Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Faith Based Boy Genius

by digby

This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with the Bush administration. They are magical thinkers:

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

His confidence buoyed everyone inside the West Wing, especially the president. Ten days before the elections, House Majority Leader John Boehner visited Bush in the Oval Office with bad news. He told Bush that the party would lose Tom DeLay’s old seat in Texas, where Bush was set to campaign. Bush brushed him off, Boehner recalls. “Get me Karl,” the president told an aide. “Karl has the numbers.”

I think what shocks me the most about this article is that it reveals that Rove actually believed they would definitely win based on his magic numbers. I assumed he was “projecting” confidence as any political strategist would do. I honestly didn’t know he was delusional.

And this delusional man’s power was unprecedented for a political advisior. In many ways he has been running the country for the last six years:

In his acceptance speech, Bush thanks Rove, calling him simply “the architect.”

“Everyone in the room knew what that meant,” says Washington Post reporter Mike Allen. “He was the architect of the public policies that got them there, he was the architect of the campaign platform, he was the architect of the fundraising strategy, he was the architect of the state-by-state strategy, he was the architect of the travel itinerary. His hand was in all of it.”

February 2005

Rove is promoted. President Bush announces that he will now be assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff and a senior adviser, the title reflecting influence over both politics and policy. Rove also gets a new office, just steps away from the Oval Office.

With Bush re-elected, Rove is thinking long-term. He intends to use both politics and policy to create a permanent Republican majority. He designs a legislative agenda that he hopes will lead to future Republican gains. High on the list: an overhaul and partial privatization of Social Security, and the appointment of “strict constructionist” judges who will reverse what many Republicans see as judicial activism. “I think what they are trying to do is bigger than the Great Society, and approaches the New Deal,” says Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall. “They aren’t kidding around.”

They weren’t serious people though and Tom Edsall and the rest of the Washington press corps should have known very well by then. Ron Suskind had chronicled the dysfunction inside the Bush administration as early as January 2003:

DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove and his people, “who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible. These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left and right, Democrat and Republican), but in the Bush administration, they were particularly unfettered.”

“Remember ‘No child left behind’? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was his heart, too. But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered.”

Weekly meetings of the Domestic Policy Council “were breathtaking,” DiIulio told me. As for the head of the DPC, Margaret La Montagne, a longtime friend of Karl Rove who guided education policy in Texas, DiIulio is blunt: “What she knows about domestic policy could fit in a thimble.”

When DiIulio would raise objections to killing programs—like the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax credit for the poorest Americans, hailed by policy analysts on both sides of the aisle, that contributed to the success of welfare reform—he found he was often arguing with libertarians who didn’t know the basic functions of major federal programs. As a senior White House adviser and admirer of DiIulio’s recently said to me, “You have to understand, this administration is further to the right than much of the public understands. The view of many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If that’s your position, why bother to understand what programs actually do?”

[…]

Five days later, on July 9, at the administration’s six-month senior-staff retreat, DiIulio writes that “an explicit discussion ensued concerning how to emulate more strongly the Clinton White House’s press, communications, and rapid-response media relations—how better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval Office. I listened and was amazed. It wasn’t more press, communications, media, legislative strategizing, and such that they needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though surely they were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on. No, what they needed, I thought then and still do now, was more policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation.”

Part of the problem, DiIulio now understood, was that the paucity of serious policy discussion combined with a leakproof command-and-control operation was altering traditional laws of White House physics. That is: Know what’s political, know what’s policy. They are different. That distinction drives the structure of most administrations. The policy experts, on both domestic and foreign policy, order up “white papers” and hash out the most prudent use of executive power. Political advisers, who often deepen their knowledge by listening carefully as these deliberations unfold, are then called in to decide how, when, and with whom in support policies should be presented, enacted, and executed.

The dilemma presented by Karl Rove, DiIulio realized, was that in such a policy vacuum, his jack-of-all-trades appreciation of an enormous array of policy debates was being mistaken for genuine expertise. It takes a true policy wonk to recognize the difference, and, beyond the realm of foreign affairs, DiIulio was almost alone in the White House.

