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Month: November 2015

The GOP’s Days of Rage

Published by digby on November 24, 2015

The GOP’s Days of Rage

by digby

My Salon piece takes a look at right wing rage — and where it’s coming from.

According to the latest Pew poll, Republicans are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. They are, as usual, deeply confused about what government does and what they want it to do, but whatever it is, they’re very angry about it. Thirty-two percent of GOP voters say they are mad at the government, while only 12 percent of Democrats say the same. According to Pew, among the truly engaged (like those, say, who go to a political rally a year before an election), 42 percent of Republicans are angry compared to 11 percent of Democrats.
Both sides say you cannot trust the government, but Democrats’ views don’t change depending on who is in the White House while Republicans are far more trusting of government when one of their own is president:
In Barack Obama’s six years as president, 13% of Republicans, on average, have said they can trust the government always or most of the time – the lowest level of average trust among either party during any administration dating back 40 years. During George W. Bush’s presidency, an average of 47% of Republicans said they could trust the government. By contrast, the share of Democrats saying they can trust the government has been virtually unchanged over the two administrations (28% Bush, 29% Obama).
It doesn’t appear, then, that despite their constant bleating about the predations of big government, this mistrust is truly a matter of principle with Republicans. Republican voters simply believe that government is the enemy unless Republicans are in charge of every bit of it. This famous quote by Grover Norquist in the wake of the 2004 GOP victory perfectly expresses how they believe government is supposed to work:
“Once the [Democratic] minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”
And while one might think that having majorities of governors and state legislatures, running both houses of Congress and a majority on the Supreme Court would make them hate the government less, without having control of every branch, they are convinced that they are an aggrieved minority who are losing at every turn: “large majorities of both conservative Republicans (81 percent) and moderate and liberal Republicans (75 percent) say their political side loses more often than it wins.” And heaven forbid they might compromise to get some of what they want. If they can’t have it all, it’s not worth anything.
None of this is really news to anyone who’s been watching the presidential race unfold this year. The Trump phenomenon alone is enough to convince observers that while a large chunk of the Republican base is ticked off at just about everything — especially immigrants, Muslims and President Obama. But what really makes them see red, and what Trump (and to some extent Carson) articulates the best, is the visceral loathing for what they call “political correctness.” (That’s what what people used to call “good manners” or “basic human decency.”) The social disapprobation against being rude and demeaning completely enrages them.
Some conservatives openly defy any restriction on their God-given right to be puerile jerks:
(Helen Keller jokes were considered gross and out of bounds even when I was a kid and that was long before the term “political correctness” existed.)
Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham come to mind as similarly infantile and crude. But mostly they are screaming mad. They are the leaders of the angry right who have been stoking the discontent of their audiences for many years, creating the subculture of right wing rage that is finding its political expression in the candidacy of Donald Trump.
No less than the Wall Street Journal made note of their influence and how they’ve managed to turn it against the very establishment that helped create them:
Consider the folks who regularly tune in to conservative talk radio. These listeners expect a steady diet of Obama-bashing, so it’s hardly surprising that not one surveyed for a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in late October approved of the job Barack Obama is doing as president.
That anger translates to how these Americans view the country as a whole. Some 98% think the country is headed in the wrong direction, a view regularly reinforced on the airwaves by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and other talk-radio hosts who don’t have much nice to say about GOP leaders in Washington, either.
A decade ago, Republicans touted conservative talk radio as a foolproof medium to communicate directly with their most ardent supporters. Democrats and liberal groups tried to replicate that success by building their own left-leaning television and radio stations, with far less success.
Now, the tables have turned. Republican leaders in Washington are under siege from their own activists, in part, because conservative radio hosts are almost as likely to rail against the party brass in Congress as they are to lament Mr. Obama’s failings in the Oval Office.
This is a switch from the days when Rush would have the whole Bush family on his show in 2008 so they could kiss each other’s rings:

There’s more at the link.

