Integrity
by digby
Perlstein has written a interesting post up about Leon Panetta from Nixonland, which I had totally forgotten about.
Did you know that Panetta was a member of the Nixon administration? And did you know that he resigned in protest? Read on for the intriguing details …
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Tax Cuts Forever
by digby
Here’s some info on the proposed tax cuts:
If the two-year plan is enacted, workers would see larger paychecks almost immediately because taxes withheld by the government would drop. The break would be retroactive to Jan. 1, and couples receiving a $1,000 tax cut would begin receiving an extra $40 in twice-monthly paychecks as the government tries to spark more consumer spending.
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The Obama plan’s tax cuts for individuals and couples would be a bit different from the rebate checks sent out last year by the Bush administration and Congress in a bid to boost the slowing economy. The relief this time around would be awarded by withholding less from worker paychecks. That provision would cost about $140-150 billion over two years.
It’s going to cost a whole lot more than that. One of the problems with this kind of tax cut (as opposed to a one time is rebate)is that you will likely never get the cash flow back into the treasury after the crisis is past. (And if anyone doesn’t believe me on that, I think they should contact Gray Davis and ask him what happens when a Democrat tries to reinstate taxes or fees that were “temporarily lowered” in order to respond to a shortfall. And then ask Arnold Schwarzenner how that whole thing’s worked out for California in the long run.)
But hey, if people go out and spend that extra 80 bucks a month and it gets the economy going again then the government can cross that bridge when they come to it. If it doesn’t, then I suppose our problems are going to be much bigger than a permanent loss of tax revenue. (And at least the 140 billion is going to working people. The larger number of tax cuts are going to business, which as Krugman says, “isn’t very New Dealish”.)
I’m sympathetic to the idea that “shovel ready” projects aren’t the quickest way to stimulate the economy and that they need to do something immediately, but I really don’t want to see anyone doing the kind of fiddling with budget projections the Bush administration did with their bogus “sunset” provisions. Let’s have honest accounting, both in the numbers and the politics.
And hey, in the end, it might make it possible for the Obama administration to actually allow the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire (but which the Republicans and the Blue Dogs are going to turn into a shrieking war cry for the 2010 election.)It’s a shame they think they can’t raise those taxes right away, but maybe this will provide them a good argument down the road — in order to preserve the middle class tax cuts, they have to raise revenue from the wealthy.
But tax cut politics are never good for progressives in the long run. It’s playing the game on Republican turf, which is a shame.
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Taser Error
by digby
BART’s police chief asked for patience from the public on Sunday after video footage surfaced showing one of his officers fatally shooting an unarmed man who was on the ground on a station platform on New Year’s Day, and after an attorney for the dead man’s family said he planned to sue the transit agency for $25 million. Chief Gary Gee said he, too, had seen video images of the shooting of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old supermarket worker from Hayward. But Gee said he found the footage to be inconclusive, and he said his investigators still needed to interview a key witness – the officer himself. That officer, a two-year veteran, has not been publicly identified and has been placed on routine administrative leave. BART officials have said only that his handgun discharged at about 2:15 a.m. Thursday at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland and that the bullet struck the unarmed Grant, who had been detained with several others. Officials have not said whether the officer intended to shoot Grant. One source familiar with the investigation said BART is looking into a number of issues, including whether the officer had meant to fire his Taser stun gun rather than his gun. Alameda County prosecutors are conducting their own investigation, as is standard in officer-involved shootings.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. The police use their stun guns on people who are already on the ground and offering no threat all the time. It’s no wonder that one of them would get confused and just start shooting people in the same position. They have no sense of what constitutes a real threat anymore.
See, the problem isn’t the form of gun they use, a stun gun or one with bullets. It’s that they use any gun on people who are already down. They do not have a right to inflict pain or kill people who are already in custody, for any reason.
If you can stomach it, check out the video at the link.
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Boo Hoo
by digby
Dianne Feinstein is having a little public fit because she wasn’t consulted about Panetta and had instructed the president-elect that he had to choose an “intelligence professional.” Well, excuse me. When did Difi get a veto on cabinet appointments?
The fact is that DiFi is actually implicated in the torture regime and should just shut up on this. Panetta is a royal pain in the ass in many ways, but he’s not a torture apologist, he’s not implicated in it and he’s reputed to be a good manager. I see no reason why the position has to be chosen from among the CIA ranks just because Porter Goss was a miserable failure or the CIA rank and file are having a hissy.