“When policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver, you’ll get a lot of oops,” he says.

A lot of oops.

Karl Rove never got Bush a mandate and yet advised him to govern as if he’d won in a landslide. (Maybe he showed Junior some “metrics” that proved that even though he had a tiny majority, it meant his wingnut policies were hugely popular.) And he’s been as responsible for the awful state of American politics and malfeasance in office as anyone in the White House. He barely escaped indictment earlier this year.

Can somebody explain to me why the taxpayers are still paying his salary?

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Freeper Geeks With Problems

by digby

So this nutball who’s been sending white powder to liberals and media celebs turns out to be a freeper. Imagine my surprise.

But it turns out that he’s an odd wingnut sci-fi freak too — and he’s been on a rampage to purge the canon of all those dastardly sci-fi lib-symps.

From Dover Bitch:

Beam them all up, already

A quick Google search for the utter prick who sent white powder to Nancy Pelosi, Keith Olbermann and others yields this dilithium crystal, apparently sent by him to SciFi Channel:

With the passing away of Lexx ends an intriguing albeit smarmy experiment in sci-fantasy. One that breaks with conventions, or should I say, cliches of TV sci-fi of the ’90s. The politically correct pabulum, the multicultural indoctrination, the Bladerunner motifs, and not the least—the steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return!?

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism

.(more here…)

“…steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return?”

Issues?

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Poppy’s Last Rescue

by digby

It seems to me that with the new narrative of Junior having to put his codpiece between his legs and beg for daddy and daddy’s old family retainers to once again bail him out it’s a good time to reprise a little vintage Molly Ivans:

Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, “He went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” He did. For one year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush, “Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth — he’s been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s son — it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School).

He got into the Texas Air National Guard — and sat out Vietnam — through Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the “Fucking Air National Guard,” included not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but some actual black members as well — they just happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father.

He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

Everybody knew this before they voted for him. But they thought they were voting for backyard bar-b-que pal not president. They also assumed that he listened to his father. Not so:

Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well, no,’ and then he got defensive about it,” says Woodward. “Then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.'”

Just two months ago, Junior told Brian Williams:

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.

WILLIAMS: You talk shop?

BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

(He left out the fact that Senior muttered under his breath afterward “… but you are an idiot.”)

Now, he’s widely seen as having to call in his daddy’s consigliere and top spook. He can’t be happy about that.

But the truth is that even daddy’s rich, loyal pals can’t bail him out of this one.(Read this if you want to see just how hopeless the situation seems at this moment. It’s a nightmare.) I suspect that the best they can hope for this time is to stanch the bleeding until they can safely whisk him back to Crawford, dump the mess on the next guy and try to blame the Democrats for the failure.

I hope people understand that James Baker and Robert Gates are in the Bush family business not the “wise old sage who will do what’s right for the country” business. Indeed, their entire lives have been devoted to bailing out Bushes.(And they haven’t always been successful. Jimmy may have pulled one out for Junior in Florida, but he was called back, much against his will, to get Poppy re-elected and failed.) Their job is simply to try to save Junior from ignominy and that is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the US or Iraq.

It is clear that no matter what this country does now in Iraq, it is impossible to
“fix” in any substantial way. We didn’t just break the pot at the Pottery Barn, we blew up the whole neighborhood. Going in was, as James Webb wrote back in 2003, “the greatest strategic blunder in modern memor” the war’s execution has been the greatest series of tactical mistakes in modern memory — so much now that it’s impossible to see a way out that even leads to some kind of authoritarian stability, much less democracy. And it’s very, very easy to see how it can lurch out of control in a dozen different ways.

James Baker and Robert Gates and Joe Lieberman aren’t magicians. And they are not going to let anybody say they and Junior “lost Iraq.” Don’t get your hopes up about these “grown-ups.” They are just looking for a way to keep Bush (and in joe’s case, himself) from looking like a loser — and real withdrawal (as opposed to cosmetic) is not going to accomplish that. Everything they do for the next two years will be to save Bush’s face and the Republican party, period.

