The unemployment rate jumped to 7.2 percent in December from 6.8 percent in November and 5 percent last April, when the recession was four months old and just beginning to bite. More than 11 million Americans are now unemployed, and their growing ranks seem likely to put pressure on President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to act quickly on a stimulus package that mixes tax cuts and public spending.“These numbers, back to back, of more than a half million a month suggest that the U.S. economy is in a freefall,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight. “It’s scary, and it indicates that unless something is done and done quickly to turn this economy around, we’re looking at an awful situation this year.”The 7.2 percent was the highest unemployment rate since January 1993, when the country was still shaking off a jobless recovery from the 1990-91 recession. The loss in total jobs for 2008 was the largest since 1945.The toll of job losses cut across every sector. Nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in 2008, and 630,000 construction jobs disappeared as home-building slowed. Jobs dried up in the financial sector, in publishing houses and trucking companies, department stores and hotels. “This is unprecedented,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’sEconomy.com. “It’s coast to coast. It’s everywhere. There’s really no refuge in this job market. There’s no safe place.”“Even with a stimulus package, the unemployment rate is going to keep rising and by December it is likely to be over 9 percent,” said David A. Levy, chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center. In a speech on the economy, Mr. Obama said Thursday that the unemployment rate “could reach double digits.”The accelerating job loss — more than one million jobs have disappeared in just two months — suggests that the recession will last at least into early summer, making it the longest since the 1930s. The severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s each lasted 16 months, the current record.In his speech Thursday at George Mason University, Mr. Obama said that his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan would “immediately jump-start job creation and long-term growth.” Most forecasters, however, say that even with an ambitious stimulus plan, the economy will continue to contract through the first half of the year, though at a slower pace — and even if a recovery does kick in by early summer, it won’t generate jobs for many months after.“I would suspect that starting this past October and lasting through April, we will have really big job losses,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm.
Considering his strong support of Obama during the primaries, many people wondered what John Kerry’s role was going to be since he was passed over for a cabinet position. I think today we saw that he’s going to be lead liberal kabuki dancer in the revival the Democratic musical comedy called “How To Succeed In the Village Without Really Trying.”
And this actually may be good news. It seems very unlikely to me that Kerry is acting out of school, but is rather playing the role of the liberal stimulus spending obsessive who will (hopefully) balance out the tax cut fetishists in the senate negotiations, giving Obama some space to compromise at least somewhere to the left of The Club For Growth. (Unfortunately, that still leaves us with the Blue Dog deficit hawks, but maybe Rahm has pictures or something.)
It’s all just a guess, of course, but I simply don’t believe that Kerry and Conrad are out there running at Obama from the left on their own. They just don’t have it in them. They are staking out this position for negotiating purposes on his behalf. Obviously, we don’t know how far any of them will go to fight for it, but at least the liberal economic argument looks like it will be made.
Since I’ve rudely called out the Democrats and the Republicans today, it seems unfair for me not to call attention to their uber-enablers.
Today, before the Tim Kaine announcement:
Nora O’Donnell: This is significant in many ways. This is the political apparatus of the Democratic Party. Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. Why do you think he chose Virginia’s Governor for this position?
Mark Whittaker, Washington bureau Chief NBC news: It is about control and traditionally the president does want to have control over the party apparatus. He chose him, first of all, because he’s a friend and a loyalist and an early supporter, and somebody who’s also very close to the president elect personally.
But also because of what Kaine stands for politically. He somebody who in Virginia, has been very successful in reaching out to independents and moderate Republicans, as well as Obama did in this election. He, like all good politicians wants to expand his base even further, not only in terms of looking already to the 2012 reelection fight, but also right now in terms of getting the maximum support and patience across the board politically for what is going to be a very difficult year ahead on the policy front.
O’Donnell: In 2005 when Governor Kaine won a red state, a blue governor, he was one of the bright spots for the party winning there. He’s one of those who talks about faith, those “value voters” that we’ve talked about that the Democratic Party’s got to reach more of and talk more about their faith. Do you think that changes the Democratic Party, and given that Tim Kaine is a Catholic who is pro-life?
What an unusual insight. Where ever do these come up with such original observations?
Jonathan Capehart said that Kaine was chosen more because of his temperament and commitment to helping Obama pass his agenda. Norah asked whether Obama would share “the golden list” with the DNC and then they all sniffed about how Obama is snubbing Howard Dean. (They did this while repeatedly mocking Howard Dean, mind you.)
But Norah couldn’t let go of the most important and ubiquitous piece of political analysis the world has ever known:
O’Donnell: I want to go to Mark Whittaker … Uhm… faith. Governor Tim Kaine has reached out to people of faith, he talks about these value voters. How do you think they handle this now, the Democratic National Committee? Will this be a larger type of courting new types of voters?
