Author: Tom Sullivan

Of politicians and poison pills
by Tom Sullivan

First things first. If you haven’t called Washington to weigh in on (or inveigh against) Fast Track — it comes up for a vote in the House today — find your representative’s number here. Operators are standing by.

As Reuters calls it:

President Barack Obama’s quest for “fast-track” negotiating authority on a Pacific Rim trade deal passed its initial tests in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday ahead of a final vote on Friday on contentious trade measures.

By a vote of 397-32, the House approved a measure authorizing funds to help workers who lose their jobs as a result of trade deals, without cutting Medicare health benefits for the elderly to pay for it, as the Senate had proposed.

Turns out Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim wasn’t enough of a poison pill. The Senate had slipped Medicare cuts into the Fast Track trade authorization package. A late-night deal between Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stripped the provision on Tuesday, Pelosi helping smooth the way for passage. She’s just helpful that way.

Reuters continues:

The House also voted 217-212 in favor of procedural rules that set up Friday’s votes on the core issue before it: the fast-track bill. Already approved by the Senate, fast-track is needed, Obama says, to help him promptly conclude a 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.

Eight Democrats were also helpful. They jumped in at the last minute to shore up the vote for passage. Howie has got a little list. Gaius has more gory details
below.

The Walmart of states
by Tom Sullivan

A Montana man committed suicide last weekend after murdering his family. His wife was “mocking” him, he told a friend. Police described the survivalist as “a Constitutionalist who didn’t believe in government.” They’re like oxymorons who don’t believe in contradiction that way.

Speaking of not believing in government, Rick Perry, the returning presidential contestant and former Texas governor, boasts how the job-creating, Texas economic “miracle” is a model for how to run the country. (It was the same with another former Texas governor-president. What happened with that?)

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson finds the Texas miracle less than miraculous. By two measures of job quality, “Texas rates dead last.” Texans have the highest percentage
of people without health insurance in the country. What’s more, Meyerson writes:

The second measure of job quality is the share of people qualifying for government poverty programs who are nonetheless employed. In April, the University of California Center for Labor Research and Education released a study quantifying the number of Americans receiving Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, children’s health insurance coverage or the earned-income tax credit who have an employed family member. Low-paid work has become so prevalent, the study showed, that the yearly tab of federal dollars going to working families was $128 billion. The state with the highest share of funds going to such families was Texas.

By this measure, Texas is the Walmart of states — something else Texans who don’t believe in government can be proud of. After all, Walmart is a BIG box store.

The 49 other states are subsidizing Perry’s “so-called Texas miracle,” Meyerson writes. “Texas’s use of federal dollars to keep its workers afloat is only deepened by its favor-the-rich-and-soak-the-poor tax policies.”

Should he succeed in taking his model national, Rick Perry’s Texas-sized plan for America, I guess, is to recruit enough “downline” countries to do for America what America is already doing for Texas.

I wonder, does Perry also sell Amway?

Oh, Lawdy-Lawd, he’s desp’at!
by Tom Sullivan

This Tweet went by the other day and I just had to go back and find it:

wow. Gov Walker wants taxpayers to pay HALF of construction costs for Milwaukee Buck's nice new arena; http://t.co/UHnd0FdsK4— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) June 8, 2015

Comparisons have been made and disputed between Walker’s diversion of state funds to the arena and his cuts in state education funding. And yes, team owners have conned Democrats too. But the specifics of the Wisconsin deal are not what interests me this morning.

These deals always remind me of the Blazing Saddles scene in which Sheriff Bart puts his own gun to his head and threatens to shoot himself. Except with sports arena deals it is owners threatening to shoot their teams, “Build us a new stadium or your team gets it!” Flustered officials blurt out, “Hold it, men. He’s not bluffing.” Then they ante up taxpayer dollars. We pay them to make money.

We regularly decry corporate capitalism’s race to the bottom. But the phrasing assumes there is a bottom. I’m not so sure. Considering offshoring, tax incentives, and tax repatriation legislation, you have to wonder just what level of taxation — including none — would rent-seeking, modern corporations accept without whining, without looking for even more ways to squeeze blood from a stone or more work from workers for even less?