I’m sorry to be so cynical, but I lost any hope that the Bush administration was capable of doing the right thing a long time ago.

BTW: George W. Bush has engendered more nicknames than any other president, I think. I have certainly used my share and even coined a fairly popular one. But I have used “Junior” more often than any other, mainly because I know it’s the one that probably bothers him the most. Back in the 2000 campaign Bush made a famous stop on Oprah and gave himself away:

OPRAH WINFREY: Here’s another viewer who e-mailed us with a question for you. Here it is.

MAN: Governor Bush, what is the public’s largest misconception of you?

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Probably that I’m running on my daddy’s name; that, you know, if my name were George Jones, I’d be a country and western singer.

He’s got to be loving this:

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Squeeze Play

by poputonian

Thinking a little more about the politics of economics, I’m reminded again of historian David Hackett Fischer’s book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, in which he noted a 16th century period when rising prices and economic inequality took a heavy toll on society. The book was published in 1996, before everything changed. Doesn’t this description sound familiar?

These many responses to rising prices — social, demographic, economic, monetary, fiscal — interacted in combinations of increasing power. For example, the price-revolution caused falling real wages and rising returns to capital, which caused the growth of inequality, which increased the political power of the rich, which led to regressive taxation, which reduced government revenues, which encouraged currency debasements, which drove prices higher.

I understand that we aren’t in a period of rampant inflation, but we might be soon. At the same time, we have seen the increased political power of the rich, a move toward more regressive taxation, and reduced government revenues.

Weep as you read Fischer’s fascinating conclusion, and notice the inescapable parallels to what we see today, particulalry about aggregate demand and the cost of fuel [all emphasis mine]:

This inquiry began with a problem of historical description about price movements in the modern world. Its primary purpose was to describe the main lines of change through the past eight hundred years. The central finding may be summarized in a sentence. We found evidence of four price-revolutions since the twelfth century: four very long waves of rising prices, punctuated by long periods of comparative price-equilibrium. This is not a cyclical pattern. Price revolutions have no fixed and regular periodicity. Some were as short as eighty years; others as long as 180 years. They differed in duration, velocity, magnitude, and momentum.

At the same time, these long movements shared several properties in common. All had a common wave-structure, and started in much the same way. The first stage was one of silent beginnings and slow advances. Prices rose slowly in a period of prolonged prosperity. Magnitudes of increase remained within the range of previous fluctuations. At first the long wave appeared to be merely another short-run event. Only later did it emerge as a new secular tendency.

The novelty of the new trend consisted not only in the fact of inflation but also in its form. The pattern of price-relatives was specially revealing. Food and fuel led the upward movement. Manufactured goods and services lagged behind. These patterns indicated that the prime mover was excess aggregate demand, generated by an acceleration of population growth, or by rising living standards, or both.

These trends were the product of individual choices. Men and women deliberately chose to marry early. They freely decided to have more children, because material conditions were improving and the world seemed a better place to raise a family. People demanded and at first received a higher standard of living, because there was an expanding market for their labor. The first stage of every price-revolution was marked by material progress, cultural confidence, and optimism for the future.

The second stage was very different. It began when prices broke through the boundaries of the previous equilibrium. This tended to happen when other events intervened–commonly wars of ambition that arose from the hubris of the preceding period. Examples included the rivalry between emperors and popes in the thirteenth century; the state-building conflicts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the dynastic and imperial struggles of the mid-eighteenth century; and the world wars of the twentieth century. These events sent prices surging up and down again, in a pattern that was both a symptom and a cause of instability. The consequences included political disorder, social disruption, and a growing mood of cultural anxiety.

The third stage began when people discovered the fact of price- inflation as a long-term trend, and began to think of it as an inexorable condition. They responded to this discovery by making choices that drove prices still higher. Governments and individuals expanded the supply of money and increased the velocity of its circulation. In each successive wave, price-inflation became more elaborately institutionalized.