Whittaker: Well, we see it not only in the Kaine selection to run the party committee, but we also in Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor who’s been invited to be part of the inauguration. Very controversial because of his position on gay marriage and other issues, but another sign that Obama in looking at where he can enlarge his base politically, is looking at evangelicals, particularly younger evangelicals, the people we saw in this election that there is a bit of generational split and older evangelicals who are very much part of the Republican base over the last 30 years, a movement among younger evangelicals who care about green issues and so forth that makes them perhaps open to moving more in the Democrats’ direction and Obama wants to pick some of them off.
As you know, I think this is total crap. But even if it weren’t, the idea that Rick Warren represents some sort of enlightened evangelism still just amazes me:
While Warren says he opposes torture, he doesn’t treat the subject with anything like the zeal he accords gay marriage and abortion. As he recently told Beliefnet.com, he never even brought up the subject with the Bush administration, where he had considerable access. Just before the 2004 election, he sent out an e-mail to his congregation outlining the five issues that he considered “non-negotiable”. “In order to live a purpose-driven life – to affirm what God has clearly stated about his purpose for every person he creates – we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly,” he wrote. The issues were abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning and euthanasia. Torture, apparently, is something that decent Christians can disagree on.
The two “non-negotiable” things the new head of the Democratic National Committee and Rick Warren agree on is abortion and gay marriage. I would guess that in order to become the purpose driven party, those are the issues that will have to be “resolved” — and I have a good idea in which direction that’s going.
If it happens it will be interesting to see if it becomes a zero sum game for the Dems. I don’t know how many people vote for the Democrats on the basis of those issues, but I suspect it may be more than a few, simply because on so many other issues the differences between the parties are very hard to discern.
Finally, Whittaker said something that just sounded strange:
Whittaker: One of the things that I’ve heard about all of these appointments — he knew Kaine already — but I’ve heard that with all these appointments that he sat down with people. And I’ve heard that the personal chemistry between Obama and the people he’s been considering for these positions has been very important. Among other things, he trusts his gut about people. And that there are some people who walked into those interviews being expected to get jobs and didn’t get them and vice versa.
I don’t actually believe this. If anything Obama seems to be almost overly analytical, so it’s hard to believe that he makes decisions based on his gut. Maybe Whittaker was just distractedly recycling Bush conventional wisdom out of habit. But I hope this isn’t true. I don’t think president’s should trust their gut about people. It leads to insular thinking — the gut is always telling you to validate your own assumptions. You actually need to fight it, not trust it.
My God. Just when you think the Democrats really are as crazed and stupid as Republicans, you see this, and realize they are juvenile amateurs by comparison:
BRIT HUME: That’s right. Well, then, the New Deal — everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed. People on the left believe it failed because Roosevelt, at the end of the day, really didn’t do enough spending, that it simply wasn’t spending — he was not spending, whether deficit spending or not, on a scale grand enough to lift the damaged U.S. economy out of that depression. There are people on the other side of the spectrum who would say, maybe, but look at this as well. President Roosevelt waged what could only be called a jihad against private enterprise. He prosecuted leading figures in it, Andrew Mellon being a conspicuous example. He prosecuted little companies, butcher shops in New York, as has been laid out in Amity Shlaes’ book about the new — book about the history of the Great Depression. It created a very uncertain, even poisonous atmosphere for business. That is not the atmosphere that you want, and I’m bound to say, Neil, that I don’t think that’s the atmosphere the Obama administration is seeking to create. The Obama administration is not showing any signs it wanted to wage the kind of war on private business that Roosevelt waged. The question, of course, still is whether the spending on the scale that we’re seeing will end up doing more harm than good —
Read here for the full rundown on why Brit Hume’s mendacity is approaching Holocaust denial territory. Talk about intellectual violence.
The conservative elite appear to have decided on a strategy of making Obama’s recovery plan fail so that they can blame the Democrats, seize power and start a world war.
I keep thinking I can’t be any more shocked by their audacity. But they always exceed my expectations.
I watched Obama’s speech on the economy this morning, and I thought he laid out the scope of the problem and the consequences of inaction pretty well. He also cited the source of the crisis – “profound irresponsibility” and the final judgment on failed laissez-faire policies. And he’s signaled that he’s perfectly willing to let the package’s total grow as it makes its way through Congress. You can read the whole speech here.
Republicans obviously have their own thoughts on this, and they’ll try their best to derail the bill and increase the tax cuts relative to the fiscal spending. Whatever – they know nothing but obstruction. What’s got me concerned is the gasbag reaction immediately following Obama’s speech. On MSNBC, the first talking head pronounced that this was “the University of Chicago lawyer” Obama, not the soaring rhetoritician of the campaign. Non-Senator Tweety Matthews agreed that economic talk doesn’t look good on TV because it’s not “visual” enough. And Richard Wolffe, trying to sound knowledgeable, cited some of the specifics Obama offered as stimulus projects – moving to electronic medical records, weatherizing federal buildings – and intoned “it’s not going to cost a trillion dollars to get electronic medical records.”
Oh dear. This brings me back to a post that Jamison Foser cited this week by Niko Karvounis of the Century Foundation, about how the media’s lack of expertise or even interest in policy matters could easily derail progressive initiatives by failing to offer a counter-balance to right-wing lies. Karvounis focuses on this question with respect to health care.