Welcome to Washington, Barack. First your good friend Bill Richardson forgets to be forthcoming about his little problems and now DiFi goes public in a fit of pique. Wrangling the egomaniacal Democrats and the defensive bureaucracy is always one of the biggest challenges for any poor Dem who actually wins the presidency. Good luck.
Update: Mojoblog has more on Panetta
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Chutzpah!
by digby
You just can’t make this stuff up. From John Cole:
No one could have predicted this would happen. John Yoo and John Bolton, in the NY Times, discuss the need to limit executive authority. Up next, David Addington and Dick Cheney write in the Washington Post on the need to reject Unitary Executive theory.
Drawing on dday’s post below, until recently this sort of obnoxious absurdity would have gone unanswered. Certainly the Democratic establishment’s first impulse would be to split the difference and the media would dutifully absorb their message without ever considering the context. We well informed DFH’s, however, have memories and aren’t likely to allow these jackasses to easily rehab their reputations this time.
I think ensuring that nobody ever takes John Bolton and John Yoo seriously again is good for the country. Others disagree so we’ll fight it out in the modern coffeehouse. (You need to read this article to understand what that means.) It’s an imperfect way to organize society but my experience tells me that it’s the best we can hope for.
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Panetta To CIA
by digby
I’ve had my problems with Panetta over the years, but he’s a much better pick for this job than I might have hoped for. Here he is, just this year on the torture regime:
Fear exacts a terrible toll on our democracy. Five years ago, America went to war in Iraq over the false fear that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even though we now know that there were intelligence officials who questioned the assertion, few leaders were willing to challenge this argument for war because they knew it might undermine public support for the president’s decision to invade Iraq. More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual. The president says the rules are too But all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Our forefathers prohibited “cruel and unusual punishment” because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.
But then there’s this:
The same rationale is used to justify eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant. The president has made clear that the failure of the Congress to pass this authority could jeopardize our security. Instead of trying to negotiate a compromise with Congress that would meet both our intelligence and privacy concerns, it is easier to threaten with fear.
Luckily the wiretapping is not a purview of the CIA and torture is, so he’s on the right side of what I consider to be the most important issue pertaining to his job.
I’ll have to do some research on the rest of Panetta’s ideas on intelligence. He’s an extremely annoying bipartisan fetishist, but I’m not sure how that would affect him in this position. I would guess that the most important constituency here is the CIA itself, and I have no idea what they think of him.
My first instinct is to be relieved about this appointment. Panetta is smart and he has a reputation for being an excellent manager, so at least we won’t be dealing with another Porter Goss debacle.
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A Note On Ideology and “What Works”
by dday
To follow up on Digby’s post about the potential inclusion of $300 billion in tax cuts in the Obama economic recovery package, I’ll start by noting that these were, for the most part, campaign promises. It’s why I remember Kevin Drum and others saying that Obama had not successfully fought against the great Tax Revolt, even as it showed signs of running out of steam. He would insist that we was offering a tax cut for 95% of Americans and tossed out tax incentives like they were candy, even while he was talking at the same time about other economic goals. Once you play on that side of the field, those lobbyists who know how to cram tax loopholes into Congressional bills start licking their chops.
Now, his plans would probably make the tax code more progressive, which is good. The tax credits for businesses that don’t lay off workers, for example, seems good, as well as eliminating the ability for corporations who paid no federal tax to apply for the credits. Then there’s the “Freakonomics” proposal to reduce withholding, so that workers will get a little bit more in their paychecks instead of a lump sum, which may lead to more consumer spending. And this article leaves out some of the details. But aside from the fact that tax cuts didn’t stave off the current recession, and that this limits the pool of money for infrastructure and public works projects to a insufficient level, the worst part of all of this is the fact that it appears the Obama team looks at tax cuts as a way to get Republicans on board. Here’s the deal: there are only two Republicans in America, at most, that need to be “on board” with something like this, and if a new President and a Democratic Senate can’t flip them, I don’t know why they even try anymore. This looks like an example of a bias that the Obama team has had for a while, that everything has to be bipartisan and attract the support of both parties, because only then can it be legitimate.
Incredibly, there’s a quote in the WSJ article from am Obama spokeswoman that goes: “We’re working with Congress to develop a tax-cut package based on a simple principle: What will have the biggest and most immediate impact on creating private-sector jobs and strengthening the middle class? We’re guided by what works, not by any ideology or special interests.”
