Month: May 2015

Death penalty for thee but not for me

by digby

Oh my goodness, look at this:

This was from Jim Bob’s 2002 Senate campaign website. He was running for office as his son Josh was molesting his sisters in their sleep.

You know the rest of the story. 

There’s a part of me that would feel a little bit sorry for these people (and does feel very sorry for the girls in that family who have been raised to be brood mares)  except for the fact that they are such media whores. Live by the People Magazine cover, die by the People Magazine cover …

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We know the intent of the Congress, now we’ll find out the intent of the Court

by digby

The New York Times’ Robert Pear went out and interviewed a bunch of people and found out that what has long been obvious to anyone with half a brain was true: the Obamacare suit before the Supreme Court is based on what amounts to a typo:

They are only four words in a 900-page law: “established by the state.”

But it is in the ambiguity of those four words in the Affordable Care Act that opponents found a path to challenge the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.

How those words became the most contentious part of President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment has been a mystery. Who wrote them, and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?

The answer, from interviews with more than two dozen Democrats and Republicans involved in writing the law, is that the words were a product of shifting politics and a sloppy merging of different versions. Some described the words as “inadvertent,” “inartful” or “a drafting error.” But none supported the contention of the plaintiffs.

He even got Republicans Olympia Snowe and one of Mike Enzi’s legal advisors on the record agreeing. Not that I think it will matter all that much. If the conservative majority wants to overturn Obamacare it will find a way to justify doing it, the easiest being to simply rule for the plaintiffs while saying that all the congress has to do if “fix it”.  (It’s not the Court’s problem if the people don’t want to fix Obamacare …)

But who knows? This one’s a nail biter.

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The most optimistic article you’ll read all week

by digby

It’s from Mike Konczal in The Nation:

I come to bury centrism, not to praise it. Discussions of the economy during the 2016 campaign will look very different from those of the past two elections, because centrism as an ideological force has collapsed.

An optical illusion has shielded centrism from critique. Centrists position themselves as anti-ideology, representing a responsible compromise between liberals and conservatives. The word conjures sobriety and restraint, caution and moderation—all of which sound compelling in uncertain economic times.

But institutionalized centrism is more than that: It’s an elite group of thinkers and writers, popular in Washington, DC, and favorable to business leaders, who told a very specific story about what was happening during the Great Recession. They populate the opinion pages of The Washington Post and think tanks like the Bipartisan Policy Center, and they influenced officials like former Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag. Circa 2010, they argued for a “sensible” response to the Great Recession: reduce the deficit to fix the short-term jobs crisis, privatize Medicare, and focus on the long-term economy—since, they claimed, working Americans would eventually bounce back during the recovery. Democratic candidates took these positions seriously. Yet each element of the centrist story has turned out to be absolutely false. read on …

He’s absolutely right. I just wish I could be more sure that reality was going to guide us rather than habit of mind or stale ideology. And then there’s no guarantee that centrism will be replaced with liberalism. It could go the other way. But no matter what, if centrism has taken a fatal hit it’s a good thing in itself. It has a lot to answer for. Whether it ever will answer for its failures remains to be seen. Just look at the VSP zombies on foreign policy. Or the Wall Street whiz kids who nearly destroyed the global economy. They never seem to pay much of a price.

Still, this is an optimistic piece. We’ve been mired in this centrist fantasy for a very long time and it’s finally starting to come apart. As Konczal says maybe now we have a shot at getting it right.

