapitation of certain living unborn children,” the measure was just a few paragraphs long and didn’t make it out of committee. But that didn’t deter anti-abortion activists. This year, at the beginning of the 2015 session, identical bills entitled the “Unborn Child Protection From Dismemberment Abortion Act” were introduced in Oklahoma and Kansas.

This time around, the legislation is a little more detailed, providing a graphic definition for “dismemberment abortion.” The term apparently refers to “knowingly dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”

The language is so vague that this would be impossible to enforce.
Despite those evocative details, “dismemberment” is not actually a medical term. The two bills proposed so far this year are written in a way that would significantly complicate the medical field, leaving abortion doctors scrambling to try to figure out what’s still permitted under the law.

“The language is so vague that this would be impossible to enforce,” Dr. David Grimes, a clinical professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and an abortion provider who has been practicing for four decades, told ThinkProgress. “It reveals a lack of knowledge of the procedures that the bill proposes to outlaw.”

The effort appears to be targeting a specific surgical abortion procedure known as Dilatation and Evacuation, or D&E. This type of abortion, which takes about 30 minutes to perform, has become the standard practice for terminating a pregnancy after 12 weeks. It involves dilating the cervix and using surgical instruments to remove the fetal and placental tissue. This is the method of second-trimester abortion that researchers from the World Health Organization endorse, and it’s now preferred by the vast majority of U.S. patients having midtrimester terminations because it’s a simple outpatient procedure with a low risk of complications.

It’s clear that going after D&E is emerging as a top priority for the pro-life community. The president of National Right to Life published an article this week announcing that “we are determined this year to bring the tragic issue of Dismemberment Abortions to the public’s attention.” Anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek followed suit on her website, advising readers to “keep an eye out for the next big pro-life conquest: dismemberment abortions.”

I predict they’ll probably succeed at banning mid-term abortion and also at lowering the first term to 20 weeks, maybe 16. The polling suggests that even young people aren’t motivated by this issue and don’t support it any more than the older generation. It will inevitably create a lot more illegal abortion in this country and a lot more unwanted kids. More women’s lives will be irrevocably altered, their futures restricted and narrowed. But these zealots are going to have to be even more creative if they want to ban early abortions. It’s just not very evocative of something violent especially when there are so many miscarriages during those early months. But I’m sure they’ll come up with something. They never, ever give up.

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The elderly poor had it so good back in the day

by digby

Paul Rosenberg has a very interesting interview on Salon with Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, authors of “Social Security Works!”

An excerpt:

Rosenberg: I mentioned before Amitai Etzioni’s article trying to paint Elizabeth Warren and other progressive Democrats as supporting “unpopular populism,” which he identifies with “welfare,” deliberately misrepresenting the actual issues she and other progressives have been focusing on. Etzioni even goes so far as to try to use Social Security—as opposed to welfare—against Warren, despite the fact that Warren advocates strengthening and expanding Social Security. His argument seems to typify the blindness of elite discourse to the actual economic issues of the day, and your book struck me as perfectly illuminating the one program at the center of their blind spot. To those who might be swayed by such arguments, that there’s nothing popular that progressive populists can hope to do, what points does your book make to shine a light on what’s being missed?

Altman: The beauty of Social Security, the ingenuity of that program, is that it represents basic American values that are shared very broadly. So, as a consequence, Social Security is extremely successful, but it’s also extremely popular across the political spectrum.

We found in polling that Tea Partyers support it, union members support it, independents, Republicans, Democrats – it’s also widely supported among every demographic group and every age. The younger you are, the less likely you are to think Social Security will be there for you but they do support it, they believe it’s an important program … So this is an issue that, when you’ve got 80 percent of the country answering polls that Social Security should be expanded, but they do not think it should be cut, they think it’s vital, they think it’s more important in the future, all of those kinds of things, those kinds of numbers, you know that it’s very popular.

Kingson: The reality is most Americans have only Social Security to count on. This is middle-class, working-class people, low-income people, even upper-middle-income people; the core protection they have for the children if they die, for life insurance protection, if they become disabled as workers, and when they retire. So it’s critical. The other thing, when I think about Etzioni, I think of communitarianism and the irony here is that nothing gives greater expression to the notion of national community than Social Security. Honestly, this program is certainly about restoring economic security, but it’s also about these notions of dignity, holding families together, responsibility to do work, but also to the right to receive just dues as a result. So this is an institution that ties our country together, at the same time that we have many forces moving toward entropy.

