News Corp.’s board unanimously approved a plan to split the media conglomerate in two pieces, separating its lucrative entertainment operations from its publishing business, said a person familiar with the situation.
The board made the decision after a meeting in New York Wednesday evening that lasted roughly an hour and a half, the person said. News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch spoke at the meeting and financial advisers made presentations to the board. The person said many details such as who will run the publishing business have yet to be resolved. The split is expected to be formally announced early Thursday morning.
One company will house entertainment businesses like 20th Century Fox, Fox broadcast network and Fox News Channel while another houses the publishing assets, which include The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London along with HarperCollins book publishing and News Corp.’s education business.
Super PAC mega-donors continued to dominate the independent spending playing field in May as their percentage of total giving to super PACs increased.
There are now ninety-five donors or collections of related donors that have given more than $500,000 to super PACs, according to a review of reports filed on June 20 with the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Those donors had given $153.6 million through the end of May…
Wealthy donors giving $500,000-plus provide the vast majority of contributions to super PACs. Through May, their contributions accounted for 71 percent of all super PAC contributions. That’s up from 61 percent through the end of January.
This doesn’t count the money they gave to the 501-cs like Rove’s American Crossroads that don’t require naming their donors.
It’s obscene but I had to laugh when I read this:
This high percentage of contributions coming from six- and seven-figure donations has led to concerns about the profound effects this new normal of campaign fundraising could have on who the government listens to in the future.
“Candidates in the future are going to know what actions and which votes are going to bring out these tens of millions of supportive spending and which votes are going to trigger millions of dollars of opposition spending,” says the Brennan Center’s Skaggs. “It’s the effect on governance that should give us real cause for concern.”
Uhm, yeah. Maybe someone should look into why all these people are spending this vast amount of money. It would be nice to know what the real agenda is going to be after November.
Britain had a larger budget deficit than economists forecast in May as the recession depressed tax receipts and government spending surged.
The shortfall, which excludes government support for banks, was 17.9 billion pounds ($28 billion) compared with 15.2 billion pounds a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said in London today. Economists forecast a deficit of 14.8 billion pounds, according to the median of 16 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. Spending jumped 7.9 percent and revenue rose 1.6 percent. Income-tax receipts fell 7.3 percent.
So slashing the government during a recession in order to lower the debt actually creates more debt? Shocker.
I would imagine that none of the Austerians will lose any sleep over it, however. When faced with the human suffering they’ve caused and shown the proof of their folly they will simply say, as these sorts always say, “things will get better eventually and that will prove that in the long run we were right.” And you know what they say about the long run …
The always excellent Dave Dayen at Firedoglakeanalyzes the pathway forward for single-payer healthcare/Medicare for all, regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday:
However, if the ACA gets thrown out – even if just the mandate is stricken – the forces continuing to push for single-payer in California plan to make a big splash. Progressive organizations like the Courage Campaign, as well as NNU’s state Chapter, the California Nurses Association, plan to reintroduce an effort to pass single-payer at the state level, as the best option to providing quality, affordable health care for all citizens. Rick Jacobs, the head of the Courage Campaign, said he would like to see a broad-based coalition, including community groups dealing with a broken health care system on the ground, come in on this effort.
There’s an active bill for the single-payer framework, SB810, in the hands of state Senator Mark Leno. California’s legislature has grown a bit more moderate on the Democratic side over the years, and single-payer actually failed to garner a majority by two votes in this legislative session, unlike in 2006 and 2008. But the single-payer campaign would presumably make that a litmus test in future elections.
This would be a long road, however. Because of the 2/3 requirement for any tax increases in California, you could not pass any revenue-raising measures inside the single-payer bill without Republican support, which isn’t coming. So the idea has always been to pass the bill, and then put on the ballot a funding mechanism for single-payer in the next election. The ability to use federal funds for a single-payer system, by pooling funds from Medicaid and SCHIP and other sources, would be limited until the waiver to provide ACA-compliant coverage hits in 2017. So you’re talking about five years at a minimum before single-payer could approach reality in California.
I’ve been saying this for a long while, but Medicare for all simply is not going to happen at the federal level, probably for a generation at least. The dynamic that Digby mentioned earlier, in which seniors dramatically oppose extension of Medicare benefits to those who haven’t “earned” them, is one factor. Another is the overwhelming opposition of healthcare business interests to the idea. Hacker and Pierson have noted, too, the ratchet effect of conservative opposition to such things at the federal level: there are numerous points at which such legislation can be blocked, from the House to the Senate filibuster to the Presidential veto to the various subcommittees and now, increasingly, to the conservative activist Supreme Court. All of which means that the chances of passing Medicare for all at the federal level are very dim.
