February 16, 2010Source Credits - Tony Ligouri, Montour Boys Basketball Boosters Topic Tags - Event Fundraisers ---The Montour Boys Basketball boosters will host a fantastic Final Four Party at the Kennedy Township Fire Hall.This event will take place on Saturday, April 3, 2010. This fundraiser is huge for the boosters, with 100% of the funds raised being used for the benefit of the kids. It is
DOWNLOADS: (44) PLAYS: (142) Speaking to students of the University of Alabama law school, Chief Justice John Roberts launched a blistering attack on President Obama's State of the Union criticism of the Court's Citizens United decision. Calling Obama's prime-time critique "very troubling," Roberts complained that the President's annual address to Congress "degenerated to a political pep rally." Of course, when Robert's political godfather Ronald Reagan or his sponsor George W. Bush used the State of the Union to berate, badger and batter the Supreme Court, that was just fine with the Chief Justice. "I'm not sure why we're there," Roberts told the audience in Tuscaloosa, adding: "The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court -- according the requirements of protocol -- has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling." But during the George W. Bush's tenure, the Justices served as a prop for his State of the Union battles with the judiciary. Bush's Supreme politicking during his State of the Union speeches was a regular fixture of his presidency. For three straight years (2004, 2005 and 2006), President Bush denounced "activist judges" and insisted "for the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage." On the very day Samuel Alito joined the Robert Court, Bush used his 2006 SOTU for a victory lap: "The Supreme Court now has two superb new members -- new members on its bench: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. I thank the Senate for confirming both of them. I will continue to nominate men and women who understand that judges must be servants of the law and not legislate from the bench." And throughout the presidency of Ronald Reagan, for whom John Roberts promoted the gutting of the Civil Rights Act, overturning Roe v. Wade and a dangerously ignorant policy in response to the AIDS crisis, bashing the Supreme Court was a routine occurrence. In 1983, President Reagan penned a screed in Human Life Review, echoing Justice Byron White's declaration that the Court's ruling in Roe was an exercise of "raw judicial power." Reagan wrote: "Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. ... Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a 'right' so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born." And as radio host Michael Smerconish noted, Reagan didn't hesitate to get in the Justices faces during his State of the Union speeches: Among Reagan's State of the Union addresses, on four occasions he did what Obama attempted to do: urge Congress to address a Supreme Court decision with which he disagreed. but in the Gipper's case, he avoided any direct reference to the Supreme Court decision. The issue of abortion, he acknowledged in 1984, was "very controversial." He asked: "But unless and until it can be proven that an unborn child is not a living human being, can we justify assuming without proof that it isn't?" One can only speculate whether Justice Harry Blackmun, a Nixon nominee and author of the majority opinion in Roe, wondered out loud, "I'm not sure why we're there." When John Roberts first assumed the mantle of Chief Justice in 2005, George Washington University law professor, New Republic regular and author of the PBS series and book "The Supreme Court" Jeffrey Rosen lauded Roberts as the second coming of the legendary John Marshall: "Whenever the Court gets dramatically out of step with the public, and issues intensely controversial, narrowly divided opinions, all of that carefully hoarded legitimacy can go out the window. That's why I'm persuaded by Roberts' argument that resurrecting Marshall's visio
Former Florida state House Speaker Marco Rubio is set to air his first television commercial in the Senate primary fight against Gov. Charlie Crist, an ad that tells us much about the political environment in which races -- primaries and general elections -- will be run this year. Let's first take a look at the 60-second ad, which was produced by Scott Howell & Company. What does the ad tell us? 1. Authenticity, Authenticity, Authenticity: Rubio speaks to the camera for the entire 60 seconds of the ad, surrounded by his (undeniably cute) family. Part of that strategy is born of his campaign's belief that he is charismatic and letting him talk accrues to his political benefit. But, another element of the strategy is that voters are carrying a deep skepticism about politicians and want to hear directly from the man (or woman) asking for their vote. One of the
Representative Alan Grayson has introduced a four-page bill that would allow all Americans under the age of 65 purchase Medicare for a fee. It is a great solution for health insurance in this country that would give everyone a choice of a robust public option.
The bill currently has ten co-sponsors. Notably, I have learned that these co-sponsors were gathered in only 15 minutes, making one co-sponsor for every 90 seconds of effort. That is a pretty good pace.