Right now, health care reform is an abstract goal that everyone wants — excitement and anticipation are high. But as the substantive process of health care reform gets under way, two things will happen: first, ideas will be crafted into policies — concrete plans of action and complex administrative measures, and second, politicians will become involved in the reform process. Policy can get pretty complicated; so the public will rely on the media to help it navigate the ins and outs of the issue. Once politics begins to shape policy discussions — that is, once politicians enter the picture — it’s all the more important to keep the focus on policy, because it’s at this point that policies have a real chance of being implemented. Americans should know their options.
Unfortunately, reporters aren’t health care policy experts. In fact, they rarely ever talk about the issue. In a December report, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, out of 3,513 health news stories in newspapers, on TV and radio, and online between January 2007 and June 2008, health care policy made up less than 1 percent of news stories and just 27.4 percent of health-focused stories. Instead of talking about issues like coverage, prescription-drug care, costs or public programs, the media prefer to report on specific diseases and conditions (cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease) and potential epidemics (contaminated food and water, vaccines, binge drinking). Together, these two topics made up 72.6 percent of health coverage.
This is less than ideal. When Congress begins to talk about health reform in earnest, the important news that will affect all of us will be about policy and institutional changes. The media need to be good at covering this stuff — yet as the Kaiser report shows, newscasters, reporters and editors have very little experience (or interest) in discussing such issues. Worse, history shows that when health care reform efforts are actually under way, the media ignore policy in favor of more sensational stories.
During President Bill Clinton’s efforts at health care reform in the 1990s, for example, media reports disproportionately focused on politics rather than policy. In their 1998 book Politics, Power, and Policymaking: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s, Missouri State University professors Mark Rushefsky and Kant Patel found that that in 1993 and 1994 — the height of public debate over Clinton’s plan — the New York Times reported just 257 stories about policy considerations (proposed reforms and solutions, analyses of options) and a whopping 549 on politics (personalities, disagreement, partisanship). When the nation’s health care system was at stake, spats received more coverage than substance.
It’s very troubling and can be easily extrapolated to this stimulus package. The media will cover it as a wrestling match, with the twists and turns being entirely filtered through the lens of surface politics. The right will send its passel of spinners to talk about “pork-barrel spending” and “unnecessary” art museums and bike paths being built with the taxpayer’s money, and the chattering class will glory to their front-row seat at the prizefight. But the truths and the falsehoods never get sorted out. That goes double for health care, where a host of right-wing myths crop up in almost any media report about the issue.
Karvounis is hopeful – more than he should be IMO – that the media can talk intelligently about these issues. I do think that the public has more access to intelligent analysis about the merits of policy, but that’s nowhere to be found among mass media. And ultimately, that’s still where most people get their news and where most editors and executives take their cues on what to report. This is an extremely important point:
But it’s important that the media rise to the occasion. As Rushefsky and Patel put it, “the mass media may not tell us what to think, but they are very successful in telling us what to think about.” News helps us figure out what’s important and what’s at stake. A dearth of good policy stories will mean that the public isn’t understanding the challenges, trade-offs, compromises, etc., that really shape health care. The public will misunderstand the terms of the debate as purely a clash of parties and personality — as a question of whether “ObamaCare” will succeed — instead of story about structural changes and policy choices that will affect all of us. We shouldn’t focus on how much we like or dislike the politicians involved in health care reform; the focus should be on the strengths and weaknesses of their proposals.
Traditional media has very set narratives for how they view policy fights, and they believe the public wants to view those fights along those lines. In the brawl, reality is subsumed in favor of the he-said/she-said approach. It’s going to take a supreme communicator to break through that very ingrained structure. But it’ll take more than that. The rot in our traditional media is very widespread.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s chilly response Tuesday to outreach from President-elect Barack Obama – after stomping on his choice of fellow Californian Leon Panetta as head of the CIA – dealt the incoming administration what is being described as the first “brush-back pitch” from powerful Democrats in Washington. Feinstein – the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who will oversee Panetta’s confirmation hearings – raised eyebrows when she expressed surprisingly sharp disapproval of Panetta as nominee for CIA chief on Monday. She said that “the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge.” Panetta has no intelligence agency experience. Feinstein, the outgoing chair of the Senate Rules Committee, followed that shocker Tuesday by breaking with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Obama when she said Roland Burris should be seated as the newest U.S. senator after he was appointed to Obama’s seat by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is under investigation for trying to sell the seat vacated by the president-elect. Vice President-elect Joe Biden said Tuesday it was a mistake not to give Feinstein a courtesy heads-up about the coming nominations of Panetta and retired Adm. Dennis Blair as national intelligence director. But even after Biden and Obama contacted her personally Tuesday, the California senator didn’t soften her opposition to Panetta, saying only that now she is “looking forward” to talking to the former Clinton White House chief of staff “about the critical issues facing the intelligence community.” Those who know Feinstein well and have worked intimately with her insist that her public critique of Panetta was not personal in nature. Though the two have competed on the political stage – a movement in 1998 to get Panetta to run for governor was derailed largely by rumors that Feinstein would throw her hat in the ring – insiders say that this week’s dustup was more a message to the incoming Obama administration about Beltway politics. “Leon certainly has management and organizational experience up the wazoo, and clearly he knows how to run an organization,” said Barbara O’Connor, professor of political communication at Cal State Sacramento. But Feinstein is “chair of the committee … the rules are the rules. You have to get along with the senior elected officials of your own party, and she’s one. And they require face time. Had they briefed her adequately … she wouldn’t have been surprised,” she said. One high-level Democrat with strong ties to Feinstein, who spoke on condition of anonymity, characterized the senator’s statements on Panetta this week as “a show of strength, a brush-back pitch, from a powerful chair who can be helpful or hurtful” to Obama. “She feels strongly about protocol,” Feinstein’s friend said. “As chair of the Intelligence Committee, she expected a courtesy call, especially if it was going to be outside the norm.” “If she did not respond with a show of strength, she’d be seen as weak,” the insider said. “This is not the time for weak leaders. And she is not the kind of wallflower that would simply turn the other cheek with this kind of offense.”