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UnitedHealth may quit the Obamacare market, by @Gaius_Publius

Published by digby on November 24, 2015

UnitedHealth may quit the Obamacare market

by Gaius Publius
 

Thanks to the Democratic primary, there’s been a lot of discussion on the left about the benefits and ills of ACA, the Obamacare public health law, versus single-payer and “Medicare For All,” which Bernie Sanders is advocating. Clinton is a strong defender of the ACA and a strong, if disingenuous, critic of Sanders’ Medicare For All.

From the second debate, here’s Clinton defending Obamacare over Medicare For All (h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism for quotes and analysis):

NANCY CORDES: Secretary Clinton, back in– (CHEERING) Secretary Clinton, back in 1994, you said that momentum for a single-payer system would sweep the country. That sounds Sandersesque. But you don’t feel that way anymore. Why not–

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, the revolution never came. (LAUGHTER) And I waited and I’ve got the scars to show for it. We now have this great accomplishment known as the Affordable Care Act [ACA]. And– I don’t think we should have to be defending it amount [sic] Democrats. We ought to be working to improve it and prevent Republicans from both undermining it and even repealing it. […]

I’ve looked at the legislation that Senator Sanders has proposed. And basically, he does eliminate the Affordable Care Act, eliminate private insurance, eliminates Medicare, eliminates Medicaid, Tricare, children’s health insurance program. Puts it all together in a big program which he then hands over to the state to administer. […]

And I have to tell you, I would not want, if I lived in Iowa, Terry Branstad administering my healthcare. (APPLAUSE) (CHEERING) I– I think– I think as Democrats, we ought to proudly support the Affordable Care Act, improve it, and make it the model that we know it can be–

The middle paragraph in Clinton’s reply above is disingenuous; it makes people fear what they’re losing while mischaracterizing what they get in exchange. Here’s Sanders on his proposal:

BERNIE SANDERS: We don’t– we don’t eliminate Medicare. We expand Medicare to all people. And we will not, under this proposal, have a situation that we have right now with the Affordable Care Act. We’ve got states like South Carolina and many other Republican states that because of their right-wing political ideology are denying millions of people the expansion of Medicaid that we passed in the Affordable Care Act. Ultimately, we have got to say as a nation, Secretary Clinton, is healthcare a right of all people or is it not?

As I said, the debate has been reignited on the left. It’s also been reignited among the populace, as more and more people are finding they don’t qualify for subsidies but can’t pay the premiums without signing up for large deductibles:

Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless

Obama administration officials, urging people to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, have trumpeted the low premiums available on the law’s new marketplaces.

But for many consumers, the sticker shock is coming not on the front end, when they purchase the plans, but on the back end when they get sick: sky-high deductibles that are leaving some newly insured feeling nearly as vulnerable as they were before they had coverage.

“The deductible, $3,000 a year, makes it impossible to actually go to the doctor,” said David R. Reines, 60, of Jefferson Township, N.J., a former hardware salesman with chronic knee pain. “We have insurance, but can’t afford to use it.” …

That’s just a taste; much more at the link.

You can see the controversy, which in truth started the day the ACA was proposed and which has more or less never stopped, even on the left. The problem for single-payer (Medicare For All) advocates is, what to do? Has the failing private insurance industry, which the ACA was designed to prop up, fully and permanently occupied the space that should have belonged to a public program like Medicare? How can we “fix” (“improve” in Clinton’s framing) the ACA in a way that gives us what, frankly, most citizens would support — again, Medicare for all of us?

Which is why this news is so intriguing…

UnitedHealth may quit the Obamacare market

The industry that ACA was designed to prop up may be starting to abandon it. Bloomberg:

UnitedHealth May Quit Obamacare Market in Blow to Health Law

The U.S.’s biggest health insurer is considering pulling out of Obamacare, a month after saying it would expand its presence in the program.

UnitedHealth Group Inc. is scaling back marketing efforts for plans it’s selling this year under the Affordable Care Act, and may quit the business entirely in 2017 because it has proven to be more costly than expected. It’s an abrupt shift from October, when the health insurer said it was planning to sell coverage in 11 new markets next year, bringing its total to 34. The company also cut its 2015 earnings forecast.