Grayson is resuming his efforts, so expect quite a few more members of Congress to sign on today.
The Medicare buy-in proposal has, it would appear, significantly more support than a new, stand along public option. In December, only two members of the Senate sort of opposed to it--Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. Lieberman, however, had publicly supported the idea as recently as September, and only changed his mind to stick a fork in the eyes of progressives. Nelson didn't even declare his outright opposition, just indicated that he was worried about it. Every other member of the Democratic Senate caucus appeared to reach an agreement on a Medicare buy-in.
This is an effort with a lot of potential support in Congress, so much that it could potentially be passed as a stand alone bill. You can support it over at WeWantMedicare.com.
The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced on Monday key amendments to the regulation of United States sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan.
The new provisions give a blanket license for the export of "certain services and software incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user."
This clarification is just what EFF called for last June, and will go a long way to allay concerns that online service providers based in the U.S. cannot offer their services in those countries. Previously, despite the well-known freedom-enhancing capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook in repressive regimes like Iran, it was unclear whether those companies could even offer their services there without falling foul of the United State's broad prohibition on the export of goods and services to these regimes.
This was not a hypothetical concern: other services that were useful for dissidents to communicate and organize, like Microsoft, and Google's instant messaging clients had previously been blocked from being used in these very countries -- not by the repressive states, but by companies themselves, cautious of violating sanctions.
While the change in the letter of the law is clearly positive, perhaps just as important is the signal this sends about the administration's new guiding policy on global Internet freedom.
Previously, cautious companies, afraid of running afoul of OFAC, have frequently forbidden or blocked all use in sanctioned countries, even when the letter of the law did not require such draconian steps. You can see this institutionally paranoid language, and its inevitable results, in Bluehost's terms of service, which pre-emptively prohibits all citizens of sanctioned countries from even applying to use their hosting facilities (a policy which lead them to shamefully throwing innocent Zimbabwean activists off their service last year).
Now we are moving (slowly) to a new, and better default, where technologists and their lawyers might assume that free Internet services that facilitate free expression and association need not be blocked pre-emptively for anyone, anywhere.
The Obama administration has shown with these changes that it would prefer to move toward that end. Have we got there yet? Is it what export law now says?
While we wait for export regulation experts to sweat the details, the answer is still far too hazy for comfort. While the State and Treasury departments have fixed much that was wrong with Iranian, Cuban and Sudanese sanctions, there are still regulations on, for instance, Zimbabwe, Syria and North Korea for techies and their lawyers to worry about, and those sanctions still inhibit making software generally available. We also would like to see more clarity about collaborative software development locations, like Sourceforge.
We hope that this administration backs up these first steps with a continuing review of export rules, and pro-actively works to reassure Internet companies that they are free to build an open Internet for everyone, without expecting a knock on the door from their own government.
In a truly surprising comeback, since the Massachusetts special election seven weeks ago, health reform has gained a net 7% in national popularity, and a majority no longer opposes it. Pollster.com:
Health reform popularity trendline, January 21-March 10
The Democratic health reform bill is actually 2% more popular on net now than it was back in early November, when the House first passed a bill.
With all that said, the bill is still not very popular, especially in relative historical terms. Congress rarely passes unpopular laws, and that has always been at the heart of the difficulty in passing this bill.
Still, at this rate of growth, it is possible that a plurality will favor reform by Latin Easter (April 4th), the current goal for President Obama to sign the bill into law.
Oh please, please give me Ralph Reed for Congress. I would be so happy to remind everyone of the details of this dirtbag's transactions with Jack Ambramoff: Reed, the 49-year-old former executive director of the Christian coalition, saw his meteoric rise take an even harder fall in 2006 after the extent of his ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff were revealed. He saw sizable, early leads in the polls disintegrate in his bid for Georgia lieutenant governor, and he wound up losing in the GOP primary. But in a changed environment, the first one favoring Republicans since 2006, Reed is plotting a bid for Congress. The Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody reports Reed will declare his candidacy tomorrow morning for retiring Georgia Congressman John Linder's seat. (Linder announced his retirement on Feb. 27. The seventh congressional district is a solidly Republican one. McCain won it with 60% of the vote; Bush did so with 70%.) “The environment is so good for Republicans right now, any conservative who ever considered running for anything, this is the year to do it,” one Republican strategist told First Read. Of Reed's ties to Abramoff, the strategist said, "It doesn't worry me too much. If he can get himself elected, then voters will have given him a clean bill of health, and he'll no doubt hold himself to a high standard in Congress. This strikes me as the sort of inside-the-beltway hand-wringing that's largely irrelevant in a country with unemployment hovering around 10 percent." You see how "strategists" think? "Oh, the voters have short memories!" Except when the Republicans want to smear someone, of course. Let's give them a taste of their own medicine and make sure no one ever puts this corrupt hypocrite in public office.