There is a runaway, kudzu-ish element to corporate capitalism, but there is a Tom Sawyer-ish feature as well. Public corporations won’t be satisfied until We the People are paying them for making a profit — the way Tom Sawyer tricked friends into paying for the privilege of whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. These sports arena deals remind us that when an Obama tells business owners, you didn’t build that, he’s right.

Pretty soon working people will be paying the elite in brass door knockers (or their equivalent) for building it for them.

Republicans pound sand
by Tom Sullivan

It is unlikely that Eugene Robinson wrote the online headline for his column today: “Republicans might as well pound sand.” But that is the gist of it. Their progress in weakening Hillary Clinton so far is “pretty close to zero.”

The  Democrats have the most admired woman in the country 17 out of the last 18 years. The Republicans have contenders bent on taking away health care from
over 6 million neighbors and throwing the weak to the wolves. Can’t imagine why they’re having trouble getting traction.

And while Republican presidential hopefuls are still emerging — the party seems to think it is still a couple bozos short of a clown car — Robinson believes Hillary Clinton is hitting all the right notes:

Her fiery speech last week in defense of voting rights was her campaign’s best moment so far. Clinton slammed several of the leading Republican candidates — by name — for their roles in GOP-led efforts to restrict the franchise through voter-ID laws and other means. And she called for automatic voter registration of all citizens upon reaching age 18.

Talk about hitting the right buttons. The big question about Clinton’s candidacy is whether she can inspire the coalition that twice elected President Obama — young people, minorities, women. Voting rights is an issue that reliably sends African Americans to the polls in large numbers. I’ll be surprised if Clinton doesn’t soon have major messages for Latinos on immigration policy and women on issues of reproductive rights.

How cynical, Republicans complain. Translation: How effective.

Meanwhile, says Robinson, the swelling Republican field is fighting over who gets to sit at the “adult table” when it comes time for televised debates. Squeezing them all onto one stage being as impractical as fitting them into that rhetorical car.

The Washington Spectator’s John Stoehr argues at Al Jazeera that it is not just stage space Republican candidates are fighting over. Those trying to out-conservative each other to satisfy activist primary voters will find that “the percentage of Republicans who identify as conservative has dropped 15 points since 2012,” according to Gallup. “There’s only so much GOP candidates should expect from a quickly contracting base.” Stoehr writes:

Meanwhile, the Democrats are enjoying the strong, diverse and growing support of the Obama electorate comprised of nonwhites and white liberals (educated, professionals living in urban centers). Those under 40 will see in Hillary Clinton a major candidate running on a platform of economic populism for the first time in their lives.

As for that, well, watch this space. But the voting rights speech got me where I live. As Michael Douglas once
said, I ain’t cheap, but I can be had.

Update: Speaking of throwing the weak to the wolves, “If you don’t want to pay for other people’s health insurance, you can’t live in a first world nation.“

Peking sitting ducks
by Tom Sullivan

So while most of the press is wondering when ISIS will kill us in our beds with their long, curved knives, or taking bets on how many clowns Republicans can fit into that car, I am watching this dispute over control of the South China Sea. It is the sort of thing that in the 20th century sometimes led to unpleasantness.

China has been rapidly building what is being called the Great Wall of Sand. Engineers and fleets of dredges have descended on the disputed Spratly Islands to construct artificial islands built from sand thrown atop reefs and capped with concrete and imposing buildings of unknown purpose. And a runway. Photos here. Worrisome yes, but militarily? Sitting ducks.

The Washington Post Sunday summarized what is going on:

For generations, the South China Sea was a regional common. Fishing boats from all of the surrounding countries would roam its waters, pausing now and then to trade cigarettes or potatoes or gossip.

But then Vietnam, followed by the Philippines, began staking claims to some of the islands, and now China is moving in, in a big way. Beijing is building up the outposts it has established, enlarging islands that it controls and claiming exclusive rights to fishing grounds.

Filipino fisherman are being run off their fishing grounds by gunmen in Chinese speedboats equipped with water cannons. With increased U.S. patrols and overflights, the Post reports, it seems as if the fishermen are being squeezed in “a geostrategic confrontation between the two great powers.”

