Looks like it’s Rand week in the US Senate. From HuffPostHill:
Running in tomorrow’s Roll Call from Emma Dumain: “Sen. Rand Paul may upset a bill to give Washington, D.C., autonomy over its budget. The Kentucky Republican plans to offer amendments during tomorrow’s markup that would loosen the city’s gun restrictions. If they are adopted by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee’s conservative-leaning membership, that would threaten floor consideration of the bill, which Sen. Joe Lieberman wants to keep “clean.” “We are deeply offended by Sen. Paul’s stunning hypocrisy,” Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, said. “Congress has the power to do things around the country and Paul has repeatedly stated he’s against government taking those steps except clearly now in the District of Columbia.”
Oh my goodness. Rand is such a busy boy these days. Inserting fetal personhood into flood bills and gun bills into local budgets. Why you’d almost begin to believe that he has a “message from the Tea Party” that he’s “come to take the government back.” He’s just doing what he promised.
This alone, in cartoon form, should be enough to to demolish the entire foundation of economic conservatism:
Every reason we are told that austerity is needed, that people must suffer, that the rich must get richer and that policies must be more “pro-business” is predicated on a hypercompetitive world in which American corporations must force the government and their employees to make sacrifices in order to stay competitive.
Record corporate profits and record executive pay disprove that notion entirely, and with it the entire conservative economic argument.
That more Democrats don’t cite this more often is proof of the capture of our electoral system by corporate interests.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) moved this week to hold a noncontroversial flood insurance bill hostage until the Senate agrees that life begins at fertilization.
The bill, which would financially boost the National Flood Insurance Program on the cusp of hurricane season, had been expected to pass easily in the Senate. But since Paul on Monday offered an unrelated “fetal personhood” amendment, which would give legal protections to fetuses from the moment of fertilization, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is threatening to halt progress on the legislation…
The highly controversial concept of fetal personhood raised by Paul’s amendment could affect the legality of abortion, some forms of birth control, stem cell research and in vitro fertilization. His office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Luckily Harry Reid told him to go piss up a rope. But this is just ridiculous.
I have already been ungracious enough about this with my annoying “I told you sos” but, honestly, this is just depressing at this point. Yes, the Democrats should have expected a monumental GOP push back against health care reform. Why? Because of this, from Bill Kristol in 1993:
“Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton… and for the Democratic Party.” So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president’s strategist and pollster. If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right. Because the initiative’s inevitably destructive effect on American medical services will not be practically apparent for several years–no Carter-like gas lines, in other words–its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse–much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
They understand very clearly what’s at stake for them. And they have built a very efficient infrastructure to ensure that their goals are met and liberals’ aren’t. It’s that simple.
Anyway, as we wait for the Supremes to issue their ruling, here’s an excellent piece of advice from Rich Yeselson about next steps:
In their understandable haste to pass some kind of universal health care law, however imperfect, liberals, Democrats, and President Obama himself missed the fundamental first step: They failed to clinch the moral argument that — unlike iPads or Toyotas — health insurance is a right, an essential element for both physical health and economic well-being.
Now even if the Supreme Court sustains some or all of the law, conservatives at the federal and state level will do everything they can to delay and disrupt it — at least until the moral argument is as unassailable as stop signs on our streets. […] So the moral issue must be joined in the most aggressive fashion possible. Not so much by showing empathy for the uninsured—liberals are always wonderful at showing empathy. No, by belligerently challenging conservative pundits and Republican politicians at every opportunity, reminding them how lucky they are to have health care themselves…Progressives must keep reminding conservatives, “You’ve got health insurance—do you really think you’re somehow entitled to it, yet others aren’t? For shame.”
I have my doubts about the ability to shame the modern conservatives. After all, they weren’t too upset to see people cheering and shouting “yeah!” at a presidential debate when Wolf Blitzer asked if Ron Paul’s plan was to “let them die.” But what the hell, maybe they still have a shred of decency about this sort of thing that can be activated.
But I am not letting the Democrats and the president off the hook so easily. Health care reform was in the works for decades. Universality was always the assumed goal of comprehensive health care reform until the political decision was made to make it about cost. That wasn’t done on the fly, it was a conscious choice to back away from the moral argument in favor of a technocratic financial argument. At no time did they even try to pass real universal health care.