ABOVE: Milton Scholar and Law Professor2 Stanley Fish
tries to remember his name
Stanley Fish, The New York Fucking Times
Do You Miss Him Yet?
1Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV, Line 327
2At a fourth-tier law school
At today's progressive media summit with the Senate Democratic caucus, the floodgates on filibuster reform broke wide open, as Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer both came out in favor of filibuster reform:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pledged on Wednesday to take a serious look at revising the filibuster rules at the beginning of the next Congress, calling the current level of obstruction in the Senate unacceptable.
And in a reflection of the party's commitment to changing the parliamentary rules, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) followed the majority leader by saying that his committee would address the topic soon.
"The rules committee is going to start holding hearings on how to undo the filibuster rule," said Schumer, who chairs the Senate Rules Committee. The New York Democrat told the Huffington Post after the speech that the hearings would take place two or three weeks from now.
I was invited to this summit, but I didn't go because I had too much work and was out of energy. I wanted to talk filibuster reform with Senators, and get an idea of who was on board, but it looks like I wasn't needed for that.
With Schumer and Reid on board, all three Senators who might be Democratic Majority leader in 2011 are now on record favoring filibuster reform. Dick Durbin came out in favor last month. Combine it with the White House being open to the idea, and this effort now officially has leadership weight behind it.
Expect more Senators to start going on record for filibuster reform, both today and in two or three weeks when the hearings start. The dam is breaking wide open. This is no longer a quixotic campaign--it is very winnable.
Here is the current filibuster reform whip count:
****
Filibuster Reform Whip Count
Among relevant current and potential Senators, there are at least 21, and as many as 26, supporters of reform
50 Senators who are currently safe bets for being in Senate in 2011
Potential Senators in 2011
DOWNLOADS: (115) PLAYS: (213) In what world does Blanche Lincoln's sort of "independence" leave anyone "smiling"? Apparently after watching this hackery, it does in CNN's Rick Sanchez's world. Sanchez and Gloria Borger have a nice little pity party for Senator Blanche Lincoln and do their best to paint her as being beaten up by extremists on both sides. Since when is someone who's taking all kinds of corporate money and voting like a Republican make them either "independent" or a "centrist"? Borger and Sanchez should be ashamed of themselves for this segment. ConservaDem Lincoln has been acting in the interest of her campaign contributors and not the interest of the party she is supposed to belong to or the interest of her constituents. Sadly who she's taking money from and how that might be affecting her votes is too much to ask either Sanchez or Borger to point out. SANCHEZ: Let me show you something else because the Democrats have their own problems. Look at Blanche Lincoln. This is Blanche Lincoln's ad. She's a Dem. And if you study the ad -- folks, I am going to play this for you. Watch to see how many times President Obama comes up in the ad. And tell me if she doesn't come off sounding more like a conservative than a progressive or a liberal. Play it, Rog. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) LINCOLN: I'm Blanche Lincoln and I want to show you what it's like in Washington these days. And your tax dollars? This is why I voted against giving more money to Wall Street, against the auto company bailout, against the public option health care plan. (END VIDEO CLIP) SANCHEZ: She's voting against everything that could possibly increase your taxes, and there is no mention in that ad of, "I support the president" or let's do health care reform. You know, I'm sorry, but I'm looking at that thing and I'm thinking, she's sounding more conservative than she is progressive or liberal or whatever you want to call it. BORGER: Well, look, she's in a very tough state. Arkansas is not an easy state for Democrats under the best circumstances. Now she has a challenger on her left, in fact. And she's got challengers on the right, in the Republican party. So, you know, she has always portrayed herself as an independent Democrat. But she did vote with Democrats on the health care bill in the Senate. That health care bill didn't have a public option in it, which is why the liberals are so mad at her. So this woman has it coming at her from both directions. It's going to be a very difficult fight for her. The liberal who is challenging her raised a million bucks in a day. You know, that hurts for Blanche Lincoln. I don't think you're going to see Democrats like this run away from Barack Obama the way Republicans ran away from George W. Bush. You're not going to see that because he remains personally popular. They're going to need his help in getting out the voters. SANCHEZ: Yeah. BORGER: But she's clearly not tying herself to him either. SANCHEZ: It's interesting to see members of both party running away from parts of their own ideology. I think there's a lot of folks out there who call themselves independents or want to be in the middle or are angry with both parties, who are smiling now. BORGER: Right. SANCHEZ: I have to let you go. We're out of time. BORGER: All right.