A pull-back would deal a significant blow to President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement. While UnitedHealth has been slower than some of its rivals to sell Obamacare policies since new government-run marketplaces for the plans opened in late 2013, the announcement may indicate that other insurers are struggling, said Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst at Mizuho Securities.

“If one of the largest and presumably, by reputation and experience, the most sophisticated of the health plans out there can’t make money on the exchanges, then one has to question whether the exchange as an institution is a viable enterprise,” Skolnick said.

UnitedHealth said it suspended marketing its individual exchange plans and is cutting or eliminating commissions for brokers who sell the coverage. …

There’s quite a bit more. For example:

Insurers have struggled to profit from the government-run marketplaces created by Obamacare. About a dozen non-profit “co-op” plans created under the Affordable Care Act have failed, after charging too little to cover the cost of patients’ medical care, and because an Obama administration fund designed to stabilize the market paid out just 12.6 percent of what insurers requested. And Anthem last month said some rivals were offering premiums too low to provide the coverage patients require and book a profit.

If the industry that ACA was supposed to benefit won’t offer policies, and if policies that are offered are unaffordable for those who fall “in the cracks” of the population that was supposed to benefit, what’s next for ACA?

Letting the blackmailer kill the hostage

The argument all along for Obama’s health care proposal, minus his never-intended-to-be-enacted public option, was the number of uninsured Americans combined with the lack of alternatives the administration would support. If you wanted to insure uninsured Americans, you could take ACA as offered, or take nothing. For progressives in the House, who insisted on a public option (though most supported single-payer), this was a very tough vote. Would they bend to administration blackmail — “Vote for the ACA or millions go without health insurance” — or would they tell the blackmailer, “You’re the one with the power. You’re the one with the gun. It’s not my fault you didn’t give us a bill we could vote for.”

Ultimately, the entire House progressive caucus took “Dennis Kucinich’s plane ride” and enough let the blackmailer win, thus passing the ACA into law. They couldn’t, in our blackmail metaphor, let the blackmailer kill the hostage. Perhaps the right decision, perhaps not, but it’s why we’re here today.

Will health insurers kill the ACA?

But the ACA’s holes, its inadequacies, its dependence on the private health insurance industry to “do the right thing,” remain. UnitedHealth is not “doing the right thing,” if the right thing is serving the public. They are doing the right thing if the right thing is serving themselves and their CEO compensation package:

UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley made more than $66 million in 2014

CEO Pay Watch UnitedHealth Group Inc.
Stephen Hemsley, CEO
Total compensation: $66,125,208 for the year ended Dec. 31, 2014
Salary: $1,300,000
Non-equity incentive pay: $3,949,000
Other compensation: $107,479
Exercised stock options: $45,569,049
Value realized on vesting shares: $15,199,680
New stock options: 83,918

Keep that in mind the next time someone talks about a CEO’s “salary.” Hemsley made $66 million with a base salary of just $1.3 million. Nice multiplier. His “non-equity incentive pay” alone was three times that. Tell me he’s not a predator.

The broader point though may be more important than one man’s predation. If progressives weren’t able to replace the ACA with Medicare for All, will the insurance companies inadvertently do the job instead, by killing the ACA themselves and clearing space for a rewrite?

Is this the end of the ACA? Stranger things have happened.

Blue America has endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. If you’d like to help him, click here. This page also lists every progressive incumbent and candidate who has endorsed him. You can adjust the split in any way you wish.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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The iCondemn® for Republicans by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 24, 2015

The iCondemn® for Republicans
by Tom Sullivan

Donald Trump’s brand of 21st-century McCarthyism rolls on unchecked by a Republican party fearful of taking him on, and giving tacit approval through its silence.