The Philippines’ attempt two years ago to take China to court in The Hague over the fishing grounds came to nothing. China was a no-show.

The governor of Zambales province, Hermogenes E. Ebdane Jr., said he wonders what China’s ultimate goal is. “No one’s going to war over fish,” he said. His constituents, the fishermen, will have to find something else to do. But if this confrontation is about something bigger, Ebdane said, it’s unclear what role the Philippines might have.

China is clearly flexing its Great Power muscles the way the ascendant U.S. did after WWII and, no, it is unlikely anyone is going to war over fish. China is not one of those “crappy little countries” neocon chickenhawks are so eager to show who’s boss every ten years. Peter Beinart explains why the South China Sea dispute has not been a stump-speech topic for even the hawkish veteran, Sen. Lindsey Graham. Basically, it’s not good television:

Via the catchall of “radical Islam,” American politicians have transferred some of the anxiety sparked by ISIS to Iran: Today they have butcher’s knives; tomorrow, nukes! By contrast, China’s incremental moves to build islands in the South China Sea or even ram the occasional Filipino fishing boat produce far less drama. No matter how serious a challenge they pose to America’s role in the Pacific, they don’t appear to threaten American lives. And they won’t—until a confrontation between the Chinese and American militaries, in disputed ocean or airspace, raises the prospect of war. Until that happens, China’s challenge will remain on Page A17 of the newspaper.

For his part, James Fallows doesn’t believe these moves make China America’s “biggest threat,” which is something:

So let’s say that China is more important than the countries U.S. politicians spend the most time declaiming about—and important because of the potential benefits and the potential risks. That’s different from being the “biggest threat.” The United States needs people who think and talk more about China, not “more China hawks.”

Over the weekend, I caught up with what strategist Thomas PM Barnett (The Pentagon’s New Map) thinks about China lately. He has maintained that, over the long term, globalization would raise living standards across the world (including China) and reduce tensions, not raise them. We are too economically interdependent. China, for example, would not risk its biggest markets. Barnett still seems to believe that.[timestamp: 48:00 to 1:16:00]

Still, accidents happen, especially between great powers and on the high seas. The Enlightened-Self-Interested-Rational-Actors on Wall Street were not supposed to bring the economy that sustains them down on their heads and ours either. Sometimes it’s the lizard brain that makes the choices and the history. In the short term, never count out the lizard brain.

36 percent of a democracy
by Tom Sullivan

If as our messaging gurus advise, progressives’ goal should be to force opponents to publicly defend their noxious beliefs, then Hillary Clinton’s advocacy for automatic voter registration this week sets a tone we can only hope others from her party will echo going forward. If uber-patriots on the right believe America is the world’s greatest democracy, fine. They should support policies that encourage Americans to act as if that’s true, instead of locking in voting restrictions that help ensure we are only 36 percent of a democracy. Democracy is like freedom, isn’t it? More is better?

Writing for Washington Monthly, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin believe a big hurdle to a more progressive politics is the mistrust of government Republicans have carefully cultivated:

Much of the blame can be heaped on an obstructionist right blocking policies designed to help working families and on the priorities of conservatives in Congress and state legislatures seeking to advance the agenda of the wealthy. But progressives’ own deficiencies in articulating a vision of government that links collective action to individual empowerment and opportunity, and in defending the institutions of government from the predatory influence of outside interests, has also contributed to the steep decline in public support for government.

Nancy LeTourneau (also at Washington Monthly), reminds us that those obstructionist policies aren’t given the sanitizing sunlight they so richly deserve. She quotes former Republican Hill staffer Mike Lofgren’s 2011 confessional:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters’ confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

They are still obstructing, as Jonathan Bernstein reported for Bloomberg. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to block the president’s appointments, “slow-walking dozens of judges, ambassadors, members of government boards and everybody else”:

This isn’t about the specific nominees. Mostly, this is just an expression of contempt for the man in the Oval Office — and, really, contempt for the Constitution and the senators’ oath of office.