That’s just not true. If you were guided by “what works,” you would take out the reams of nonpartisan charts about what works best as stimulus and go with those programs that provide the biggest and most immediate impact. And they are NOT broad tax cuts. But the holy grail of bipartisanship has been intertwined with “what works,” leading us to more use of the tax code (and magically, the repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the rich have vanished). And so that IS being guided by ideology. It’s setting the policy at the midpoint of the Republican caucus to ensure some support from that side of the aisle. That’s not only ideological, it’s Republican in character.
The reason we have seen an explosion of citizenship in the past year, as this TAP article argues, is actually because of partisanship, because both sides made an argument, because people were excited to line up with either alternative, and because they were enabled through new technologies to break down what were seen as barriers to entry. It was partisanship, however, that spurred the citizenship.
The rebirth of civic participation this year is not a product of experiments in deliberative democracy or a new interest in league bowling. Rather, it is based on party politics, coupled with and accelerated by new opportunities provided by the Internet. Skocpol’s claim that “conflict and competition have always been the mother’s milk of American democracy” tells part of the story. Just as social-movement theorists might have predicted, the major innovations came from outsiders, like members of MoveOn.org, who wanted to challenge the system. At the time when it led opposition to the Iraq War, MoveOn represented a point of view that had little support among political elites, which meant it wouldn’t have been able to use conventional tools of interest-group politics even if it had wanted to. Instead, it turned to the Internet and created a new model of mass mobilization.
Unlike the mass-membership national organizations that Skocpol described, which asked for a single act from each member — a donation — MoveOn engaged its members through a never-ending flow of transactions — petitions, letters to Congress, polls, contests. In his book The Argument, Matt Bai writes that MoveOn’s members were typically ordinary suburbanites who have been “isolated for too long, entirely disconnected from each other and despondent over the rise of Republican extremism.” Thus, MoveOn built exactly the kind of dense local networks Putnam dreamed of and connected them to national debates as Skocpol hoped […]
Evidence suggests that people who are strongly engaged in politics and hence likely to volunteer for campaigns are strongly partisan and tightly clumped around the ideological poles (they are strongly liberal or strongly conservative). If this is right, online activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is both making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions, and forcing Republicans to adopt similar organizing techniques in order to win elections.
That’s just a sample, I invite you to read the whole article.
We’re not going to see Obama walk into the Oval Office and sign this bill, so there’s some time to bring this around to the right direction. And again, I hope this is just a trial balloon. But if the debate in Washington devolves into one side vowing bipartisan love fests while the other side plays the same partisan game, those civic bonds will break down, or at least to the extent that they are tied to Obama. Politics draws its breath from the conflict of ideas in the public square. Those who have been energized over the past couple years will not take kindly to an Administration that calibrates itself at the midpoint of the opposing party to ensure wide support. Even Bill Clinton, who was supposed to be the master triangulator, put out a tax plan that did not receive a single Republican vote. Somehow he, and the economy, survived.
What’s most dangerous about this is the effort to corral 75-80% support just for the sake of doing so. Not only is it unlikely, it will end up really eroding Obama’s ability to draw on popular support to govern.
Update: from digby — I just wanted to intrude on dday’s post to encourage you all to read the article to which he links called “Can Partisanship Save Citizenship” by Henry Farrell. It is very illuminating.
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…I want to further intrude on my own post to link to Krugman’s view, via his blog, on the tax cut rumblings.
Yes He Will
by digby
This is an excellent day for those who believe in presidential adherence to the rule of law — the Obama team has chosen an absolutely first rate person to bring back “honor and integrity” to the Office of Legal Council. As Greenwald says this morning,” there is probably no official who will have a more significant role in determining the extent to which the Obama administration really does reverse the lawlessness and legal radicalism of the Bush years,” and Dawn Johnsen is the perfect choice for such a job. There have been few experts in the field of presidential authority who have been more outspoken and critical of the Bush administration’s lawless regime. He literally couldn’t have chosen anyone better to signal an abrupt change with the past.
Greenwald highlights some of her writings on the subject and she sounds as if she would not turn a blind eye to any evidence that’s uncovered of Bush administration lawbreaking. It’s impossible to know if that might happen, but it’s very, very good news that President Obama intends to completely reverse course on these executive atrocities. It’s not that I particularly doubted that he was going to do it, but picking someone like this says that he means to make it a priority in the new Justice Department and that he wants everyone to know it. Huzzah.