A fourth stage began as this new institutionalized inflation took hold. Prices went higher, and became highly unstable. They began to surge and decline in movements of increasing volatility. Severe price shocks were felt in commodity movements. The money supply was alternately expanded and contracted. Financial markets became unstable. Government spending grew faster than revenue, and public debt increased at a rapid rate. In every price-revolution, the strongest nation-states suffered severely from fiscal stresses: Spain in the sixteenth century, France in the eighteenth century , and the United States in the twentieth century.
Other imbalances were even more dangerous. Wages, which had at first kept up with prices, now lagged behind. Returns to labor declined while returns to land and capital increased. The rich grew richer. People of middling estates lost ground. The poor suffered terribly. Inequalities of wealth and income increased. So also did hunger, homelessness, crime, violence, drink, drugs, and family disruption.
These material events had cultural consequences. In literature and the arts, the penultimate stage of every price-revolution was an era of dark visions and restless dreams. This was a time of lost faith in institutions. It was also a period of desperate search for spiritual values. Sects and cults, often very angry and irrational, multiplied rapidly. Intellectuals turned furiously against their environing societies. Young people, uncertain of both the future and the past, gave way to alienation and cultural anomie.
Finally, the great wave crested and broke with shattering force, in a cultural crisis that included demographic contraction, economic collapse, political revolution, international war and social violence. These events relieved the pressures that had set the price-revolution in motion. The first result was a rapid fall of prices, rents and interest. This short but very sharp deflation was followed by an era of equilibrium that persisted for seventy or eighty years. Long-term inflation ceased. Prices stabilized, then declined further, and stabilized once more. Real wages began to rise, but returns to capital and land fell.

The recovery of equilibrium had important social consequences. At first, inequalities continued to grow, as a lag effect of the preceding price revolution. But as the new dynamics took hold, inequality began to diminish. Times were better for laborers, artisans, and ordinary people. Landowners were hard pressed, but economic conditions improved for most people. Families grew stronger. Crime rates fell. Consumption of drugs and drink diminished. Foreign wars became less frequent and less violent, but internal wars of unification became more common and more successful.

Each period of equilibrium had a distinct cultural character. All were marked in their later stages by the emergence of ideas of order and harmony such as appeared in the Renaissance of the twelfth century, the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento, the Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century, and the Victorian era.

After many years of equilibrium and comparative peace, population began to grow more rapidly. Standards of living improved. Prices, rents and interest started to rise again. As aggregate demand mounted, a new wave began. The next price-revolution was not precisely the same, but it was similar in many ways. As Mark Twain observed, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Misleading Reuters Headline

by poputonian

Elton John wants “hateful” religion banned

LONDON (Reuters) – Elton John has said organized religion should be banned because it promotes homophobia and turns some people into “hateful lemmings”.

“I would ban religion completely, even though there are some wonderful things about it,” the British singer said in an interview with the Observer newspaper on Sunday.

“Religion has always tried to turn hatred toward gay people. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it is not really compassionate.”

The singer, who tied the knot with long-term partner David Furnish in a civil ceremony last year, said he admired the teachings of Jesus Christ, but disliked religious bodies.

The headline ambiguously implies that Elton wants some religion banned, the hateful kind. From his full quote, it’s clear he wants all religion banned.

Reuters should be more careful with its headlines.

Fun With The House Money

by poputonian

Several posts ago, commenter JEP noted:

We need talented and determined writers to produce the long, detailed historical work that will reveal the total amount of taxpayers’ money that the federal government gave to rich and powerful people from 2001-2007.

It is then, and only then, that Americans will have any hope of learning the truth and consequences of Karl Rove and George W. Bush. Everything else, conservatism, religious issues, terrorisim, Iraq, everything, is just the means and the public relations required to transfer the money without anyone noticing or asking questions.

By the time this historical work is produced, if it is produced at all, no one will have any interest in the crimes of this administration, all the principle actors will be dead or otherwise beyond prosecution and the interest earned on the transfered money will be enough to purchase another six years of one-party rule.