It is the Senate’s duty to defeat judicial nominees it believes (within reason) are outside the mainstream, and it absolutely should exercise the leverage it is given by the Constitution to secure influence over executive branch departments and agencies through confirmations. That’s not what’s happening here. McConnell and the Republicans are undermining the constitutional order by simply ignoring their responsibilities. That’s a big deal, and the press and anyone who cares about a functional government should be angry.

As Anat Shenker-Osorio said recently, problems have a source. If we don’t provide an origin story for voters, people will fill one in for themselves. That is what Lofgren was getting at. (And what I hear regularly from relations: it’s all “dirty politics.”)

Stanley Greenberg explains that Democrats will not be able to win back control of Congress unless they can woo back working-class whites and white unmarried women. Voters are well aware of how screwed up things are in Washington. They want it fixed:

What really strengthens and empowers the progressive economic narrative, however, is a commitment to reform politics and government. That may seem ironic or contradictory, since the narrative calls for a period of government activism. But, of course, it does make sense: Why would you expect government to act on behalf of the ordinary citizen when it is clearly dominated by special interests? Why would you expect people who are financially on the edge, earning flat or falling wages and paying a fair amount of taxes and fees, not to be upset about tax money being wasted or channeled to individuals and corporations vastly more wealthy and powerful than themselves?

We have arrived at a tipping point at the outset of the 2016 election cycle, where the demand to reform government is equal to or stronger than the demand to reform the economy. More accurately, reform can make it possible to use governmental policies to help the middle class. In short, it is reform first.

But included as part of that narrative is the message that the people best qualified to fix Washington are not those committed to monkey wrenching it. As long as the public believes nothing will change, we will still remain 36 percent of a democracy.

Wisconsin on everything
by Tom Sullivan

The vigor with which our corporate overlords have sought to put the plebs back in their places and return the stars and planets to their spheres has been as stunning as it is pathetic (last dying moments of a cobra?). Still, you’ve got to hand it to them. Like a Jack Russell with a knotted rope, they don’t give up easily. What’s worse, they know most of the rest of us do. Just the way they like it.

In a plot twist that would make Rod Serling proud, conservatives have treated “The Road to Serfdom” as a cookbook for the re-medievalization of society ever since Ronald Reagan broke the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981. It has been a race to the bottom (except for the top) ever since.

Mark LeVine observes for Al Jazeera, union membership is at a 100-year low in America. “In just the last two years, the percentage of unionized public employees dropped 2 points, just as union leaders feared and conservatives hoped.” Universities are next on the menu:

A similar process is already playing out nationally in academia. The share of the more than 1.5 million faculty (teachers at accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities) who are tenured or on tenure track is as low as a quarter by some counts — half the share of the 1970s and one-third of the 78 percent of the late 1960s, at the height of the postwar boom in university education. At the same time, the share of nontenured or adjunct faculty has skyrocketed to upward of 75 percent of teachers, while the number working in university administration and commanding outsize paychecks has grown massively. With the elimination of tenure, the drive to corporatize the university is reaching its end stages.

Wisconsin under Gov. Scott Walker is one of the premier laboratories for restructuring academia, writes LeVine:

It is not surprising, then, that conservatives — who have long attacked the notions of tenure, shared governance and academic freedom more broadly — would now set their eyes on Walker’s Wisconsin (it’s worth noting here that Walker did not graduate from college) as the moment to break the institution of tenure, based on the same corporate-dominated neoliberal principles that supported the near fatal weakening of unions a generation ago. In fact, as University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Richard Grusin wrote on his blog, Ragman’s Circles, the “daisy chain of Republican power” now extends from the governor to the regents he appoints, the system president they appoint and the chancellors he appoints.

There is little doubt that, should Wisconsin succeed, corporatized boards of private universities and state legislatures in the majority of Republican-governed states will jump on the bandwagon and move with lightning speed to remove tenure protections, shared governance and, ultimately, academic freedom protections from their universities.

And not just in Wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore previews the examination of Walker’s anti-labor ideology by University of Maryland’s Donald F. Kettl in the June/July/August issue of the Washington Monthly. Walker’s “accomplishments” include “the withdrawal of most collective bargaining rights for public employees, a harsh set of forced concessions from those employees to finance Walker’s own agenda, and then as a coup de grace, enactment of a Dixie-style ‘right to work’ law denying union shop contracts for private-sector unions as well.”