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Stimulating Debate
by digby
The Democrats are floating the idea that they will spend 40% of the proposed 700 billion dollar stimulus package on tax cuts. I certainly hope they really believe that it will work to create jobs and stimulate investment because if they are doing this as a political move to appease the Republicans they will not only create a stimulus that is highly unlikely to work, but the Republicans will not reward them for it. Sure, they may get a few more to sign on to the plan, but if it doesn’t get the job done the conservatives will soon swarm them like a school of starving piranhas, no matter who voted for it.
I actually suspect this unfortunately isn’t about Republicans, but rather about a bunch of Blue Dog Democrats who are so incredibly stupid that they can’t tell the difference between fiscal responsibility for a family of four and trying to stave off another Great Depression. (Yes, they really are that thick.)
I will withhold judgment until I learn more. It’s possible that this thin article doesn’t really reflect their thinking. And I’ll look forward to reading what the smart economists have to say, because maybe I’m just being reflexively anti-tax cut and failing to see this for the brilliant economic mix that it is. But if this is really about politics and a 40% of the stimulus in tax cuts is the opening bid then I would guess they are at least testing the idea of not rocking the tax cut boat and are hoping that an extra few hundred bucks will get people buying a bunch of garbage at the malls again this time. Maybe it will. But with Paul Krugman saying things like this, (before the article I linked was published) I’m skeptical that a 400 billion dollar infrastructure stimulus combined with more ineffectual tax cuts and a lot of happy talk about “waste fraud and abuse” will get the job done:
News reports say that Democrats hope to pass an economic plan with broad bipartisan support. Good luck with that. In reality, the political posturing has already started, with Republican leaders setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation — which is pretty rich considering their party’s behavior over the past eight years. More broadly, after decades of declaring that government is the problem, not the solution, not to mention reviling both Keynesian economics and the New Deal, most Republicans aren’t going to accept the need for a big-spending, F.D.R.-type solution to the economic crisis. The biggest problem facing the Obama plan, however, is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs — a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts. This is a problem with which Keynes was familiar: giving money away, he pointed out, tends to be met with fewer objections than plans for public investment “which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” What gets lost in such discussions is the key argument for economic stimulus — namely, that under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful. All of this leaves me concerned about the prospects for the Obama plan. I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized. And Mr. Obama is right: We really do need swift, bold action. Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy — well, you can see where this is going
Stay tuned. There are a lot of trial balloons being floated and we have no idea what’s real and what isn’t. But I really hope that something this important isn’t being dealt away in the vain hope that “bipartisan support” will help insure success. Success will ensure success and it’s far more important to properly fix the economy than change the tone in Washington, which doesn’t matter a damn to the average American if he’s lost his home and he’s out of a job. I would guess that a majority of Republican politicians don’t care about anything but making a comeback, but there are probably a handfullwho will give Obama the bipartisan cover he feels he needs without sacrificing the efficacy of the plan. There’s a reason for having a real majority and it’s for times like this.
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Changing The Tone
by digby
It was only two and a half years ago that Time Magazine put Ann Coulter on the cover saying: “the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire.” And thank goodness, it looks like the mainstream media is planning to keep this woman’s humor and fire accessible to the masses.
In preparation for the media blitz, the good folks at Media Matters have read her new book “Guilty” so you don’t have to. Evidently, she hilariously posits that liberals are assaulting America with their victimization (the conservatives are busy fighting the war on Christmas, no doubt.) She asks “who’s the biggest pussy? Barack or Hillary?” and claims that Republican turncoats, male and female, are nothing but a bunch of … women, which is the worst epithet Coulter can think of. (She calls John McCain a pussy too.) Fun stuff.
But I wonder if she’s going to find a friendly audience even among the neanderthals with her attack on divorced people and single mothers:
- Coulter calls children whose parents divorce “future strippers” in a chapter titled “Victim of a Crime? Thank a Single Mother”:
In any event, divorced mothers should be called “divorced mothers,” not “single mothers.” We also have a term for the youngsters involved: “the children of divorce,” or as I call them, “future strippers.” It is a mark of how attractive it is to be a phony victim that divorcées will often claim to belong to the more disreputable category of “single mothers.” [Page 36]
Later in the chapter, Coulter writes: “Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.” [Page 38]
So Coulter is not only attacking liberals these days, but Republicans, war heroes, single mothers, divorcées and their children as well. At some point there is going to be nobody left to buy her books — except for media figures, who apparently continue to believe that she’s just rollicking good fun. But then they love nothing more than kissing up to those who abuse them.
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