When challenged, Trump doubles down, citing vague sources he fails to name. He has a “pretty good source.” He is “hearing … from other people” something no one else has heard. Trump got “hundreds of calls” from people who imagined they saw what he imagined he saw. James Downie writes at the Washington Post:

It’s all eerily similar to a claim made by a U.S. senator in Wheeling, W.Va., 65 years ago: “I have here a list of 205 [State Department employees] that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party.” Sen. Joe McCarthy never revealed where he got that list; the number changed from 205 all the way down to seven, and he never provided any concrete evidence. But, as Trump knows, McCarthy’s lack of evidence was no hindrance to tapping into the fears of a portion of the U.S. electorate. In those days, communists were coming for you; now, Muslims and immigrants are, and in both cases, the U.S. government won’t stop them. The message remains: Be afraid. The more that people buy into the message, the worse off America is.

Dana Milbank has no sympathy for Republican cowardice in not calling down Trump:

Trump gets ever more base in his bigotry — and yet, with few and intermittent exceptions, rival candidates, party leaders and GOP lawmakers decline to call him out. So he continues to rise, benefiting from tacit acceptance of his intolerance.

Or more than tacit. Carson, taking questions from reporters Monday afternoon, said that he, too, had seen nonexistent “newsreels” of the supposed cheering by New Jersey Muslims on 9/11. (His spokesman said later that Carson had been mistaken.)

Did they both see the Clearwater Virgin in window stains, too?

Milbank continues, “Yet no matter how far Trump goes, most of his competitors stay silent, or mild, or deferential.”

You know, it’s too bad there are not Republican Muslims cheering Trump from New Jersey rooftops. Maybe then the GOP leadership would find the cojones to demand someone in their party condemn Trump — the way conservatives demand random Muslims publicly condemn every act of terrorism by a lunatic fringe that claims Islam as justification. We could even make it easy. Perhaps with a Republican version of the iCondemn® app for Muslims:

With the iCondemn®, Muslims can say “not in my name” at the speed of life!™ And non-Muslims no longer need to wonder whether 1.6 billion Muslims around the world feel the guilt and sincerely apologize for that latest reprehensible crime some idiot carried out while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

The iCondemn® for Republicans would make it easy and quick for Republicans to apologize for every offensive, nativist comment from Trump or any other conservative spokesperson, as well as for any act of domestic terrorism. The iCondemn® for Republicans would leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that they are not Trump coddlers just giving lip service to American principles. Hell, Trump probably would put his name on the thing.

*Sigh* #humansaretheproblem

Published by digby on November 24, 2015

*Sigh*

by digby

Another species gone because the human species is so stupid and superstitious:

Nola, one of only four known northern white rhinoceroses, died on Sunday at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, the park said in a statement. The park said that Nola, 41, had a bacterial infection, as well as age-related health issues, and that officials made the decision to euthanize her after her condition worsened overnight on Saturday.

“We’re absolutely devastated by this loss, but resolved to fight even harder to #EndExtinction,” the park wrote in a Facebook post, adding, “let this be a warning of what is happening to wildlife everywhere.”

The northern white rhinoceros is the most endangered animal on earth, according to the San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy. Frequent civil wars and widespread poaching of rhinos in Africa, driven largely by demand in Asia for ground-up horns as an ingredient in medicine, has caused their numbers to plummet. Only about 29,000 rhinos remain in the wild today, down from about 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century, according to Save the Rhino, a charity.

The San Diego conservancy estimated that three of the animals were killed each day.

Nola had lived at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, Calif., since 1989 and spent most of her time as a resident of the South Africa exhibit. A video posted to the zoo’s YouTube channel in January showed her ambling slowly through the dry grasses and shallow ponds of her 65-acre enclosure, poking at the ground with her gracefully curved horn…

The northern white rhinoceros originally comes from Central Africa, said Andy Blue, the associate curator of mammals at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, in a video posted to the wildlife conservancy website.

They kill them to grind up their horns for “medicine” so men can get erections. There is nothing more important on the planet than erections.