Read on …

Now the bad news on the “L” word

by digby

Simon Maloy at Salon makes a good point about this recent polling on the word “liberal.”  Yes, people are starting to feel comfortable calling themselves socially liberal but they are still unwilling to admit to being economically liberal:

This bears out in Gallup polling on economic issues. By a 39 to 19 percent margin, more Americans recognize themselves as “conservative” than “liberal” on economic issues. This wide disparity has been intact consistently since 1999. Among Democrats, too, only 33 percent will recognize their positions as “liberal,” compared to 45 percent who prefer “moderate.” Republicans, meanwhile, just can’t wait to let everyone know how conservative they are. Sixty-four percent of Republicans label themselves economic “conservatives,” compared to only 27 percent who go with “moderate.” You can understand the ring to it on a personal level. Describing yourself as “economically conservative” makes the pollster think that you’re an upstanding financial manager who dutifully balances your checkbook every month.

Think of all those rich people you know (or have heard say) they are social liberals and economic conservatives. It’s quite common. In fact, I’d say that a good many of our Democratic party elites would describe themselves that way.

But as Maloy points out, it’s kind of self-defeating for average folks to join them in that:

Liberal doesn’t need to be a naughty word when it comes to economic issues. Americans lopsidedly support quintessential “economically liberal” positions like protecting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on the wealthy, and maintaining discretionary spending programs for education, medical research, infrastructure, etc. People may conceive of these as “moderate” positions, and they may have once been. But now they are positions that are under withering assault from “economic conservatives.”

It may be a chicken or the egg situation, but this may explain why so many people are afraid to call themselves liberals:

You would never, ever catch President Obama — at least before he was a lame duck — going out there and describing the aforementioned positions as “liberal” ones, or himself as a “liberal.” He would describe his economics as “common sense,” “middle class,” or some other milquetoast phrase. He would go to great lengths, in fact, when accused — gasp! — of being a “liberal.” As long as Democratic standard-bearers refuse to describe these economically liberal positions as such, though, Republicans will continue using “liberal” as a caricature — and an effective one.

They are the ones who are supposed to “lead” at least in theory.

Clinton calls herself a progressive which is better than nothing. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist which is actually the right term for what the modern left believes. Liberal is freighted with a bunch of baggage, some of which the left hates and some of which the right hates. But we have to call ourselves something and there’s a part of me that loathes the fact that the right continues to be able to demonize the left by turning their identifiers into epithets so I stick with liberal. But the fact that we continue to have this discussion tells us the problem continues on some level. Someday it would be nice to see the shoe on the other foot.

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Campaigns for billionaires and celebrity kooks

by digby

I did a little trip down memory lane over at Salon today and wrote a piece about the 2012 debates and the trouble the RNC is going to have in this cycle despite their best efforts:

It goes on. Lord, I enjoyed that GOP primary. And this one’s likely to be pretty good too. But what this whole thing portends is a major shift in the way we pick presidential candidates and it’s probably not going to be something that benefits democracy. Billionaires financing celebrity candidates for their own purposes isn’t unprecedented — Ronald Reagan was the original. It’s probably not a good idea to institutionalize that model.

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It’s working out fine for Mary Landrieu

by digby

Hey, it doesn’t have quite the local prestige (plenty in DC though) but you can bet the money she’s going to make is awe-inspiring.

Former Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is joining the Washington lobbying firm Van Ness Feldman, the firm will announce later Tuesday (May 26).

Landrieu said she will join Van Ness Feldman as a senior policy advisor, working closely with another recent hire, former Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the former top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Former senators are barred from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after the end of their congressional careers. For Landrieu, that means she can’t lobby colleagues until January, 2017. But she can lobby members of the executive branch, and is free to provide Van Ness Feldman clients with strategic advice. .

Landrieu said the job will provide her with the “flexibility” to continue her work for the Walton Family Foundation, advocating on education issues, such as support for charter schools in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and nationally.,

Landrieu lost her bid for a 4th Senate term to then Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, in a Senate runoff election.

In taking the job at Van Ness Feldman, Landrieu, who ended her 18-year Senate career as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is joining a long list of former lawmakers in the lobbying business. Among former Louisiana members now lobbying are former Rep. Bob Livingston, R-Metairie; former Sens. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., and John Breaux, D-La., and former Reps. Billy Tauzin, R-Chackbay, Jimmy Hayes, R-Lafayette, Chris John D-Lafayette, and Rodney Alexander, R-Quitman.