Just because the new president is a member of her own party is no reason for her to be a rubber stamp. Feinstein is right to keep up her standards. Let’s take a look back at all the times Dianne Feinstein stood up to the Bush administration.
Oh. Right.
The Bush administration didn’t make courtesy calls, either. They went to the floor of the senate and told senators to go fuck themselves. To which the senators replied, “thank you sir, may I have another.”
With just 14 days until the president-elect’s inauguration, the unexpected umbrage from a powerful California senator over the naming of a well-known and highly respected California nominee underscores what one Democratic insider describes as a political “reality check for Obama. “The lesson is that, despite the Democratic euphoria over winning the White House back and expanding our margins in the House and the Senate, you still have very powerful committee chairs … who will be very protective of their turf,” said Democratic strategist Garry South. Democrats who dismiss such matters might recall that “Jimmy Carter came into office and ran afoul almost immediately of the Democratic Congress – and never recovered because of that,” he said. “It is a warning sign to the Obama administration that despite his significant electoral victory and popular victory, he still has to contend with powers that be in the Senate.”[…] …O’Connor said, it should be a lesson learned. “You don’t want a chair of your own party, who’s chairing a major subcommittee, reacting this way to your appointment,” she said. With the withdrawal of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as Obama’s nominee for commerce secretary – in the face of a pay-to-play inquiry – and the current brouhaha over Panetta, she said, “I would be more careful. You don’t want to squander all the good will from the election.”
Keep in mind that she’s talking about “good will” from the president’s own party. Should he have to worry about that right now?
And, by the way, this isn’t just something that plagued Jimmy Carter. It plagued Bill Clinton as well. Here’s a post I wrote one year ago today:
Just in case anyone’s forgotten or are too young to remember –the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and current Unity 08 poobah, David Boren, is an egomaniac who stabbed Bill Clinton in the back repeatedly when he was trying to pass his economic plan in 1993. (As did Bob Kerrey and Sam Nunn, among others.) After months of kissing Boren’s ass and treating him like the perfumed prince he believes he is, Boren went on “Face The Nation” and announced that he just couldn’t support his president.
He had already insisted on getting rid of the proposed BTU tax and wanted a “compromise” that would have dropped all the new taxes on the wealthy and make up the money by capping Medicare and Medicaid and getting rid of Clinton’s planned EITC for the poor. He, like Bob Kerrey and many others, were obsessed with “fixing” social security and other “entitlements” in order to cure the deficit.
But there was one thing he believed in more than anything else:
Gore asked, what did Boren want changed in the plan in order to secure his vote?
Like a little list? Boren asked.
Yeah, Gore said.
Boren said he didn’t have little list. Raising the gas tax a nickel or cutting it a nickel or anything like that wouldn’t do it, he said. He had given his list to Moynihan like everybody else in the Finance Committee. It was over and done with, and Boren likened himself to a free agent in baseball. “I have the luxury of standing back here and looking at this,” Boren said. His test would be simple: Would it work? If not, it didn’t serve the national interest.
Gore said he was optimistic for the first time.
Boren shot back. “There’s nothing you can do for me or to me that will influence my decision on this matter.” he added. “I’m going to make it on the basis of what I think is right or wrong.”
Nobody responded for a moment. Clinton then stepped in. Why didn’t Boren think it was in the national interest? he asked. It wasn’t bipartisan, Boren answered. To be successful in this country it had been demonstrated over and over, an effort had to be bipartisan, Clinton had even said so himself, Boren pointed out. Even most optimists, Boren said, thought they were still not even halfway there.
No Republican voted for the plan. Clinton knew that he would never get any Republicans to vote for a plan to raise taxes on the wealthy after the handful who had done so in 1990 were burned at the stake by the conservative movement. But sure, they would have voted for a “compromise” that raised no taxes, dropped all investment in infrastructure, any help for the poor and capped spending on the sick to cure the deficit. That’s bipartisanship, village-style.