I received some more bad news, in a month that already seems saturated with it, about Ivan G. Shreve, Jr., proprietor of the indispensable blog on classic films, TV, and radio, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear. As you may already know, TDOY hasn’t been updated since February 25, and while this isn’t unprecedented — Ivan will occasionally suspend blogging while he works on liner notes for an upcoming DVD release, or some other paying gig — he usually posts a Gone Fishin’ sign before he disappears. So I’ve been getting a little worried.
The very resourceful Stacia, of She Blogged By Night was kind enough to track me down on Twitter and let me know that Ivan has been hospitalized. We don’t know how serious the situation is, or how long he’s likely to be laid up, but she has since posted a bit more information on her blog:
“Ivan is in room 5401 of the Athens Regional Medical Center and there is no set release date as of yet, but from what I’ve heard, I’m reassured he’ll be back to blogging soon. Which is good, because Thrilling Days of Yesteryear provides at least 50% of my online Jack Benny intake. Ivan’s hospital has an e-greetings system here that you can use to leave him a note if you want.”
Not only is Ivan a witty, gracious, and highly informative writer, he’s a very old friend of World O’ Crap — one of the earliest of early adopters, going back to WO’C’s first days at the old Salon blogs — so this hits particularly hard. Ivan has often remarked that he got into blogging because of Sheri’s example, and since the same can be said of me, I’ve always considered him a blog blother. If you can spare a moment, please click the link above and send Ivan a little note.
Thanks.
Representative Joe Donnelly confirms that he is a member of the Stupak bloc. From an interview with a local paper yesterday:
President Barack Obama wants Congress to vote yes or no on a comprehensive reform measure from the Senate. Donnelly likes a lot about the bill, but its language on abortion is a "fatal flaw." For him, it is a deal breaker. "I would not vote for it," he said. He figures there will be a vote within a month or so. The abortion language is unpopular with "a significant" number of congressmen. It has the potential to kill the bill, he said.
We jumped the gun on a couple of stories yesterday, but this is different. This is a direct quote from Donnelly, and it came only yesterday.
That makes seven confirmed, and eleven potential, members of the Stupak bloc:
Definite Stupak bloc (7)
Marion Berry (AR-01)
Joseph Cao (LA-02)
Kath Dahlkemper (PA-03)
Joe Donnelly (IN-02)
Steve Driehaus (OH-01)
Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
Bart Stupak (MI-01)
Not Stupak bloc (3)
Dale Kildee (MI-05)
Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-01)
Jim Oberstar (MN-08)
Rumored, but unconfirmed, Stupak bloc (11)
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Jerry Costello (IL-12)
Mike Doyle (PA-14)
Brad Ellsworth (IN-08)
Baron Hill (IN-09)
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Paul Kanjorski (PA-12)
Alan Mollohan (WV-01)
Solomon Ortiz (TX-27)
Nick Rahall (WV-03)
Charlie Wilson (OH-06)
Additionally, via Greg Sargent, via Greg Sargent, Representative Jim Marshall confirms he is a "no" (he was a "no" in November), while Jim Matheson says he is undecided (he was a "no" last time). All together, I believe this makes the current vote count 195 in favor, 195 opposed, according to David Dayen. I am counting Altmire, Baird and Gordon as "yes" votes, at least for the time being.