I’m sure glad the poor dears all landed on their feet. It’s not as if former member of congress and the Senate have any hopes of landing a job that doesn’t reek of corruption. So really, this is the only thing they can do.

Oh, and by the way, their staffs all do the same thing. It’s quite a little system they’ve got going.

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The march of folly picks up speed


by digby

Remember when certain Evuntheliberal New Republic writers panicked and decided that things were going so wrong in Iraq that we needed to reinstall Saddam Hussein? Good times. Well, get a load of this headline:

They used to at least have the decency to call it “American hegemony” and the “Pax Americana” and go on about democracy like they cared. In this article Kaplan explains that the Post WWI order in the region is falling apart because the strongmen have all been deposed, the US hasn’t stepped up in the role as it should have (and the wogs are incapable of ruling themselves, of course.) So there’s nothing left to do:

A new American president in 2017 may seek to reinstate Western imperial influence — calling it by another name, of course. But he or she will be constrained by the very collapse of central authority across the Middle East that began with the fall of Saddam Hussein and continued through the post-Arab Spring years. Strong Arab dictatorships across the region were convenient to American interests, since they provided a single address in each country for America to go to in the event of regional crises. But now there is much less of that. In several countries, there is simply no one in charge to whom we can bring our concerns. Chaos is not only a security and humanitarian problem, but a severe impediment to American power projection.

Thus, the near-term and perhaps middle-term future of the Middle East will likely be grim. The Sunni Islamic State will now fight Iran’s Shiite militias, just as Saddam’s Sunni Iraq fought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Shiite Iran in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War. That war, going on as long as it did, represented in part the deliberate decision of the Reagan administration not to intervene — another example of weak imperial authority, though a successful one, since it allowed Reagan to concentrate on Europe and help end the Cold War.

Back then it was states at war; now it is sub-states. Imperialism bestowed order, however retrograde it may have been. The challenge now is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone.

Great. Look for the GOP candidates to start foaming at the mouth on the campaign trail. Which one do you suppose will adopt this as their manifesto?

Not a point of pride

by digby

Obama is a very bad Socialist–government employment has shrunk under him, but grew under Reagan,Clinton, both Bushes pic.twitter.com/pjQKfrSb3c— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 26, 2015

Isn’t that special?
by Tom Sullivan

Re: Trans-Pacific Partnership investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals.

Query: If corporations can sue over loss of “expected future profits” they didn’t earn, can people get food over loss of “expected future work”?

It has always seemed to me that people should be holding the corporate leash, not wearing the collar. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” Yet we seem ready to hand mega-corporations a new and improved leash.

TPP is a “sellout of democracy” by “well-intentioned, sophisticated, realistic people … used to disregarding democracy when they want to accomplish something important,” writes Duke law school’s Jedediah Purdy at Huffington Post (emphasis mine):

From what we know of the TPP, it works as an economic policy straitjacket, locking its members into a shared set of market rules. It even brings in “investor-state dispute settlement” — a fancy term for allowing foreign corporations to sue governments whose lawmaking interferes with their profits, outside the courts of law, in suits resolved by private arbitrators. All of that is fundamentally anti-democratic. It reverses the basic and proper relationship between a political community and its economy. But plenty of Americans are seeking just that reversal. Not all of them believe the market is perfect and magical; but they believe it works, more or less, and that democracy does not. They are more than half right that this democracy, “our democracy” (a phrase that’s hard to say without irony), does not work. And that is the reality that makes their anti-democratic agreement so plausible.

I just said it in plain English. That extra-legal process violates not only democratic principles, but all the “Makers” and “personal responsibility” bullshit our corporate Brahmins spew to keep the rest of us in line — especially the poorest among us. But when you are that special, living your hypocrisy is just another of the perks.