Bob Kerrey eventually agreed to vote for the plan making it a 50-50 tie — which Al Gore broke, passing the plan. (It passed by one vote in the House, as well.)
Right after the vote Kerrey went on the Senate floor said:
“My heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote yes for a bill which challenges Americans too little.
“President Clinton, if you’re watching now, as I suspect you are, I tell you this: I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down the presidency…
“Get back on the high road, Mr President,”Kerrey proclaimed. Taxing the wealthy was simply “political revenge,” he said. “Our fiscal problems exist because of rapid, un controlled growth in the programs that primarily benefit the middle class.” Clinton needed to return to the theme of shared sacrifice, he said, and should have said no to the deals and compromises.
And then he went back on his word to Clinton that he wouldn’t demand a bipartisan commission to study how to cut all those middle class “entitlements.”
David Broder loves David Boren and Bob Kerrey and thinks the country is best served by rabid conservative ideologues and preening Democratic narcissists who lay down for Republicans and fight their own president every step of the way if he wants to enact any kind of progressive legislation. That’s called “getting things done.”
I’m sure Obama knows that history very well. And I have no doubt that he has fashioned some strategy to deal with it, (although if it is to appeal to Republicans, I’m not quite sure that it will end up serving the right purpose … )
A lot of people believe that Obama is going to enact successful liberal policies and call them centrist, thus moving the center to the left. But there is danger that the sausage making and ego stroking that is inherent in dysfunctional Democratic politics and the toxic village will lead him to adopt unsuccessful centrist policies that people will call liberal, thus moving the center of gravity further to the right. I don’t know that that will happen, but it’s possible. It’s certainly happened before. He needs to get a grip on these Democrats immediately. At this point, I’m actually more worried about them than I am of the Republicans. These people can make or break the majority. .
So, I saw this post by Marc Ambinder yesterday and wondered what it was about:
Blue Dogs Happy With Obama’s Entitlement Comments
07 Jan 2009 01:06 pm
Here’s President-elect Barack Obama, this morning:
We are working currently on our budget plans… starting to consult with members of congress on that… Discussion around entitlements will be a central part of those plans… by Feb [with my 10-page budget preview] we will have some very specific plans to release [on reforming entitlement spending].
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) liked what he heard:
“I have talked with President-elect Obama several times about the severity of our entitlement crisis, and I have urged him to conduct a full audit of his predecessor’s books. He understands the tremendous fiscal challenges we face. I appreciate his forthrightness on the subject this morning, and I pledge to work with him and his economic team to get this situation under control.”
Convincing these Democrats that he’s serious about entitlement reform is one of the ways he can smooth the stimulus package’s digestion.
I can’t imagine why Obama should be having any problems with any Democrat on a stimulus package, unless they honestly are too stupid to understand the scope of the problem or are so reflexively conservative that they blurt out Republican cant without even considering what they are saying. But they are Blue Dogs, so I suppose that both of these things are true.
Changes in Social Security and Medicare will be central to efforts to bring federal spending in line, President-elect Barack Obama said on Wednesday, as the Congressional Budget Office projected a $1.2 trillion budget deficit for the fiscal year.
“We expect that discussion around entitlements will be a part, a central part” of efforts to curb federal spending, Mr. Obama said at a news conference. By February, he said, “we will have more to say about how we’re going to approach entitlement spending.”
Alluding to the projected deficit, which was accompanied by grim unemployment predictions, Mr. Obama said: “And we know that our recovery and reinvestment plan will necessarily add more. My own economic and budget team projects that, unless we take decisive action, even after our economy pulls out of its slide, trillion-dollar deficits will be a reality for years to come.”
Mr. Obama did not offer specifics on how he would address Social Security and Medicare, nor was there any hint that he expects to ask Congress to approve draconian cuts in benefits. The programs are vital to millions of Americans, and talk of cutting benefits has long been considered politically explosive. On the other hand, both programs face long-range problems, given the growing legions of baby boomers nearing retirement and, in the case of Medicare, the ever-rising cost of health care.
Clearly, they’re not going to be able to try to “privatize” it as Bush did since the same baby boomers who are sucking the life blood out of the treasury in their old age (and who have been paying double for more than 20 years into the trust fund) just lost about a third of their retirement funds in the stock market. So that’s good (sort of …)
What else he’s talking about, I still can’t guess. Maybe it’s just lifting the cap, as he talked about during the campaign. But that will most certainly be seen as a tax hike and there’s no way in hell that’s going to pass anytime soon. And anyway, I’m not sure it’s such a great idea to put that back on the table right now either. The last thing people need is to start thinking their social security (or their parents’ social security) is going to be cut if he wants people to start spending.
The message is getting muddled.
The deficit scolds are coming out of the woodwork, which even I in my cynicism didn’t think they’d have the nerve to do at a time like this. Last night on The Newshour we had two deficit hawks on saying stuff like this:
DAVID WALKER: Gwen, we’ve got a structural problem. You know, since the 1980s, but for the period of time that we ended up having the statutory budget controls, we were addicted to deficit and debt. We were running deficits in good times and bad, whether we were at war or not. You know, we had a problem before we came into this recession, before these bailouts.