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Yes, we really are in danger

Published by digby on November 24, 2015

Yes, we really are in danger

by digby

Via Think Progress, some rationality:

Speaking to MSNBC on Saturday morning, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was asked to discuss the growing anxiety over Syrian refugees entering the United States, purportedly over concerns they could be potential agents for militant groups such as ISIS. Rawlings staunchly rejected the assertion that Syrians are somehow uniquely prone to violence, saying he is more concerned with the rise of white supremacy and the recent flurry of mass shootings committed by white men.

“I am more fearful of large gatherings of white men that come into schools, theaters and shoot people up, but we don’t isolate young white men on this issue,” Rawlings said.

There are hundreds of graphs showing the death toll from gun violence out there. But these two are the ones that get me:

Conventional wingnuttia sounds almost tame these days

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

Conventional wingnuttia

by digby

If you think Trump and Carson are the only looney tunes in the bunch, think again:

“One more liberal justice and our right to keep and bear arms is taken away from us by an activist court. One more liberal justice and they begin sandblasting and bulldozing veterans memorials throughout this country. One more liberal justice and we lose our sovereignty to the United Nations and the World Court.”

That’s Cruz, of course, sounding like a conventional wingnut. I’m not sure it’s enough anymore.

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Who among these Republicans has the courage to call it what it is?

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

Who among these Republicans has the courage to call it what it is?

by digby

Michael Tomasky wonders when any members of the GOP will call Trump out for what he is. And he reminds us of a brave Republican from yesteryear, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who did just that when Joe McCarthy started his crusade and nobody said anything:

There’s precedent for the courageous path, should anyone choose to take it. On Feb. 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that communists were working in the State Department. The months that followed were very much like these last five months of the Trump ascendancy, as the official party stood mute in the face of the hysteria created by one of its number.

Then in June, one Republican senator said “enough.” Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was a freshman senator, having taken her husband’s seat. She took to the Senate floor and gave a 15-minute speech (PDF), which has gone down in history as her “Declaration of Conscience,” that all of us, starting with leading Republicans ought to be reading this week. Two choice excerpts:

“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge which it faced back in Lincoln’s day. The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation—in addition to being a party which unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.”

“The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people… Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Six of her Republican colleagues signed with her a statement of principles that began: “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” So that’s what people can do in the face of extremism, if they want to.

They’d want to if it weren’t for the fact that the right wing media they created is powerful enough to destroy them if they come out against Trump. Hoist on their own petard …

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QOTD: A Trump person

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

QOTD: A Trump person

by digby

Robert Kiger of Citizens For Restoring USA, a Super PAC supporting Trump’s presidential bid:

Kiger: “I think [Black Lives Matter] is a farce. I think they’re just there to disrupt. If they really care about black lives, they need to pick up a banner and go to the south side of Chicago, where black lives are being slaughtered on a daily basis.”

CNN: “So they don’t have the right to protest at a Trump rally?”

Kiger:“No they don’t, really. Look, I wouldn’t go into a black church and start screaming ‘White Lives Matter.’ People are trying to elect a president.”

Trump rallies are for white people to pick a president. I think that was already obvious but it’s good to see one of his prominent supporters acknowledge it.

By the way, I don’t think Dylan Roof screamed out “white lives matter” before he opened fire in Charleston that day, but it’s good to know that this fellow wouldn’t do that…

Update: he also said this —

Donald Trump has “gone out of his way to be polite” but “enough is enough. We’re trying to elect the next president of the United States here. They don’t really have a cause they’re trying to bring to the forefront. Being in Birmingham, Alabama, going in and disrupting that thing, that’s no place for BlackLivesMatter to try to bring their issues to the forefront.”

Birmingham Alabama is no place for African Americans to be protesting. Huh.