Alan Grayson came to the House Floor today to introduce the Public Option Act, which would allow all Americans to buy into Medicare at cost. The bill is 4 pages long, and calls for an unsubsidized option for any American to choose Medicare over private insurers. The bill would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish enrollment periods, coverage guidelines, and premiums for the program. Because premiums would be equal to cost, the program would pay for itself. “The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote,” Congressman Grayson said. I have doubts that this bill will get to a vote anytime soon, but it gives me hope that we'll move in the direction of a Medicare expansion, and it certainly offers a solid goal for progressives to embrace going forward. I have always believed this is the right public option, rather than creating a brand new bureaucracy. However, the Medicare infrastructure needs some work before the doors can be thrown open to everyone. Those remodels are already in the Senate bill, in the form of innovation, streamlining, electronic health records and outcomes-based medicine. The Medicare reforms are robust, meaningful, and will make Medicare the most viable public option of all. More significantly, Grayson's introduction of this bill right now invites Dennis Kucinich to stand down on his opposition to the Senate bill. Grayson isn't introducing this bill as a symbolic gesture. There's no question that the public option, as debated over the past year, has traction and is popular, especially when framed as a Medicare buy-in. By making it a separate initiative, Grayson unbundles it from the Senate bill and gives both an opportunity to pass. Whether it passes this year or not, it's a magnificent and savvy political move on Grayson's part. Let's hope Kucinich picks up the cue, moves the ball down the field instead of picking up the goalposts and heading home.
It got a brief mention on some of the cable channels, but the only major TV network that carried live coverage of this healthcare reform rally in D.C. yesterday was Fox - and then, only to ridicule it: The reason? AHIP, the health insurance lobbying organization, was meeting in (where else?) the Ritz-Carlton. A coalition of groups led by unions including SEIU, AFSCME, UFCW and Health Care for American Now declared the meeting site a "corporate crime scene" and attempted to make a citizens' arrest: In a reverse twist on the old protestors' tactic of getting arrested to make a point, union leaders and other backers of President Obama's healthcare plan issued "citizen's arrest" warrants for health insurance executives Tuesday – accusing them of exploiting consumers. The "warrants," delivered to police during a demonstration outside an insurance industry meeting at a Washington hotel, were an attempt to dramatize protestors' call for insurance reform – and to build public support for the Democrats' healthcare legislation. The demonstration, which drew several thousand protestors from as far away as Illinois and California, was organized by groups that for more than a year have pushed Congress to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers as part of national healthcare overhaul. While that policy objective, known as the public option, is not part of the healthcare legislation pending in Congress, the groups are nonetheless mounting a multi-million dollar campaign to promote the bill. The effort will continue in coming weeks, with more demonstrations, paid advertising and other events, including a hearing to take place Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Boy, there was a time when you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing someone about Tea Party rallies. I guess the only way you can get on TV these days is to be on the side of the insurance companies.
Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has faced a steady drumbeat of criticism from her Republican primary opponent -- state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner -- for ducking debates and non-choreographed media appearances in her run for the California governorship. Yesterday at an event in Oakland, Whitman handed Poizner considerable fodder to make that case -- refusing to take questions and then watching as reporters were moved out of the room and some sort of blockade was put in place so the cameras couldn't shoot film of Whitman standing around. (You must watch the video above; it is b-r-u-t-a-l.) Of the back and forth, San Fransciso Chronicle veteran political reporter Carla Marinucci wrote: "Veteran reporters, who included KTVU's Randy Shandobil and KPIX's Hank Plante, were among the crowd that wasn't amused. Question: is Whitman a candidate for governor, or a museum piece to be 'watched' by reporters?" Ouch. While the press
In the past I have argued that Democratic losses in 2010 will move the Congressional Democratic caucuses to the left. This is because, according to my argument, most of the Democrats who will lose in 2010 will be in the right-wing of the party. Thus, the remaining group of Democrats will be, on average, more left-wing than the current group of Democrats.
However, at least as far as the Senate is concerned, it turns out that isn't the case. Despite prominent center-right Senators such as Blanche Lincoln, Arlen Specter, and Evan Bayh set to leave the Senate by either retirement or the ballot, the Democratic Senate caucus will not see any significant ideological shift in 2011.
For this analysis, I measured the current 59 members of the Senate Democratic caucus according to three oft-cited ideological voting scorecards: Progressive Punch (crucial votes), and DW-Nominate and National Journal. I recalibrated all of those scored along a 0.0 to 100.0 scale, with 0.0 being the most conservative and 100.0 being voting the most progressive. Only scores for 2009-2010 were used.
According to this analysis, the current 59 members of the Senate Democratic caucus have a mean progressive score of 74.7. Debbie Stabenow stands at the median of the caucus, with a score of 78.1.