James has it right. For example, if a ruling party (Republican) transfers wealth from State to Industry in the form of a drug benefit program that guarantees income (at taxpayer expense) to private firms, what is the quid pro quo from industry, if it’s not to help get the ruling party re-elected?

Likewise, if gas prices drop more than a dollar a gallon in the several months leading up to an important election, a price drop that puts the cost of fuel below its market equilibrium, should the profits foregone by the oil companies be considered campaign contributions made to the incumbent party? It would appear, after all, that the purpose of the price drop was an attempt to buy the election.Call it pluto-reciprocity, or some such name.

Beware Of This Guy

by poputonian

With the post-election dust settling, the Republican opportunists are beginning to make moves around their hapless loser-mates. Yes, authentic conservatives are ready to reclaim government. First up? A man who proclaims on a web-site we pay for that he is “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.”

He means that literally, of course. Here was Mike Pence a few years back speaking at the Center For Christian Statesmanship (No, really, Christian Statesmanship!)

At this year’s first Center-sponsored summer intern event, over 400 young people filled the Cannon Caucus Room to hear Representative Mike Pence (IN) deliver his personal testimony of faith.

Because of that first luncheon, one intern has already come to know Christ personally. In addition, 13 more interns have asked how they too can have a personal relationship with Christ, 58 requested to take part in discipleship relationships, and 85 requested Bible studies.

One intern said that events like this one allowed him to see a side of Capitol Hill that he did not know existed.

“When I first heard Mike Pence speak, I called home and told my mom, ‘You’re not going to believe what just happened here,’” said Matt McKinney, a second-year intern for Representative Robert Aderholt (AL). “You don’t hear about the people who live for God. I didn’t realize that people of integrity [worked] here.”

But that was then and this is now. Here is Human Events responding to Pence’s announcement that he intends to become minority leader of the House.

When the now-defeated Republican majority in the House of Representative was led astray on key issues by President Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, it was Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana who rallied backbenchers to fight back in defense of conservative principles.

That is why Pence should be elected minority leader for the next Congress.

Under Pence’s leadership over the next two years, we believe, House Republicans can put themselves in position to retake the majority in 2008. More importantly, they can be counted on to fight for what’s right—even when that means defying a president of their own party.

Speaker Hastert did the right thing today by stepping aside. But if Republicans in the House simply elevate the other members currently in the leadership—go back to business as usual—the party may find itself mired in the minority for years to come. Conservative activists need to speak out now to make certain this doesn’t happen. They need to say: No to the old leaders. No to business as usual. Yes to Mike Pence.

Pence stumbled a little on immigration (in the eyes of the conservative base) though I suspect he’ll recover quite easily from that.

But the real reason to watch out for Mike Pence? He’s not a faux-maverick, fleshy dough-boy, like John McCain. He’s young, vibrant, and handsome — and, get this, he entered politics through talk radio, as mentioned in a NYT lede:

He supports tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He opposes stem cell research and the Medicare drug plan. He is a master of his movement’s medium, talk radio. Jesus Christ is his personal savior and Ronald Reagan his political idol.

Conjure what might be called the perfect conservative, and chances are he would look a lot like Representative Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who in just three terms has turned 100 House allies into a vanguard and himself into one of his party’s rising stars.

And finally, his announcement letter stating the new and immediate mission:

“Our mission has now changed. Our mission in the Majority was to pass legislation reflecting Republican principles. The duty of the Republican Minority in the 110th Congress is to defeat the liberal agenda of the Democrat Party and become the majority in Congress again. We will only defeat the Democrat agenda by presenting a positive, conservative message in vivid contrast to the big government liberalism of the new Majority.”

Look at that face, peeps … the opposition is gonna love him.

We’ve got work to do.

Cart and Horse

by poputonian

Following up on Digby’s earlier post about Congressional investigations, I think Nancy Pelosi likewise has it right, that it isn’t necessary to do all the impeachment drum-beating that would be typical of the now side-lined Movement Conservatism and Aggrievement Society, were the shoe to be on the other foot. To do so would be the equivalent of the prosecutor’s office judging someone guilty, and then setting out to look for evidence to prove it. It’s hard to wait it out, and much less gratifying, of course, but I think she put it well in her comments to CNN:

BLITZER: The power that you will have as the majority is subpoena power, when you conduct your investigations, your oversight. You said on “Meet the Press” back on May 7th, “Well, we will have subpoena power. Investigation does not equate to impeachment. Investigation is the requirement of Congress. It’s about checks and balances.”