Rosenberg: You point out that before Social Security came into being, old age and poverty were synonymous, and old age was commonly looked at with dread. Few people alive today have any memory of that, but could you talk about that reality, what it was like, and what kind of difference Social Security made?

Altman: When Social Security was enacted, every state except New Mexico had poorhouses. I know that sounds like Dickens, but this is just 80 years ago. The residents—they were called “inmates”—were not working-age people, or children; they tended to be people who have been independent all their lives, but dependent on wages. When they were no longer able to work, if they didn’t have children who could take them in, they literally went to the poorhouse. It was often common at that time that if the worker died, the family would split apart. Orphanages were full of children who still had a parent living who couldn’t support those children. Often you’d see people begging on the streets; there were lots of stories about that.

Yes, these poorhouses existed all the way up until the 1930s.

Here’s what the population looked like:

The second one is a poorhouse broom factory. Working until they dropped dead kept the old people from becoming moochers and parasites, dontchaknow.

Conservatives won’t admit that this is the system we will inevitably adopt if they have their way.  It’s where their philosophy leads. Sure, some people will have children who will be forced to take them in at the expense of their own kids. And some people will make enough money in their lifetime to be able to support themselves in old age (assuming they don’t have to spend every penny on medical care, which is probable.) But in the conservative/libertarian system this will be the inevitable end for a whole lot of people.

By the way, they are also trying to destroy disability insurance and are questioning whether mental illness really exists, so there are going to be a lot of folks in the poorhouse. They seem to be willing to spend whatever it takes to keep massive numbers of people in prison however, so I’d imagine that most of the sick, old and mentally ill poor could wind up there, so that’s good. They’ll have a roof over their heads at least.

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If your blue state is healthier, thank a Republican
by Tom Sullivan

Affordable Care Act opponents argue in King v. Burwell now before the U.S. Supreme Court that Congress intended to withhold subsidies from the states unless they established their own exchanges. If SCOTUS agrees, ACA opponents expect the ruling to effectively gut the federal exchanges operating in over half the states and to seriously undermine Obamacare.

Even as this argument seems to have fallen apart, should the court strike down the federal exchange subsidies, Republicans in Congress vow not to reinstate consumers’ health insurance tax credits.

Steve Benen writes:

Remember, as far as the public is concerned, a clear majority of Americans would expect the Republican Congress to protect consumers from hardship. Indeed, Greg Sargent this week flagged the latest report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that nearly two-thirds of Americans would expect lawmakers to keep existing subsidies in place if the Supreme Court ruling goes the wrong way. Only a fourth of the country would expect Congress to do nothing.

The same report found that even most Republicans support states setting up exchange marketplaces so that families can continue to receive subsidized access to medical care. This is, of course, the exact opposite of what GOP policymakers have in mind.

Ezra Klein reframes that outcome, arguing that Republicans’ plan for Obamacare’s demise has become “a plan to rip themselves off.” Klein elaborates:

If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, the subsidies will basically shut off in (mostly) red states. And congressional Republicans won’t do anything about it. That means Republicans in those states will be paying the taxes and bearing the spending cuts needed to fund Obamacare but getting none of the benefits.

Which is to say, the biggest fight in American politics in recent years began with Democrats creating a law that was a giant subsidy from blue states to red states and has evolved into Republicans working to turn the law into a giant subsidy from red states to blue states. It is very, very weird.

Not really. Republicans, especially in the 15 refusenik states Klein identifies, have a unremitting knack for cutting off their noses to spite their faces (and their children’s). They have principles and they stand in on them.

Says it all

by digby

Senate Republicans revealed this week that they have eliminated the phrase “civil rights and human rights” from the title of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee charged with overseeing those issues.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee this month and announced the members of the six subcommittees this week. With Grassley’s announcement, the subcommittee formerly known as the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights suddenly became the Subcommittee on the Constitution.

The new chairman of the newly named subcommittee is Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). His office confirmed that it made the switch.

“We changed the name because the Constitution covers our most basic rights, including civil and human rights,” said Cornyn spokeswoman Megan Mitchell. “We will focus on these rights, along with other issues that fall under the broader umbrella of the Constitution.”

In his press release, Cornyn never used the phrase “civil rights” or “human rights.” Instead, the release said he would be a “watchdog against unconstitutional overreach and will hold the Obama Administration accountable for its actions.” Cornyn is an opponent of legislation that would restore federal oversight over some local and state election changes that were eliminated when the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Well, that makes sense. To Republicans, allowing people to vote is a denial of their civil rights. Read Bush vs Gore …

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He’s busy fighting terrorism three days a week

by digby

Scott Walker. I just. I can’t:

As one of more than a dozen Republicans with a plausible shot at the nomination, Walker is well aware that he must fill in his national profile. He got an assist from Fred Malek, the former Richard Nixon official and founder of the American Action Forum, who lobbed batting-practice softballs that allowed Walker to talk about his faith, his family, and his limited foreign policy experience.