Molly Ivins once warned voters not to let Dubyas’s Mayberry Machiavellis anywhere near Washington or they would do to the country what they did to Texas: Texas on Everything. The same caution applies to Walker and Wisconsin. Kilgore concludes:

My own impression of Walker has always been that he represents a sort of hammer-headed approach to the application of conservative ideology: there’s no real passion or nuanced understanding in how he assesses problems—just an impressive ability to figure out exactly how far he can go in pursuing a prearranged agenda designed to reduce enemies to an impotent rage that he then uses to depict himself as courageous and invincible. There are partisans you can reason with and partisans that you know would be perfectly happy running a one-party authoritarian state. In that second camp Scott Walker proudly pitches his tent.

“Arf! Arf!” says Scotty.

Clinton “lets rip” on voting rights
by Tom Sullivan

County elections staff met here last night with party officials to discuss recruiting election judges and poll workers for the next two years.** It all went smoothly until a man in the back asked what was being done to prevent people from voting here and then voting absentee in another state. You might as well ask what North Carolina is doing to prevent its 10 million residents from robbing convenience stores in Florida.

The electoral paranoia behind that question — and the Republican-sponsored voting restrictions spawned nationwide by it — was on Hillary Clinton’s mind yesterday when she called for universal, automatic voter registration at a speech in Houston yesterday. Reporters knew the speech would be about voting rights, Rachel Maddow noted last night, but nobody knew Clinton was about to “let rip” on the subject of voting rights:

[W]e have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country—because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.

[snip]

North Carolina passed a bill that went after pretty much anything that makes voting more convenient or more accessible. Early voting. Same-day registration. The ability of county election officials to even extend voting hours to accommodate long lines.

Now what possible reason could there be to end pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and eliminate voter outreach in high schools?

Reason had nothing to do with it (as the gentleman’s question last night demonstrated). Clinton went on to criticize the Supreme Court for eviscerating a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But she reserved even harsher criticism for her GOP opponents: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. In the end, she called for modernizing registration nationally on the Oregon model:

And I believe we should go even further to strengthen voting rights in America. So today I am calling for universal, automatic voter registration. Every citizen, every state in the Union. Everyone, every young man or young woman should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18—unless they actively choose to opt out. But I believe this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy. Between a quarter and a third of all eligible Americans remain unregistered and therefore unable to vote.

Greg Sargent at Plum Line writes:

In political terms, Clinton’s call for universal voting registration appears to be a bid to energize millennial voters. As it is, the broader voting access push — like her recent moves leftward on immigration, climate change, and sentencing reform — is partly about mobilizing core Obama coalition groups, including minorities. Today’s proposal is more heavily focused on the young. After all, one of the key unknowns of the cycle is whether Clinton will be able to turn out Obama voters on the same levels he did, and young voters — who were excited by the historical nature of Obama’s candidacy — are key to that.

At the same time, Clinton making voting rights a presidential campaign issue puts Republicans in the position of defending their multitudinous efforts across the country to restrict access to the voting booth. Why do they want to lead they world’s oldest democracy when they seem bent on demolishing it by any means necessary?

As Clinton put it yesterday:

Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting. What part of democracy are they afraid of?

** This is the behind the scenes of democracy most voters never see. When they go to the polls on Election Day, voters see maybe five or six people working at their precinct. In my county there are 80 precincts. There are 100 counties in the state. The democratic process involves an awful lot of time and manpower (much of it volunteers), and not just during the weeks before general elections. Political parties are more than partisanship and campaign season. They help administer the democratic process itself.

Yves Smith on the art of class war

Yves Smiths’s post Tuesday summarizes the challenges of reigning in (pun intended) the One Percent and of running a blog with that purpose. Knowing your opponent is key, but mastering the gory details of finance is its own challenge. It is a worthwhile read.