Now, I understand why they did it. The Republicans, after all, had been going along with a privatized health care solution based on those technocratic reasons until the day the Democrats looked like they might actually pass it. But without the moral argument, there was just not much to hold thing thing together, once the conservatives went their way (as anyone should have expected.)
Throughout the health care process I was arguing for the principle of universality. Way back when I wrote:
I never understood why universal coverage wasn’t the explicit goal of health care reform and the principle on which the whole thing rested. But it wasn’t. (Even the reform as finally passed fell quite a bit short, although it wasn’t bad.) The goals were fairness and cost savings, which isn’t quite the same thing, so the government funded portion of the bill was always the most vulnerable. I’ve always been skeptical that those provisions would be safe. And now that we are joining the global austerity crusade, I expect there will be tremendous pressure to starve this program or at the very least delay the implementation. Certainly the Republicans will do away with it the minute they get the chance. They can always be counted upon to stick it to poor people.
The ACA was, even when fully implemented, not guaranteed universal health care (which is why I was always so irritated with the ecstatic victory dances implying it was.)There are many ways to get there, but what we should care about is that it is simple,seamless, universal and can’t be taken away. That is, after all, what we believe in, right?
Update: In fact, if the Supremes strike down the law altogether, I’d go further and come out swinging with this. What the hell? Might as well stake out a real left position this time instead of an insider strategy. It didn’t serve us well.
You all recall the anti-choice zealot Bart Stupak, I assume. What you may not recall is that his famous amendment to pretty much ban abortion coverage in health care policies had a Republican co-sponsor by the name of Joe Pitts. And he’s actually far worse than Stupak ever was.
Blue America is hosting an online chat at 11 PDT over at Crooks and Liars with his progressive candidate Aryanna Stryder who’s challenging him in Pennsylvania’s redrawn 16th congressional district.
Blue America founder Howie Klein called Strader one of the most positive and energetic congressional candidates he’s seen running this year anywhere in the country.
“The Pennsylvania legislature made the 16th district more open to an independent-minded populist like Aryanna than it has been in the past,” he said. “If she can get her message out, she’ll have a very good chance of beating Joe Pitts the same way Matt Cartwright beat Tim Holden in the 17th. And like Matt, Aryanna is part of the next generation of dynamic, progressive leadership the country is looking for.”
Strader, 30, is U.S. Army veteran, small businesswoman and mother of two.
Blue America PAC says of itself that it, “doesn’t work in safe districts where our help isn’t needed. We look for tough races where a little encouragement, some financial help and some advice could go a long way, especially with candidates unlikely to get much help for the DCCC or the DSCC.”
And indeed, Strader will have to work hard to prove that she’s a competitive candidate – including any financial help the PAC could bring. Open Secrets, a nonprofit research group that records the use and effect of money in U.S. politics, observes that Joe Pitts has raised $793,081 so far this 2011-2012 cycle, 78 percent of it ($616,085) from PACs. Strader struggles behind with only $50,286 so far. 2 percent of her funding, a mere $1,000, has been from PACs.
She has the difficulty of being a candidate running in a district historically unfriendly to her party: the newly drawn 16th district has voted Republican 56 percent of the time on average.
However, there is hope for the Democrats; in 2008 Obama won the district 50.2 percent to 49 percent. Further fueling Democrats’ hope, as Blue America posted on Facebook Monday, Strader’s district is “newly redistricted and distinctly less red.”
In order to get the cash she needs to realize the Democrat’s hope, Strader first has to get others to see it. Strader and Blue America’s goal is to make potential donors view her campaign as viable. No matter how much they’d like to see her succeed, donors won’t risk their money unless they think there’s a good chance of returns.
Strader may find support in the many progressive activists across the country who oppose Pitts for his strong – and vocal – pro-life legislation. MOMocrats call Pitts “virulent, anti-choice”, and Blue America describes him as a “obsessed anti-Choice fanatic”.
Meanwhile, Pitts spokesman Gabe Neville sees the PAC’s endorsement as a detraction to Strader’s campaign and criticized Blue America.