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The spies and the cops seize an opportunity

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

The spies and the cops seize an opportunity

by digby

For Salon this morning, I wrote about the government national security bureaucracy’s predictable reaction to the Paris attacks today — give us more power. This is an excerpt:

For all of his racist and eliminationist rhetoric last week, there’s something else Trump said that hasn’t gotten quite the same amount of attention. Before he meandered into the idea of registering Muslims in a database he made a much more ominous general statement:
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Coming from Trump that hardly merits a second thought. But unfortunately, in the wake if the Paris attacks, this is actually a pretty mainstream view among politicians of all partisan stripes. First there were the instantaneous shrieks blaming Edward Snowden for the attacks, the most lurid coming from ex-CIA director James Woolsey who said, “I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.” (Even Trump’s repeated execution fantasies on the stump aren’t quite that vivid.)
And there have been rumors swirling about the use of encrypted Playstation and various other nefarious uses of technology that will have to be stopped immediately. (Of course it was just a year ago that everyone was saying we had to have more encryption in order to protect against the kind of hacking that happened to Sony.) From the earliest moments after the horrifying events, government officials have been publicly speculating that the terrorists used sophisticated methods that can only be thwarted by allowing more government surveillance with fewer safeguards. The usual suspects are pushing to have even more leeway to spy on citizens without due process and if history is any guide, they are very likely to get their way.
My colleague Elias Isquith’s fascinating interview with Charlie Savage, NYTimes national security reporter and author of the new book called “Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,” about how President Obama evolved on national security and the influence of the permanent national security apparatus, dug into the dynamic that makes that happen.
Savage observed that the opposition to Bush’s policies on which Obama and most Democrats ran in 2008, was actually based on two different strands of thought. The first was the opposition to the Bush and Cheney views on presidential power and American military hegemony, which held that the president had massive unilateral authority and that America needn’t adhere to international law.
The other strand of thought comes from the civil libertarians who agreed that those programs were illegal because the president did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally undertake them, but also believed the programs themselves were unconstitutional on their face.
In practical terms that means that the first group opposed the war in Iraq and torture and warrantless surveillance under the Bush administration because they were not properly authorized. The other groups opposed those policies on the merits of the policies themselves. Together they formed the opposition to Bush’s national security policies and it successfully brought the Democrats to power. But the rationale for opposing those policies were different and Democrats have been confused by this ever since.
However, Savage’s thesis about the two strands shows itself starkly within the political class and it’s something to which voters who care about these issues should pay attention. He characterizes it as the CEOs vs the lawyers:
Bush and Cheney were CEOs by background. They did not put a lot of lawyers in policymaking roles around them. The lawyers they did pick, especially in their first term, tended to have these pretty idiosyncratic views of executive power; and, as a result, they’re able to put in these wide-ranging changes, to have the the government run like a business. Overnight, it’s like, “we’re going to have military commissions”; no further ado; no second-guessing.
Obama and his administration are quite the opposite. Obama and Joe Biden, of course, are both lawyers and showed a clear tendency to put lawyers into policymaking roles around them. And this has consequences, having government-by-lawyer and not government-by-CEO. Lawyers are very incremental; lawyers have to really engage with the other side, because they have to prepare for everybody’s argument; they have to value process. That means they are going to be cautious about changing the status quo. They’re going to be cautious about dislodging what Bush has equipped to them.
I have long thought of this “lawyerly” approach as the “process dodge,” by which I mean that by focusing on whether the president is going through the proper hoops you don’t really have to engage with the policy itself. We saw this a lot with the Iraq war where you had many opponents making the argument that the “real problem” was that the president didn’t get UN approval before going in. They got credit for being against that war even though they hedged their bets by saying what they really cared about was the “process” not that the policy was wrong.
There were similar fights over the policies of torture, surveillance, Guantanamo etc. Some argued they were wrong on the merits. But others opposed the Bush administration over their end run through the OIC and the warrantless wiretapping and insistence that habeas corpus didn’t apply etc. In fact, acting Attorney General James Comey was lauded as a hero for the “Ashcroft bedside crisis” because he didn’t believe the White House had legal authority to authorize internet data mining. The outcome of that brave stand wasn’t exactly inspiring however. The program was suspended briefly and then went on unimpeded under a different legal basis with Comey’s blessing. (Now that Comey is head of the FBI we see the problem with failing to recognize that that those who believe process is everything are often not civil libertarians.)
Savage explained how this phenomenon played out in the Obama administration. During the period he was running for president, many of those policies were brought into line by Congress, which very cooperatively legalized them for the next president. On the trail Obama was obviously one of the lawyerly types who believed that the problems under Bush and Cheney derived from their willingness to stretch the law. He famously came off the campaign trail to vote for telecom immunity from prosecution. This is how the lawyer solves the problem: Make it legal and it’s all good. Savage says that by the time Obama came into office, he felt that most of these thorny problems had come into compliance with the law.
So the truth is that President Obama never really embraced the civil liberties position which would have looked at all the post-9/11 practices through a simpler prism of the Bill of Rights and simple morality. Instead, the congress legalized them or changed them just enough to fit into a legal framework and the practices went on unimpeded.  This is how the process dodge works. You don’t have to take a stand on whether or not the policy is right but only whether it is “legal” and those are not necessarily the same thing.
This is where President Obama was when he started his term. According to Savage, when he was tested with the “underwear bomber” case, even the process argument was no longer operative.