Is that true? I don’t think so. I seem to recall that the last Democratic president left a rather large surplus, which was supposed to be dedicated to the “social security lockbox.” I guess that’s been airbrushed from history now that the Republicans blew through that surplus by giving it to the wealthy. That’s what happens when Democrats exercise fiscal responsibility — they get blamed for being profligate spendthrifts anyway. So it doesn’t pay politically, and at this particular moment in time, the only possible reason to focus on it is for political purposes. This is the reality:
As the ranking Democrat and then chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina accused President Bush for eight years of recklessly running up huge fiscal deficits.
But by noon on Wednesday, after listening for two hours as economists explained why it was crucial to run a large deficit — one that would triple the previous record and vault far above $1 trillion — Mr. Spratt looked shell-shocked.
Lingering in his chair as the cavernous hearing room emptied, he stared into the distance and gave vent to his concerns.
“The thing I wanted to ask,” he said, “was if there was some limit which we should be wary of? Is there some limit in terms of how much borrowing and debt creation we should take on?”
For the moment, the answer is no. The Congressional Budget Office predicted on Wednesday that the federal deficit would balloon to $1.2 trillion this year — even before Democrats pass an economic stimulus bill that could cost an additional $1 trillion spread over this year and next.
To a degree that would have been unimaginable two years ago, economists and politicians from across the political spectrum have put aside calls for fiscal restraint and decided that Congress should spend whatever it takes to rescue the economy.
A startling range of name-brand economists — Martin Feldstein of Harvard and a top adviser to Republican presidents; Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com and a former adviser to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign; and Robert B. Reich, secretary of labor under President Clinton — urged Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday to think more boldly than ever before.
“It pains me to say that because I am a fiscal conservative who dislikes budget deficits and increases in government spending,” Mr. Feldstein told the lawmakers. But he said, “Reviving the economy requires major fiscal stimulus from tax cuts and increased government spending.”
So why are we hearing stale old Republican nonsense (and predictable Blue Dog enthusiasm) about fiscal discipline and “entitlement reform?”
And why the opening gambit on business tax cuts that are highly unlikely to help much? Bob Borosage, who is anything but reflexively critical toward Obama, wrote a piece yesterday that questions the dissonant Democratic strategy:
He’d be more likely to get a big and bold plan passed swiftly if he had put together his package, called on the Congress to pass it, invited Republicans to join or take the risk of standing in the way, while saving any concessions on business taxes until the end if he actually needed to round up the votes. I suspect that he’d have won just about as much Republican support that way.
Obama seems to be choosing a path that builds consensus at the potential cost of effectiveness. But if the plan fails, he’ll take the blame no matter how many Republicans vote for it. And Republicans will attribute the failure to government spending, no matter how much of the plan consists of tax cuts.
And putting social security on the menu, even just for rhetorical purposes, can only scare the folks and make the plan even less effective. I’m not getting it. The point of all this is to get the economy moving again — bipartisan support should be a secondary concern at best. There will be sufficient Republican support for any plan — a small number of them aren’t entirely brain dead and that’s more than enough. This is one time where there is no doubt that the best policy is also the best politics.
Update: The Republican response to the speech this morning was instructive. They agreed to work with the president on a stimulus as long as it isn’t as big as it needs to be, as long as it consists of more tax cuts than spending, and as long as those tax cuts don’t just go to the middle class and poor but are also more tilted to business and wealthy investors.
So, the markers have been laid down and any compromise to get to 80 votes will have to be somewhere between the plan Obama floated and these Republican parameters.
The efforts by the right-wing to derail the nomination of Eric Holder is an object lesson in how they will press every advantage, use every trick, and enlist every argument to deliver defeats to their adversary, simply because they treat politics like the sports section, charting wins and losses. They are very effective in the minority, and with a dreadfully bumbling majority as their opponent, that effectiveness will be magnified.
Watch Arlen Specter paint Holder as a cross between Nixon and Idi Amin:
The senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who is the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said Mr. Holder’s support of the White House’s stance on three contentious issues when he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration suggested that he was too willing to do the president’s bidding.
“He’s had an outstanding academic and professional record, and I acknowledge that early on,” Mr. Specter said of Mr. Holder in a 25-minute speech on the Senate floor. “But aside from these qualifications on Mr. Holder’s résumé, there is also the issue of character, and sometimes it is more important for the attorney general to have the stature and the courage to say no instead of to say yes.”
Before Tuesday, Mr. Specter had been mildly critical of Mr. Holder’s role in President Bill Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich. He said Tuesday that he would wait until the hearing next week to decide how he would vote, but in the Senate speech he let loose on Mr. Holder, comparing him with Mr. Gonzales in his ability to maintain independence from the president.