“This will raise Strader a few dollars, but it will also cost her votes. ‘Blue America’ is so left-wing it brags about attacking even thoughtful Democrats like our neighbor Congressman Tim Holden,” he said.
“In their statements, Aryanna Strader and ‘Blue America’ repeatedly express their desire to fight about abortion, but not once do either of them use the words ‘jobs’ or ‘unemployment.’ That speaks volumes about how out of touch they are. Joe Pitts, on the other hand, is actively focused on creating jobs and reviving our economy through smarter government, new markets, cheaper energy, sustainable budgets, and stable tax rates.”
He also knocked her residency, noting that she moved to Chester County in July 2011 and doesn’t actually reside within the newly drawn 16th.
And though the district is less Republican after the redraw, it has only gone from a Cook PVI of R+8 down to R+6. For example, Lois Herr ran in the previously drawn district in 2010, 2006 and 2004. She lost by margins outside a slight change in PVI (30.8 percent, 17 percent and 29.9 percent, respectively).
Tuesday at 2pm EST Strader will live-blog with Blue America members at CrooksandLiars.com for an hour. Blue America is also asking for contributions to Strader’s campaign through a public Act Blue page, and notes that the PAC’s average contribution falls around $45.
So the Catholic hierarchy decided it needs some professional PR help, what with all the bad press it’s had what with the pedophilia, nun-hating and other throwback policies and the like. Adele Stan reports that they’ve decided to hire a professional:
This weekend the Vatican announced its hire of Fox News correspondent Greg Burke for the newly created role of communications strategist…
Burke’s authoritarian bona fides hardly end with Fox News. He’s also a member of Opus Dei, the secretive, misogynist, elitist Catholic cult embraced by the late Pope John Paul II. And he’s not just a member, he’s a special member — a “numerary,” a position described by the Religion News Service as “a celibate layman who lives at an Opus Dei center…” The Opus Dei domicile at which Burke resides is in Rome.
Both men and women can bear the title of numeracy, but men enjoy a privileged position in their sex-segregated housing, where they are served by the women. A 1995 article in the Jesuit magazine, America, described the life of the female Opus Dei numerary this way:
According to two former numeraries, women numeraries are required to clean the men’s centers and cook for them. When the women arrive to clean, they explained, the men vacate so as not to come in contact with the women. I asked Bill Schmitt if women had a problem with this. “No. Not at all.” It is a paid work of the “family” of Opus Dei and is seen as an apostolate. The women more often than not hire others to do the cooking and cleaning. “They like doing it. It’s not forced on them. It’s one thing that’s open to them if they want to do it. They don’t have to do it.”
“That’s totally wrong,” said [former numerary] Ann Schweninger when she heard that last statement. “I had no choice. When in Opus Dei you’re asked, you’re being told.” According to Ms. Schweninger, it is “bad spirit” to refuse. Women are told that it is important to have a love for things of the home and domestic duties. “And since that’s part of the spirit of Opus Dei, to refuse to do that when you’re asked is bad spirit. So nobody refuses.”
It’s hard to imagine Greg Burke finding a way to sell that mentality to the media as a good thing — never mind the fact that Opus Dei members are devoted to “mortification of the flesh” by wearing cilices, metal chains with spikey prongs that the wearer fastens tightly to the thigh, prongs to flesh.
This is the really funny part. You’ll recall that I wrote last week about the high level cardinal who said that everyone was believing in Dan Brown conspiracy theories (which were the work of the Devil)?
With an apparent lack of self-awareness, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone “accused the media of trying ‘to imitate Dan Brown’ in their coverage of the VatiLeaks scandal,” according to Reuters. In Brown’s conspiracy thriller, The DaVinci Code, Opus Dei is a major player in a Vatican conspiracy. In hiring Burke, it’s almost as if the Vatican was looking to feed the fantastic conspiracies of Brown and his fellow travelers. You could call that an epic PR fail.
I always thought that Dan Brown stuff was nuts. But maybe not …
Greg Sargent has a cheeky and dismaying post about the Affordable Care Act over at The Plum Line:
What’s particularly interesting about this poll is that solid majorities of Republicans favor most of the law’s main provisions, too.