More at the link.

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“Strength and stamina”

Published by digby on November 23, 2015

“Strength and stamina”

by digby

Trump:

“They only understand strength,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t understand weakness. Somebody like Jeb, and others that are running against me — and by the way, Hillary is another one. I mean, Hillary is a person who doesn’t have the strength or the stamina, in my opinion, to be president. She doesn’t have strength or stamina. She’s not a strong enough person to be president.”

I wrote this last April:

As we’ve seen many times over the years, foreign policy and national security are particularly tricky for Democrats even when one is a certified war hero like John Kerry (or even John Kennedy). Even the hardcore Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party suffered for the fact that the right had associated them with socialism during the Great Depression and turned that into sympathy for Communism. By the time the ’60s were over, they were routinely portrayed as cowardly and treasonous for opposing the Vietnam War and characterized in “feminized” terms such as “weak” and “emotional.” (Here’s a particularly crude example of the genre of recent vintage.)

All Democratic politicians have had to fight that stereotype ever since then. And all Democratic presidents have struggled while in office to deal with it. Even the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden under President Obama failed to stop them from calling him a weak and feckless leader, even to the point where they are willing to risk nuclear war to make their point. This dynamic has, over time, succeeded in making Democrats more hawkish and Republicans downright reckless.

So where does this leave Hillary Clinton? She seems to have as good a resume for the Commander in Chief job as any woman could have with her close proximity to power in the White House for eight years, her eight years as senator and four years as Secretary of State. The only thing missing is a stint in the armed forces — which is also missing on the CV of most of the Republicans presenting themselves as fierce warriors, so it should be no harm, no foul there. (The exceptions being Texas Governor Rick Perry, a pilot in the Air Force, and South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, a member of the Air Force JAG corps.) But stereotypes are very hard to dislodge; even with her reputation for toughness, and despite her sterling resume, Clinton will be pushing against something very primal. The Republicans know this, which is why some of us have been pretty sure they would try to frame this election as a national security election if they could. Those elections always give them an advantage in any case, and if a woman is the standard bearer it stands to reason that advantage would be even greater.

This isn’t just about being a woman,of course, it’s also about being old even though Trump is older than Clinton. And he’s the one without any stamina — he whined like a toddler after that 3 hour debate and had to take several days off afterwards. He holds on to his podium like it’s a walker and about halfway through he slumps over it like an elephant who’s been hit with a tranquilizer dart. The man is a pampered billionaire, not an athlete, and it’s obvious.

But this will be a theme among the Republicans, no matter who is it. Rubio, for instance, is already hitting hard on the age factor.

Trump has articulated the feminized “weakness” argument in his crude fashion. He used it against Bush the way Republicans have used it against Democrats like Gore and Kerry for many years. Using it against a woman is entirely predictable.

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