Removing the Senators who are retiring (Bayh, Burris, Dodd, Dorgan, Kaufman) and the Senators who are currently trailing in their bid for re-election (Bennet, Lincoln, Reid, Specter), the caucus mean would become 75.5. Patty Murray would become the median, at 78.3.
Here is the chart I used, with departing members in red:
The slaughter of the moderates would thus move the Democratic Senate caucus less than 1% to the left. The size of the shift would be the equivalent of the difference between Debbie Stabenow and Patty Murray, whatever that is.
Further, if Barbara Boxer were to lose re-election, which is entirely possible, the Democratic Senate caucus would actually shift slightly to the right on the mean, and remain with Debbie Stabenow on the median.
So, if you are hoping that a Democratic wipeout in 2010 will move the party to the left, think again, at least when it comes to the Senate. Setting fire to the forest will just result in having the exact same forest, only with fewer trees. The Democrats who remain in the Senate will be, on average, virtual ideological twins to the ones who left.
I will try to whip up an equivalent analysis of the Democratic House caucus, post-2010, tomorrow.
Chris Hayes filling in for Rachel Maddow talks to Howard Dean about the protests held outside of the Ritz-Carlton "where the insurance companies were having their conference and plotting to kill health reform". Dean also weighed in on what he thinks should happen if the bill does pass -- the Senate should either include a Medicare buy-in or restore the House version which has a public option. He also thinks they should get rid of the individual mandate and that might make it a decent bill. I guess we'll find out if anyone's listening to Dean shortly if the bill does make it through the House.
The ebb and flow of gas and electricity into your home contains surprisingly detailed information about your daily life. Energy usage data, measured moment by moment, allows the reconstruction of a household's activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when they take a hot bath.
California's PG&E is currently in the process of installing "smart meters" that will collect this moment by moment data—750 to 3000 data points per month per household—for every energy customer in the state. These meters are aimed at helping consumers monitor and control their energy usage, but right now, the program lacks critical privacy protections.
That's why EFF and other privacy groups filed comments with the California Public Utilities Commission Tuesday, asking for the adoption of strong rules to protect the privacy and security of customers' energy-usage information. Without strong protections, this information can and will be repurposed by interested parties. It's not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the information to plan a burglary. Marketing companies will also desperately want to access this data to get new intimate new insights into your family's day-to-day routine–not to mention the government, which wants to mine the data for law enforcement and other purposes.
This isn't just a California issue. Many threats to the privacy of the home—where our privacy rights should be strongest—were detailed in a 2009 report for the Colorado Public Utility Commission. The federal government has been promoting the smart grid as part of its economic stimulus package, and last year, EFF and other groups warned the National Institute of Standards and Technology about the privacy and security issues at stake. For example, security researchers worry that today’s smart meters and their communications networks are vulnerable to a variety of attacks. There are also questions of reliability, as PG&E faces criticism from California customers who have seen bills skyrocket after the installation of the new "smart meters." Unsurprisingly, California legislators are questioning the rapid rollout. Texas customers are also complaining.
There are far more questions than answers when it comes to this new technology. While it's potentially beneficial, it could also usher in new intrusions into our home and private life. The states and the federal government should ensure that energy customers get the protection they deserve.
You'd think this was common sense, right? An ATM shouldn't give you money you don't actually have, and you shouldn't be able to use your debit card when you don't have enough money in the account to cover it. Now even Bank of America admits it, and has decided to take the lead as the good guy. (Although I don't think this is completely altruistic. If memory serves me, there's already a class action suit out there over this - even though it's not mentioned in the story.)
In a move that could bring an end to the $40 cup of coffee, Bank of America said on Tuesday that it was doing away with overdraft fees on purchases made with debit cards, a decision that could cost the bank tens of millions a year in revenue and put pressure on other banks to do the same.
Bank officials said that effective this summer, customers who try to make purchases with their debit cards without enough money in their checking accounts will simply be declined. Debit purchases account for roughly 60 percent of overdrafts at Bank of America, the nation’s largest issuer of debit cards.
Banks are bracing for a new federal rule that will require them to get permission from account holders before providing overdraft services for debit purchases and A.T.M. withdrawals. That change was already expected to wipe out billions of dollars in overdraft revenue for the banks.