The Courage to Make Others Suffer
by Batocchio

On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. . . . Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

– Hubris, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn (via Jon Schwarz).

“I must say, I’m a little envious,” Bush said. “If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.”

“It must be exciting for you . . . in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks,” Bush said.

– A 2008 videoconference between Bush and U.S. military and civilian personnel.

In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

– Richard Cohen, looking back on the Iraq War in 2006.

There’s a breed of pedigreed dolt endemic to Washington, D.C. They determine their opinions socially, not empirically; what “everybody knows” trumps facts any old day. Their notion of tough, hard-nosed realism invariably entails that other people should suffer, from the blithe imperialism that cheers on unnecessary wars to the ‘sensible centrism’ that insists that unnecessary cuts to the social safety net are absolutely imperative. (The occasional safely contrarian view offers some novelty and the gloss of independence without truly challenging the establishment framework.) They remain cheerfully cloistered from the effects of their pronouncements about what the less privileged should be doing (and should be having done to them).

Among this crowd, going to war – or rather, sending others to war – is not a matter of careful deliberation; it is a matter of fashion.

Supporting and opposing war are not automatically respectable and equally valid positions; requiring a high threshold for war is the position of basic sanity, akin to a doctor making sure that amputating a limb is actually necessary before proceeding. A truly unavoidable conflict can be argued for with evidence and reason. If instead a war advocate lies, or constantly shifts rationales, or routinely exaggerates and fear-mongers, or slanders the patriotism of skeptics, or seems eager for war… it’s cause for grave concern. Human beings will die in a war; death cannot be undone. Inevitably, not only supposed villains will suffer. Someone who can’t be bothered even to pretend to treat war with the appropriate weight should not be trusted.

With a new presidential election cycle starting, we’ve seen many politicians, pundits and supposed journalists make revisionist claims about how the Iraq War started. It’s crucial to remember that it wasn’t an honest mistake nor was the case for war honestly made. Fighting against memory hole efforts are Digby, Paul Krugman (one and two), James Fallows, Josh Marshall, Greg Sargent, driftglass (one, two and three), Steve Benen, David Corn, Duncan Black, Matt Taibbi, the Columbia Journalism Review and The Daily Show, Balloon Juice, and I’m sure many more I’ve missed. (It’s worth noting that the revisionism started almost immediately, and generally went unchallenged.)

Some war advocates had reservations; far more were largely uncritical of the Bush administration’s case for war. There was a disturbing (if sadly unsurprising) trend of treating war skeptics as unpatriotic or even traitors. The key problem with belligerently cheerleading war (at its worst, gleeful bullying), wasn’t that such people were socially obnoxious, although they were – it’s that they helped create a climate where authority wasn’t questioned, and skepticism was pilloried. They increased the chances of an unnecessary war. They increased the chances of unnecessary death and destruction. Avoiding those consequences – requiring a high threshold for armed conflict – is the entire point of war skepticism. It’s not a game. Likewise, the reason to point out that the Iraq War was sold dishonestly, and that war advocates were wrong (or dishonest), is not for social bragging rights, but to prevent unnecessary wars in the future.

All of this should be completely obvious, but among the political class, it isn’t. Far too many war advocates then and now treat such decisions as an issue of status and face, an abstract, intellectual game or “a low-stakes cocktail party argument” (to borrow a phrase from Jamelle Bouie). A few former war advocates have learned something profound, but for most of them, a true self-accounting would be too painful (and deep reflection has never been their nature anyway). Cloistered dolts rarely suffer for their careless decisions. And for many advocates, whether delusional or coldly clear-eyed, war was and is profitable. In Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, the instigator often suffers the effects of his own hubris, and it can lead to reflection, redemption, or at least recognition – for the audience if not the character. In politics and warmongering, hubris characteristically entails that someone else pay the costs.

(For more, see a 2013 post, “The Dogs of War.”)