Walker seemed particularly intent on guarding against the idea that a Midwestern governor might lack sufficient national security expertise to plausibly occupy the White House. Malek had his back. “You command the [Wisconsin] National Guard,” he told Walker. “I wondered if you might want to comment on how you feel about the threat posed by ISIS and other entities abroad?”

It turned out Walker did. “That’s a great question,” he replied. “You know, the interesting thing with that is, as a governor, not only do I and the other governors, the commanders in chief of our National Guard at the state level, which is a distinct honor and privilege … as a part of that, my adjutant general that I have in the Wisconsin National Guard is also my chief homeland security adviser. And on a fairly frequent basis he, along with members of the FBI, gives me and I presume other governors security threat assessments. So we go and get classified information—important confidential information—about threats not only to our state but typically within our region and across the country. Without violating the terms of any of those specifically, I just gotta tell you that for my children and others like them, I see on an ongoing basis legitimate concerns about the threat to national security, state by state and across this country. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve said repeatedly, one of the most important things we need out of our leaders in Washington, particularly our commander in chief, is leadership.”

Walker didn’t elaborate on his strategy to defeat ISIS, and his adjutant general wasn’t available to ask. Nor did he elaborate on anything else.

LOL! He’s a regular Eisenhower, I tell you!

That’s from a longer piece by Joshua Green at Bloomberg.

*FYI: The “fighting terrorism three days a week” is lifted from an anecdote in Perlstein’s “Before the Storm” in which he quotes an Orange Country California housewife saying she was busy fighting communism three days a week.

Update: Soeaking of Perlstein, I should just mention that Fred Malek is this guy:

It’s one of the more gothic stories about Nixon related in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days. As they tell it, late in 1971–the same year, coincidentally, that the Washington Senators moved to Texas and changed their name to the Rangers–Nixon summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a “Jewish cabal” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The “cabal,” Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau’s methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

In 1988, when George Bush pere installed Malek as deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee, Woodward dusted off his notes and, with the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, further revealed that two months after Malek filed a memo on the matter–he’d counted 13 Jews, though his methodology was shaky–a couple of them were demoted. (Malek denied any role and said Nixon’s notions of a “Jewish cabal” were “ridiculous” and “nonsense.”)

Steve King is not an anomaly


by digby

Kilgore makes an important observation about Iowa politics:

Steve King is not being imposed on Iowa by some alien force. He’s been elected to Congress seven times, with his closest race being an eight-point win in 2012 over an exceptionally well-financed and well-regarded opponent, former Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack. He represents a fourth of the state. And while yes, he’s anathema to most Democrats and many independents, among Iowa Republicans he walks very tall, and would if the Caucuses did not exist. Had he chosen to run for the Senate last year, he would have been given the GOP nomination by acclamation, and we might never have gotten to know Joni Ernst (yes, King could have lost the general election, but we’re talking about Republicans here).

Beyond that, the aspects of the Caucuses that give people like King disproportionate power nationally are not some sort of accident. It’s the labor-intensive nature of that contest that draws in the money and time of campaigns (not just in presidential years, but in midterms when they are expected to support state and local candidates in Iowa with money and staff and expertise). A mere primary would not do so. If, as Salter gently suggests, Iowa Republicans are misrepresenting themselves through the abattoir of the Caucuses, then it’s something they have chosen to do.

This is a close-up view of how the grassroots of the GOP have organized over the past few decades. It’s not an accident. It’s the plan. And the Party now has to deal with the fact that the hardcore kooks of the Republican Party, the people they’ve been encouraging for years, are now in the drivers seat. Democracy!

Bush’s brain has a thought

by digby

Karl Rove was on Bill O’Reilly’s show and wondered if maybe that whole Benghazi thing might not be the slam dunk issue they were counting on:

ROVE: Yeah, look. Benghazi could be a problem [for Republicans.] My sense is this is sort of like potentially like President Obama. And remember how he let all this conversation go about how he was not really born in the United States of America and it took him years before he finally put it out? He loved having conservatives talk about it.

I’m beginning to suspect that Mrs. Clinton might have been happy to let the Benghazi thing go forward and the controversy to be there because she has some asbestos. She’s really, if you get into, isolated, insulated from it, I don’t know.

Yah think?