But that’s not as true of the state level in more progressive states. California is such a few good legislative votes short of being able to pass a single-payer system. If California and a few other states can get it done and make it work successfully, it can roll out via the states, ultimately providing a big moral and economic boon to the blue states that do it. Pressure would ultimately mount for Congress to make it universal throughout the country.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t much help the progressive or simply down-on-their-luck family in Oklahoma. But it’s better than despair or false hope in a federal solution that isn’t coming.
I’ve always been a fan of “Medicare for all” and I think that if the Court strikes down Obamacare tomorrow, liberals should organize around the idea. But I’m with Ed Kilgore on this point and it’s very important that everyone understands what that means:
[T]he idea of making Medicare universal—even if it initially gains a positive response in public opinion—is going to run into some serious heavy weather once specifics are discussed and criticism begins.
As I’ve argued for a good while as others wondered why Republicans have been able to pit Medicare beneficiaries against those benefitting from ACA, many and perhaps most seniors receiving Medicare do not perceive the program as a social good that government gives them, but as an earned benefit—earned through lifelong payroll taxes, premium payments (once retirement age is reached), and more abstractly, through a lifetime of work that is performed before eligibility is reached. Extending “Medicare” to “all” would change that assumption rather dramatically, particularly with respect to younger beneficiaries (including children) who haven’t “earned” much of anything, from the point of view of seniors. The GOP talking points write themselves: Liberals want to give YOUR Medicare to THOSE PEOPLE! If “Medicare For All” is vastly easier to understand than ObamaCare, then so, too, are the racial and generational arguments against making it available to darker and younger people as opposed to just “cutting” Medicare (or setting up “death panels”) to give something new to THOSE PEOPLE. I’m afraid anyone who thinks a universal Medicare would be as popular as the current Medicare is missing this important if unfortunate point.
Now I don’t see this as reason not to do it. If Obamacare is found to be unconstitutional, I suspect it will require that the employer sponsored health care system break down to such an extent that most Americans are affected before we take another wack at it. It’s likely to take a while and during that time liberals have a huge job ahead of them to make people understand the moral imperative of universal health care. They really need to make sure that the libertarian/conservative cant that led to people shouting “yes” and applauding the idea of letting people die at the Republican presidential debates, is shown to be the inevitable result of our unwillingness to embrace universal health care.
I do think that most people are either morally repelled by that “yeah!” or are smart enough to realize it could one day be themselves in that position to eventually understand this. But they haven’t made the connection between that and the necessity for a commitment to universality. A campaign for “medicare for all” could be a great vehicle to make that case, but it shouldn’t be done with eyes closed to what the reaction from the right would be.
In fact, this campaign should be done regardless of whether the Supreme Court knocks down the ACA tomorrow. The moral arguments must still be made to ensure that the reforms are strengthened rather than weakened. It’s the right thing to do no matter what. But it won’t be easy.
A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.
There you have it. Poor people dying is part of what makes our system so great. Why mess with success?
Do most Americans agree with that? I’d like to know.
The modern Supreme Court is the most conservative since the 1930s.
The median justice during the Roberts Court is more conservative than at any time during the last 75 years, according to a statistical method developed by legal scholars Andrew Martin of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and Kevin Quinn of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law…
The high court’s rightward trajectory mirrors the broader national shift over the last several decades. President Bush sealed a five-member conservative majority by appointing Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
By contrast, justices appointed by Democratic presidents have grown less liberal, with President Obama’s two picks shifting the court further to the right, according to Martin and Quinn.
The good news is that this is only guaranteed to stay this way for another quarter century or so, so it’s not like it’s that big of a deal.
Bleeding heart liberal rag Forbes does some important journalism and investigates the Fast and Furious pseudo scandal. It turns out that the basic facts the wingnuts are presenting — that the ATF was engaged in a gun-walking sting operation, is false. Well, waddaya know?
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to matter. The scandal has taken on a life of its own and it will, in my opinion, likely lead to the resignation of Eric Holder. It’s just how these things work. (Look for a shift from the scandal itself to a Village-wide condemnation of “the handling” of the scandal.)
I had to laugh when I read this, though:
Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal.
Irony doesn’t begin to cover it.
I saw Chris Hayes speak this week here in LA about this book and he said a lot of interesting things, but this hit home especially: he said, “the defining characteristic of the last decade or so is a feeling of disorientation.” This sort of thing is partly why. (I date it to the gothic Clinton scandals, personally.)
Article like this should put the scandal to rest. But it won’t. And we’ll keep crying “but…it’s not true! That doesn’t make any sense!” and it will keep on happening and there’s nothing we can do about it except try to keep our own grip on reality. The disorientation is a feature not a bug.
In order to justify new voter suppression laws, GOP operatives are spinning increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories about the extent to which the Obama campaign and its allies are trying to hijack the 2012 election. “Stop the corrupt Obama machine from stealing the 2012 elections,” reads the headline of a recent fundraising letter from the conservative legal organization Judicial Watch (see below).