Tell us how you plan on pursuing using this subpoena power.

PELOSI: Well, first of all, others have said to us, do the Democrats want to get even now that we’re in the majority? We’re not about wanting to get even. What we want to do is to help the American people get ahead, not to get even with the Republicans.

And so, as we go forward with our hearing process and — which is the normal checks and balance responsibility of Congress, it will be to what is in furtherance of passing legislation that makes the policy better, that improves the lives of the American people. In order to make important decisions, you have to base them on facts. That’s the only way your judgment…

BLITZER: So you’ll use that subpoena power as appropriate?

PELOSI: Well, it’s not a question — well, subpoena power is a last resort. We would hope that there would be cooperation from the executive branch in terms of investigating the pre-war intelligence. I don’t know — those decisions will be made by our caucus with the wisdom of the committees of jurisdiction.

They may or may not be a priority. We’re a brand-new caucus, we have many new, excellent members coming in and we will establish our priorities together. But we will not abdicate our responsibility as the first branch of government, Article I, the legislative branch and our checks and balances responsibilities.

BLITZER: I asked the question about subpoena power because the vice president once again made clear if you subpoena him, he’s not necessarily going to play ball. “I have no idea that I’m going to be subpoenaed,” he said the other day, “and obviously we’d sit down and look at it at the time, but probably not in the sense that the president and vice president are constitutional officers and don’t appear before the Congress.”

PELOSI: Well, as you know, President Ford did and he wasn’t subpoenaed because he came without a subpoena, but why are we even talking about this? We’re so far from that. We’re at a place where we’re here about the future.

Whatever information we need to make the future better, to go forward, whether it’s to protect our country, to end our engagement in Iraq, to make our economy fair, whatever it is — we need to move towards energy independence, I might add — that’s where our priorities are. Information is central to that. So we would have hearings to obtain information.

That’s right. Relax. Get the information (evidence) first. Time is on our side now.

Supporting The Troops

by digby

Veteran’s Day is a good day to take a look at one of the greatest building blocks of the American middle class, the GI Bill:

On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944,” better known as the “GI Bill of Rights.” At first the subject of intense debate and parliamentary maneuvering, the famed legislation for veteran of World War II has since been recognized as one of the most important acts of Congress.

During the past five decades, the law has made possible the investment of billions of dollars in education and training for millions of veterans. The nation has in return earned many times its investment in increased taxes and a dramatically changed society.

The law also made possible the loan of billions of dollars to purchase homes for millions of veterans, and helped transform the majority of Americans from renters to homeowners.

Most people would call that a good thing, right? A successful government program that helped millions of people improve their lives in tangible ways must be unassailable.

*Uh, no:

The public purpose of the G.I. Bill was to smooth the transition from military to civilian life after the war. But ulterior motives were also present. Washington Keynesians wrongly feared the economic consequences of putting this many people in the private sector at once; better to let them flounder around in schools for a few years.

Left-liberals wanted universities to be “democratized” and purged of traditional notions of merit and class. These ideologues saw veterans as a helpful tool (90 percent were eligible to receive funds) in this egalitarian effort. Moreover, colleges and universities across the country wanted government subsidies, just as they do today.

There’s a myth that most veterans would not have attended college without federal government help. In fact, myriad programs existed at all levels of society. Virtually every major church, civic organization, and large corporation raised money to provide them, and most states established loan programs as well. These could have worked without negative effects on schools. But they were preempted by the feds and history’s largest infusion of public dollars to education.

In 1946, the program’s first year, the government dumped $1.3 billion on higher education. This may not seem like much today, but it was then the largest program giving direct payments to individuals, exceeding unemployment benefits, Social Security (by four times), military retirement (by one third), and even agricultural subsidies during the heyday of rural central planning. Two years later, it had exploded in cost by 250 percent.