“What our customers kept telling me is ‘just don’t let me spend money that I don’t have,’" said Susan Faulkner, the bank’s deposit and card product executive, who said the overdraft changes were part of a broader push to build trust among its customers. “We wanted to help them avoid those unexpected overdraft fees.”
Faced with a difficult national political environment and daunting historical trends heading into the 2010 midterm elections, House Democratic strategists have long subscribed to an age-old cliche: a best defense is a good offense. In a political context, that means finding Republican-held seats where Democrats can make pickups -- or attempt pickups -- this fall in hopes of mitigating what appear likely to be significant losses across the country in their own ranks. This morning the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee showed a bit of its hand in that regard with the release of its "Red to Blue" list of Republican-held districts and open seats where the party believes it can win. Of the baker's dozen of races on the list, President Barack Obama carried nine in 2008: California's 3rd (49 percent), California's 45th (52 percent), Delaware's at large (62 percent), Illinois' 10th (61 percent), Nebraska's 2nd (50 percent), Ohio's 12th
Public expenditures on social programs--health care, pensions, transportation, housing, education, unemployment assistance--have risen sharply as a percentage of GDP over the past two years. In fact, for the first time in history, public social spending in the United States has surpassed 30% of GDP.
Here is a chart with the details on the spending. The figures taken from usgovernmentspending.com (which is unfortunately a teabagger site, but still has good data). The chart includes figures for all levels of government--federal, state and local. It only looks at social investment programs, rather than things like defense and interest on the debt:
Social safety net spending as a percentage of GDP, by category, 1970-2010
About 30% of the increase over the last two years comes entirely from increased public expenditures on unemployment. Another 15% comes from an increase in public spending on pensions. A bit more comes from the recession itself, as GDP has not increased much even in absolute terms over the past few years.
Still, the chart suggests that progressives are making real advancements in expanding the social safety net in America. About half of the increases come from non-recession, non-demographic related areas like health care, education, and the "other spending" category that focuses on a wide variety of public services (environmental protection, scientific research, housing, water, communications, waste management, etc) Further, even with the projected end of the stimulus, the end of the recession (at least in GDP terms), and increase in employment, the long-term forecast is for social investment spending to stay above 30% indefinitely.
The New Deal regulatory structure has indeed been gutted, and union density has declined markedly since the mid-20th century. These twin developments have played major roles in the rise of wealth inequality in the U.S.. However, conservatives not only failed to gut Great Society and New Deal social safety net programs, but those programs continue to expand.
In 1940, under FDR, public social investment spending was less than 14% of GDP, far less than it is today. No matter how frustrating the fights may be, we are indeed making progress.
DOWNLOADS: 197 PLAYS: 703 (h/t Heather) Paul Krugman recently wrote that he thought that Republicans and Democrats no longer occupy the same universe with one another. Certainly, my understanding of Christianity isn't the same as Glenn Beck's, when he advised his listeners to leave their churches if those churches focus on social justice: Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that "social justice," the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice. "I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!" Now, I'm going to set aside the troubling implicit admission of the selfishness of the Mormon Church by this LDS convert for the moment. I just have to ask if Beck has read the same Bible as the rest of us: "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me." "Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?" "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 25:34-40) Now that seems pretty clear to me that Jesus said that you need to do good works with those less fortunate than you and that he felt it was critical that you show his devotion to Him by doing so. But maybe Beck missed that sermon. He then went on to conflate communism and Nazism, saying they both were the ultimate expression of the (you guessed it) left, by saying they both focused on the dreaded "social justice". Man, teh stoopid, it hurts. I wish there was a way to just stop this stupid "Nazis were leftists" meme (Erick Erickson was tweeting that this morning too--citing Jonah Goldberg as an expert--bwahahaha!). But since one must shut down one's brain to believe that, I think it's a lost cause.
The Hill: Ex-GOP lawmaker who helped write business tax cuts for BUSHCO is hired to extend them
Instaputz: Wingnuts en masse seem concerned that Stupak will cave. Given their tendency to be wrong about everything, including the price of milk, this is worrisome.
Mario Piperni: Like it used to be, you know
Mondoweiss: The price tag for Israeli intransigence
Apoliticus: Celebrities who should be politicians. They couldn't do any worse than this guy.
The Satirical Political Report: Oh noes...and right before St. Patrick's Day!
According to Whipcongress.com, Senators Daniel Akaka, Byron Dorgan, and Jon Tester, have stated their support for a public option through reconciliation.