I asked Ipsos to send over a partisan breakdown of the data. Key points:
* Eighty percent of Republicans favor “creating an insurance pool where small businesses and uninsured have access to insurance exchanges to take advantage of large group pricing benefits.” That’s backed by 75 percent of independents.
* Fifty-seven percent of Republicans support “providing subsidies on a sliding scale to aid individuals and families who cannot afford health insurance.” That’s backed by 67 percent of independents.
* Fifty-four percent of Republicans favor “requiring companies with more than 50 employees to provide insurance for their employers.” That’s backed by 75 percent of independents.
* Fifty two percent of Republicans favor “allowing children to stay on parents insurance until age 26.” That’s backed by 69 percent of independents.
* Seventy eight percent of Republicans support “banning insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions; 86 percent of Republicans favor “banning insurance companies from cancelling policies because a person becomes ill.” Those are backed by 82 percent of independents and 87 percent of independents.
* One provision that isn’t backed by a majority of Republicans: The one “expanding Medicaid to families with incomes less than $30,000 per year.”
“Most Republicans want to have good health coverage,” Ipsos research director Chris Jackson tells me. “They just don’t necessarily like what it is Obama is doing.”
The other thing Republicans don’t like is the mandate, of course. Not that Tea Partiers in California are in mass revolt over every driver in the state being required to have car insurance.
Basically, Republicans are uninformed, angry people who would totally like most of what’s in the Affordable Care Act, except for the fact that Democrats passed it. So I guess the 2010 election was a mandate…for something or other.
I read an email earlier today in which the writer referred to Lori Montgomery of the Qashington Post as the Judy Miller of deficit reduction. Dean Baker explains why:
Readers of an article that highlighted a study by the National Association of Manufacturers warning of the loss of nearly 1 million jobs due to cuts in military spending are undoubtedly asking this question. They no doubt remember a plan cooked up by the paper’s publisher, Katherine Weymouth, to sell lobbyists access to its reporters at dinners at her house. This article essentially lent the paper’s authority to a completely misleading study.
The basic story here is very simple, when you are in a severe downturn any spending creates jobs. If we spend money on schools and hospitals that creates jobs. If we pay people to dig holes and fill them up again, it creates jobs. And, if we pay people to build weapons for the military it creates jobs.
When the economy is not in a downturn, then military spending destroys jobs. An analysis done for CEPR by Global insights showed that a long-run increase in military spending of 1 percent of GDP (roughly the amount spent on the war in Iraq in its peak years) would reduce the number of jobs by almost 700,000. The hardest hit sectors would be construction and manufacturing.
If the Post wanted to inform rather than mislead its readers, it could have just run a piece pointing out that cutting government spending at this point in the business cycle will cost jobs. (Raising taxes will also cost jobs, but not by as much, especially if the tax increases target higher income people who would not change their spending much in response to a decline in disposable income.)
In short deficit reduction right now will cost jobs. The politicians in Washington may not understand this fact, but the Post’s reporters and editors should.
No, they’ve all been captured by marauding Austerians who insist that the only thing that will save the economy is for average people to sacrifice. We’ve seen this move over and over again …
House Majority Leader Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) suggested that the House’s end game in passing the Voter ID law was to benefit the GOP politically.
“We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we’ve talked about for years,” said Turzai in a speech to committee members Saturday. He mentioned the law among a laundry list of accomplishments made by the GOP-run legislature.
“Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it’s done. First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
The statement drew a loud round of applause from the audience. It also struck a nerve among critics, who called it an admission that they passed the bill to make it harder for Democrats to vote — and not to prevent voter fraud as the legislators claimed.
Well, since there is no systemic voter fraud that’s been denying GOP victories, we know that the only reason was vote suppression. Nice to see them admit it for once.
It’s always funny to me when conservatives try to take credit for Abraham Lincoln simply because he was a “Republican.” Most progressives, of course, point to his position against slavery and discrimination to argue that he wouldn’t dream of joining the ranks of the modern Republican Party.
But Lincoln wasn’t just a progressive on race. Just as importantly, he was a progressive on labor and capital as well. My favorite Lincoln quote is this one:
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
In the same way that Ronald Reagan would be considered a RINO, Lincoln would be called dangerous Communist today.