As veterans grew older, spending stabilized and declined, but the program left an awful political legacy. It served as a model for how politicians can grow the government without provoking public revolt, and caused an entire generation to regard government as a benefactor.

As Bob Dole said on the campaign trail, promoting federally funded vouchers, “I want to help young people to have an education, just as I had an education after World War II with the G.I. Bill of Rights.”

The bastard.

This is essentially the conservative argument against the New Deal and it’s been driving the political and economic debate for decades now. If the government does it — no matter how efficiently or how many people benefit — it must be wrong. And anyone who promotes such things is a self-interested liberal ideologue who wants nothing more than to destroy America’s will to succeed and make people dependent on them. It’s such an awful problem that they can’t even give government benefits to those who put their lives on the line because people might get the idea that government programs work — and that sends the wrong message. Slippery slope, don’t you know.

They’ve never had the nerve to really go after the GI Bill, of course. It would be political suicide. But they hate it and if Grover Norquist and his ilk have their way they would drown government veterans benefits in the bathtub right along with social security — or transform them into faith-based programs where Vets could get training from Ted Haggard (if they asked nicely.)

And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t tried it their way before:

Among the motives inspiring the legislation was the desire to spare the veterans and the nation the economic hardships that accompanied the return, years before, of those who fought in World War I.

… and resulted in this:

The Bonus march of 1932, when World War I veterans rallied in Washington DC for more effective veterans benefits during the height of the Depression was broken up when the US army sent tanks and soldiers with bayonet-affixed rifles into the veteran camps to clear the veterans out and burn the camp down, killing some (including William Hushka), and injuring many more.

(There are some surviving veterans of WWI, by the way.)

The GI Bill was a case of the government learning from mistakes, being responsive to a problem — and solving it. It worked.

Now who is it that supports the troops again — the conservative Club for Growth-style extremists like that guy I quoted above, or the Democratic party? The Democrats will make sure the VA works (as it has beautifully ever since Bill Clinton had it overhauled in the 90’s) and the GI bill and other more modern benefits will continue to be available to Veterans. The other side won’t because when you get down to it they just don’t believe that government is in the problem solving business. It’s really that simple.

* ironically, this article weighs in against the conservative hobby horse,school vouchers, because they are just as pernicious as the GI Bill in installing government into the private education system. It’s pretty clear, although not explicit, that he would just prefer a totally private educational system for everyone — let the hoi-polloi teach themselves.

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More Southern Agitation

by digby

Super smart commenter Sara left this one the Southern Comfort post and I thought it was well worth talking about as we continue this conversation:

Yes, the South needs to rebuild its Democratic Party, and the DNC and Dean can start the ball rolling with some subsidies, but the hard work will be pulling together the Majority Minority African American Democratic Districts with the progressive democratic culture. It has to be built by people on the ground who can cross that racial divide and the trust divide that reflects racial sell-outs of the past, and create one party. For right now the secure Democratic Districts are mostly Majority African American — and in many parts of the South, that is the core of the Democratic Party. In Texas it will need to be three way trust — White anglo, Hispanic and Black.

The parties need to keep focused on doing elections well — but in the off season they need to be good social and information centers. You compete with the Republican Clubhouse in the Mega Church by offering up the party organization as a social setting and a place of fellowship as well as political education. You introduce young people to the party with events that welcome them into their political maturity. Parties in the South ought to be planning major events to which all those new Senate and House Committee Chairs are invited to speak and meet and greet. Out of this will come more election volunteers, and eventually candidates that can win locally and eventually on the state-wide stage. I’ll feel less critical of the South when I see all this sort of stuff just regularly happening. I’ll also be less critical when I see people on all sides of the race and trust divides understanding each other’s take on issues, and backing each other’s interests. That is, afterall, what a political party is all about.

One of the things we haven’t really gotten to in this discussion of southern politics is how race affects the Democratic Party. Anyone want to weigh in on that?

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