According to Judicial Watch, which led the fight to impeach Clinton, the Obama Administration is “aggressively pursuing plans behind closed doors to enact ‘stealth’ amnesty’ for millions of illegal aliens in a move to curry favor with Hispanic voters and potentially make it easier for illegal aliens to break the law and vote in 2012,” along with “continuing to funnel tax dollars to the corrupt and criminal ACORN.”
Such assertions are easily debunked. There is no “stealth amnesty” program, there is no record of noncitizens intentionally voting in US elections and ACORN no longer exists. Yet such outlandish claims are deeply ingrained in the conservative psyche. A 2009 survey by Public Policy Polling found that “52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.”
The purveyors of such discredited arguments, like Judicial Watch, continue to be deeply influential in conservative political circles. Nancy Pelosi recently said that Republicans are going after Attorney General Eric Holder, another frequent Judicial Watch target, as payback for the Justice Department blocking discriminatory voting laws under the Voting Rights Act. “His department’s blatant refusal to enforce federal law requiring states to clean up their inaccurate voter-registration records, combined with DOJ lawsuits against state voter-ID laws, must bring smiles to any ACORN-like groups contemplating electoral mischief this fall,” conservative columnist John Fund wrote recently in National Review.
I was way too early predicting this theme, so I’m not sure it counts as being prescient. But I think the reasoning is still sound. I wrote the following six years ago in the wake of a special election here in California in which the Democratic candidate said that “you don’t need papers to vote” and everyone went into a frenzy. (It wasn’t what she meant, but that doesn’t matter…) Anyway, this has been a long time coming:
As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”
I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”
Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similiar to third world dictatorships.
“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”
Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:
MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.
MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.
But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.
That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference…
The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on “criminal” Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us.
The news is not good. The press release struggles to put a positive spin on things by noting that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C “could halve sea-level rise by 2300, compared to a 2-degree scenario.” In their mid-probability scenario for 2 degrees, sea levels rise up to 3 meters (9.8 feet) by 2300. The good news is that 1.5 degrees raises seas only 1.5 meters (5 feet) by 2300!
These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. It will be the rate of sea-level rise, more than sea level itself, that determines how difficult it will be for humans and other species to adapt. So can we slow down or stop the rate of change in sea levels?
It matters a great deal, because small differences in the rate of sea-level rise over the coming century will have huge consequences for total sea-level rise in subsequent centuries. (Once again: the decisions we make in the next few years are very important!)…
So can we ever stop sea levels rising? Er … theoretically. If we limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, Schaeffer et al. project that by 2300 the rate of sea-level rise will decline back to zero — i.e., sea levels will stabilize, albeit more than a meter higher than they are today.
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that if we let temperature rise even 2 degrees C, by 2300 sea level will still be rising at a rate of around 8 millimeters a year, lower than its peak rate but still higher than humans have ever experienced.
So that’s the, ahem, good news. The bad news, as anyone who’s read my brutal logic posts knows, is that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C is probably flatly impossible at this point, and limiting to 2 degrees C is, while technically and economically possible, probably politically impossible. We’re currently on a trajectory for as much as 6 degrees…
So, if we f*ck around and allow temperature to rise 4.5 degrees C, by 2300 sea levels could be up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) higher and rising at around 13 mm a year. That will be tons of fun to adapt to for all Earth’s creatures, I’m sure.
Roberts also notes that the next fifty years of sea level rise are guaranteed even if the world dropped emission rates to zero tomorrow.
This is the sort of problem that democracies and free markets are mostly incapable of solving. Politicians who have to come up for reelection every two to four years aren’t good at annoying business interests in order to solve problems that won’t even show up in a significant way for the rest of their lifetimes.
And even in its most ideal form, the logic of “free market solutions” is predicated on companies getting punished by angry consumers if they don’t do the right thing. There are all sorts of things wrong with this approach, of course: if a bunch of people die due to food poisoning, it’s not as if it’s always easy to identify where in the production chain the problem occurred, or which corporations to punish by not buying their product (not to mention the obvious fact that the deaths should have been stopped by regulation and oversight in the first place.) But in its most simplistic form it might work if the impact of corporate malfeasance is immediate.
But how does a “free market solution” work when it comes to carbon emissions? Whom do consumers punish? Whom do consumers reward? On what timescale? By the time the problem is advanced enough to penetrate consumer consciousness, it will have been far, far too late for the market to change organically.
And that’s, as I’ve said before, why climate change is such a threat to the conservative enterprise. It’s not just that big energy interests would be impacted. It’s that the entire conservative model of problem solving would be rendered obsolete if the realities of climate change were accepted in our public discourse.
So absent some sort of organizational metamorphosis for human societies, business interests will continue to divide nation states against one another as politicians in the major industrialized democracies dawdle and pretend the problem will go away.