Mr. Specter raised questions about Mr. Holder’s role as deputy attorney general on a range of issues that included an investigation into the 1993 federal siege in Waco, Tex., that left David Koresh and about 80 of his Branch Davidian followers dead, and an espionage investigation involving a nuclear scientist, Wen Ho Lee.
Neat switch there, huh? It’s Holder who is the toady for the new President, as Specter exactly the same criticisms that were launched at Abu Gonzales. What’s more, Specter decided to employ the fresh “I was not consulted” criticism, much like Dianne Feinstein used to criticize the selection of Leon Panetta.
Specter said in prepared remarks Tuesday that Obama did not consult with him before choosing Eric Holder Jr. to be attorney general, and he tells Legal Times that Obama also did not consult with him or notify him before announcing four other Justice Department nominees Monday.
“History demonstrates that presidents who seek the advice of members of the Senate prior to submitting a nomination frequently see their nominees confirmed more quickly and with less controversy than those who do not,” Specter (R-Pa.) said. “A recent example is that of President Clinton who consulted with then-Chairman [Orrin] Hatch prior to nominating Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Justice Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court. Both nominees were confirmed with minimal controversy.
“In contrast, on the nomination of Mr. Holder, President-elect Obama chose not to seek my advice or even to give me advance notice in my capacity as Ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which is his prerogative.”
Be prepared to hear that story about Orrin Hatch and Bill Clinton over and over, by the way. The new rule is that all judicial nominees, maybe all nominees, from Obama must get clearance from Republicans before going forward. That’s how things work now.
And as long as we’re throwing in the Feinstein/Panetta spat, why don’t we connect the dots from Holder to Rod Blagojevich?
In a conference call this morning, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continued the assault, saying that “it’s not going to be a smooth confirmation” for Holder. He evoked Holder’s very tenuous ties to embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich as reason to be suspicious of the nominee:
GRASSLEY: It signals that it’s not going to be a smooth confirmation. It doesn’t signal that he may not be confirmed. … [H]e was a counsel or at least Governor Blagojevich had sought to have him involved with something with race tracks in Illinois and casinos, I think. And so we’re trying to get freedom of information on that because we need to know what the relationship is with Governor Blagojevich. And I don’t say that in denigrating in any way except Governor Blagojevich’s recent troubles raises questions with anybody that’s had a relationship with him. … [I]t’s not going to be smooth sailing.
Ironically, just minutes before asserting that “anybody that’s had a relationship” with Blagojevich “raises questions,” Grassley insisted that the Senate must seat Blagojevich-appointed Roland Burris. “He’s got a perfect right to have that seat,” Grassley said.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little Democrats.
It’s just a matter of time before all the Justice Department nominees are called out for being insubstantial yes-men with ties to corrupt cronies. And if that doesn’t work, conservatives can always play the Terri Schiavo card.
Conservatives are now brushing off the Schiavo case to use it against Thomas Perrelli, President-elect Obama’s pick for the no. 3 spot at the Justice Department. Right-wing websites are outraged at Obama’s association with Perrelli, since he was one of the lawyers who represented Michael Schiavo, who wanted his wife’s feeding tube removed. The Washington Times today reports that these conservatives are now gearing up to fight Perrelli’s nomination:
Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, derided Mr. Perrelli’s selection as “just another death-peddler Obama has added to his list of nominees.” She said he’s earned the nickname among pro-lifers of “Piranha Perrelli” for his work on the case.
Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs at the Family Research Council, said several end-of-life issues could make their way to the federal level in the next four years and having Mr. Perrelli at the department means pro-life causes would have a tougher time winning those debates.
“If the Justice Department isn’t going to do anything about it, the states, what’s to stop them from cases like Schiavo and even worse cases,” Mr. McClusky said.
Now, not all of these are cause for alarm – if the right wants to relitigate the deeply unpopular Schiavo case, by all means, they should go ahead. And I cannot say with certainty that Holder’s actions with respect to Marc Rich or any of these other golden oldies was completely laudatory – I would suspect it was less than that. But that’s hardly the point, even for conservatives – in the end, their strategy is to chip away at Obama’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of his cabinet appointments, in particular Holder. And even if it doesn’t pay off until months or even years into the future, it will be a success. Eric Lotke has a good piece on this today.
Losing the election, lacking ideas about how to fix the Bush-era mess, and unsure how or even whether to attack Obama personally, the conservatives are digging into the old bag of tricks. Karl Rove is the point man. The 1990’s are the time frame.
Conservatives are practiced at this attack. The talking points have long since been written and mastered. Talk radio needs the exercise. The Holder nomination represents a pathetic attempt to relive the glory days of the past […] the Republicans are complaining about an eight year old pardon. The same republicans who sat around while George Bush turned the Department of Justice into a political tool, including hiring his white house counsel as Attorney General and firing US Attorneys who refused to undertake political prosecutions. Now they’re worried that this well proven civil servant, who earned his stripes on public corruption, might have made a mistake eight years ago.
Maybe he did. Or maybe he didn’t. But the world has moved on since then. We have other things to think about. Don’t fall for the distraction of litigating this long-dead case. Resist even the temptation to point out Bush’s own dubious pardons. Our people need doctors, our bridges need building, and the economy needs fixing. There’s work to do.