You need to be a soldier in the war to demystify finance, because its supposedly arcane and impenetrable nature is one of its biggest weapons. It’s easy to dismiss critics if they can be depicted as ignorant. There are costs to citizenship. One such cost is knowing your enemy, their strategies, their tactics, and the terrain on which they fight. That requires not passing familiarity with finance, but knowledge of it.

A key piece of that knowledge is “private equity is a government sponsored enterprise.” From tax subsidies to investments in government pension funds to sovereign wealth funds, these investments make money using the government, she writes, and,

… close to half the investment capital in private equity funds is contributed directly by government entities. In this respect, private equity is little different than companies like Fannie, Freddie, and Solyndra that are regularly criticized in the media as recipients of government subsidies.”

It no longer seems magic once the audience knows how the trick is done. That’s why private equity masters cloak their methods in arcana:

And this process explains the hypersensitivity of financiers like Tom Perkins and Steve Schwarzman, who become outraged by even mild criticisms of or attempts to regulate their industry. They recognize that the biggest threat to them is delegitimation. As long as they can maintain the illusion that their profits are fairly earned by their own effort (as opposed to extensive government subsidies and backstops), that all of their services, as currently configured, are essential for commerce, and that it’s all so complicated and difficult that no one can replace them, they will continue to have the whip hand. Over you. And your pension, if you have one. And your workplace, if they buy it for one of their asset-stripping projects.

That is why it is important to penetrate their veils of secrecy and complexity. Pay attention to these men behind the curtain. They don’t have superpowers and their know-how is not as lofty as they pretend. Their secrecy and sleight of hand are meant to disguise that many of their services are socially destructive (like most over-the-counter derivatives, which are used for tax or accounting gaming) or extractive by virtue of being overpriced, which might be defensible in a truly private industry but not one that is even more heavily supported by the government than the defense industry. In other words, your apathy and resignation play straight into the hands of the banksters. Do you really want to make their lives easier?

So broadcast the trick. Call them socialists. Make them own it. When even financiers are doing it, the term is, as George Will writes this morning in his forumlaic snark, “a classification that no longer classifies.“

McConnell v. Snowden
by Tom Sullivan

BREAKING: Obama signs bill reshaping NSA's phone records program, renewing powers that had expired.— The Associated Press (@AP) June 3, 2015

Passage of the USA Freedom Act does not end the debate about privacy and government spying. It is hardly a speed bump. The FBI surveillance flights reported yesterday demonstrated that. As Digby observed last night, “And just wait until the drone fleet gets going…”
The last time the press exposed a fleet of government aircraft operating behind shell corporations, the aircraft were ferrying terrorism suspects to exotic CIA “black sites” or foreign prisons for torture.

But the debate in the Senate over the Patriot Act was not about that. What Dan Froomkin wrote last week about the Patriot Act debate and
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell bears repeating:

Anybody paying attention knows it’s not a policy debate. The reasons McConnell and others cite for wanting to extend the program as is — despite the fact that it’s flatly illegal, essentially useless, and spectacularly invasive — are laughable. In fact, the compromise they’re willing to fight to the death to oppose was actually proposed by the NSA.

The issue is they just don’t want Snowden officially vindicated, by an act of Congress.

That is to say, they damned well don’t care that what’s being done is illegal. They only care that it got exposed. Which is something, I guess. Wall Street doesn’t even care that much.

The Republican “meltdown” over failure to renew the Patriot Act included what Sen. Barbara Boxer described on All In with Chris Hayes last night as a temper tantrum by McConnell. The Senate Majority leader even committed a messaging faux pas by repeating a headline calling his failure “a resounding victory for Edward Snowden.” Bad move.

The Guardian this morning calls the reforms’ passage a vindication for Snowden. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden noted that more needs to be done:

“This is the only beginning. There is a lot more to do,” Wyden told reporters after the vote. “We’re going to have very vigorous debate about the flawed idea of the FBI director to require companies to build weaknesses into their products. We’re going to try to close the backdoor search loophole – this is part of the Fisa Act and is going to be increasingly important, because Americans are going to have their emails swept up increasingly as global communications systems begin to merge.”

He also pointed to a proposal in the House “to make sure government agencies don’t turn cell phones of Americans into tracking devices” as another target for NSA reformers.

Meantime, watch the skies.