Politics here count for more than anything. If the conservatives win, it energizes the base for future battles. If the conservatives lose, they are driven farther into their corner. That’s why Karl Rove chose the battleground here, on fertile Clintonian soil.
This is all about picking a fight, trying to “play offense” instead of defense, all of the little petty nonsense that the media sucks up like cats to milk, precisely what can derail an agenda as irrelevancies take priority. Lotke thinks the answer for progressives and Democrats is to play this like a team. Indeed, Patrick Leahy today threw the Gonzales statement back in the face of every Republican who voted to confirm him. I would just be wary that Democrats don’t ignore this. It’s really quite toxic.
Jane Hamsher does the definitive rundown on the unbelievably amateurish Burris mess, so I won’t go into it any further. It’s not like it wasn’t patently obvious from the moment Blago announced the appointment that fighting it would be a complete waste of time and not useful in any way to the furtherance of the agenda or the needs of the American people. And it’s not like it wasn’t obvious from the beginning that the Democrats were running around like shrieking five year olds on the playground with absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Now, we’ve got Reid on record saying that Ted Stevens shouldn’t go to jail, which is very collegial, I’m sure, but doesn’t look very consistent with his noble stand against the “taint” of Blagojevich and DiFi is whining “I won’t be ignoooored, Barack” to the press over Panetta. This has been about the most inauspicious beginning of any congress I’ve seen, a total embarrassment to the Senate Democrats, who’ve managed to make the House look like the more restrained, deliberative body.
Jack Cafferty said today, “there does not seem to be a whole lot of public support coming from the president-elect’s own party in advance of his taking the highest office in the land.” Well, who would have guessed?
I am going to succumb to the temptation to say “I told you so” here about a very unpleasant moment in the primaries when I wrote a post that people couldn’t comprehend in the moment (and made many of them nearly insane with anger toward me.) Now that the smoke has cleared and the primary opponents are preparing to work together in the same administration perhaps it’s easier to see that I was pointing out that the behavior of certain Democrats was indicative of beltway pathology and not a defense of one of the candidates.
I know, it’s great fun to think about Rahm and Teddy telling Bill to STFU. But everybody ought to take a deep breath and remind themselves that this is also exactly the kind of thing Democrats do to their sitting presidents, whether named Clinton or, I dare say, Obama. They run to the press with the news that they scolded them so they can make sure everyone knows they are the ones running things.(I know everybody’s forgotten how that used to be because the Republicans don’t constantly air dirty laundry in public for their own aggrandizement. They usually work these things out among themselves for the good of the party.)
If the Democrats win the presidency, expect many more of these little dramas. The inflated egos of powerful Democratic Senators and Congressmen require that they consistently step forward to knee-cap their president whenever possible lest anyone get the idea that he (or she) is actually in charge. They’re just practicing with Bubba, kind of a reminiscence of the good old days.
Oh, and don’t worry about congressional prerogatives. They’ll rediscover them with a vengeance when there’s a Democratic president. They’ll investigate his or her every move, calling for special prosecutors and generally behaving like asses, at the smallest provocation by the press if it gives them a chance to pontificate grandly on Tim Russert about their own superiority. They don’t have the guts to do it when the Republicans are institutionalizing torture or lying the nation into an illegal invasion of another country, because well, Republicans are mean. But they’ll find plenty of things about which to get righteously indignant with the executive when its a Democrat. They’ll be in hyperventilating, bipartisan bliss with their Republican cohorts, elbowing each other to be first to the microphone denouncing the latest shocking presidential failure to dot “i”s and cross “t”s.
The villagers love to get out the pitchforks —- against Democrats. They aren’t scared of them. It’s good fun.
I did fail to mention one of the most important factors. The issues over which they will confront the new president will invariably be either about personal, trivial matters or because of their own eccentric, egomaniacal obsessions. Never fear, they will go along with anything he might do that will screw liberals, usurp the constitution or help Republicans. That’s what’s known as “bipartisanship.”
It turns out that those giant ponds of coal ash, toxic sludge created by coal-fired power plants, which can pour into local reservoirs and contaminate drinking water, are unmonitored and unregulated. Who knew?
The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee last month was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.
Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.
This is actually a function of effective regulation of smokestacks and air pollution – the coal companies just moved the pollution to a hidden corner away from any regulator’s prying eyes.
The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.
Numerous studies have shown that the ash can leach toxic substances that can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.
“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”
The loophole, actually, is allowing coal-fired power plants to continue to exist. The incident in Tennessee is among the worst-case scenarios, but with continued power generation from coal, it’s inevitable. And over half of Americans live within 30 miles of one of these kinds of power plants. That means 30 miles from enormous pools of crap that are one step from your local river, stream or reservoir.
Enough. We need to shut down coal plants in the name of public health. The massive PR machine that the coal industry bakrolled to the tune of $45 million last year is pernicious and threatens the safety of the nation. There is no clean coal. Only sick people.
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