This brings the number of signatories up to 40. With Tom Harkin, Herb Kohl, and Claire McCaskill as definite "maybes," 50 votes in the Senate is starting to seem plausible. Of course, given ongoing vote troubles for Democrats in the House, that chamber needs to be monitored and whipped at least as closely in any public option campaign.
Oh, and there are now 53 Senators on record publicly open to using reconciliation on health care. That should help increase confidence in the viability of the "sidecar bill" reconciliation fix strategy.
1. Former representative Eric Massa's twin appearances on Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck Show" and CNN's "Larry King Live" Tuesday night made for some of the most watchable political television in recent memory. But, does the Massa mishegas (not bad, eh?) have any real impact on the current political environment? Yes and no. In the short term, the impact is fairly obvious. For Democrats, Massa's seeming unwillingness to go quietly into that good night means a week filled with distractions as the party attempts to rally behind President Obama's health care plan. For Republicans, the short-term danger is in overplaying their hand on the scandal -- either by casting themselves in a sort-of holier-than-thou pose that has been a recipe for disaster for both parties in recent years on ethics issues, or by embracing (bad word choice) Massa too closely given that there appear to be more revelations to come.
As part of Michael Moore’s DVD and Blue-ray release of Capitalism: A Love Story, he is available for an exclusive online live video and live chat on Tues, March 16 at 12:00-12:30 pm PST/3-3:30 pm EST . The 30 minute session will be conducted on BraveNewFilms.org site. No log on required to view or to participate in the session. A $5 DVD/Blue-ray coupon for Capitalism: A Love Story is available for people to print from the site as well as a chance to win the baseball cap off of Michael’s head. Coupon page with contest below it is here. People can submit questions to Michael now as well as post them during the live chat. This link will also host the chat on 3/16.
Title: Come To GriefArtist: The Molotovs I first saw The Molotovs one sweltering evening last summer, playing a headline gig upstairs in a North London pub. It was a fairly large space and they'd filled it: people were squeezed in like sardines between the bar and the stage, continually shuffling for extra foot space as more and more fans filed in through the door. The gig was to launch their mini-album, And The Heads Did Roll, on the independent label Fierce Panda. And since buying it, I've found that listing to them through my headphones has the same effect as watching them live. I can't sit still. The Molotovs have managed to pour all of their energy and compassion into one six-track CD. The opening track, Come To Grief, has particularly sobering lyrics, and yet I get excited every time I listen to it. The saxophone, drums and keyboard gradually grow into a tight ball of frenzy before suddenly dispersing. It's the kind of song that makes you walk quicker when you're on your way out. And smile.
DOWNLOADS: (472) PLAYS: (2664) Well, here's one way to shut these liars down. While discussing Karl Rove's latest bit of revisionist history Brad Blakeman of course defends the Bush administration and the lies in Rove's new book. Near the end of the segment after numerous attempts by both Shuster and Corn to rebut Blakeman we get this exchange. Blakeman: President Bush did not bring us into this war because of WMD. He brought us into the war... Corn: What!? Blakeman: ...because Saddam Hussein failed... Corn: What!? Blakeman: ...to allow inspections of the sites the U.N. demanded be inspected. Corn: Brad you're absolutely wrong. Blakeman: I'm right. Corn: The inspectors were in. They were for months before the war. Blakeman: Come on David. Corn: I'll bet you $1000 right now! $1000 the inspectors were there. Needless to say liar Brad Blakeman did not take him up on it. Why MSNBC feels the need to bring in someone like Blakeman who they know is just going to lie on the air is beyond me. It was nice to see Corn and Shuster call him on his bullshit though.
Above: G0ld3n4rs3
John Hinderaker, Powerline:
Where do the Lobbyists End, and the Obama Administration Begin?The Competitive Enterprise Institute has uncovered, via…
Uh, wow.
I've been seeing a number of op-eds in recent defense journals that have a slightly hysterical, paranoid perspective on the "dangers" of health care reform. The authors of these articles are terrified that mounting costs of health care are going to impinge on the defense budget. Democrat attempts to give all Americans insurance may increase overall health care costs. As a result, a weakened America will be just wide-open to attack by terrorists and China and who knows what else. Think I'm exaggerating? Here's Harvey Sapolsky, a defense academic out of MIT, talking in the National Defense journal.
The defense spending squeeze is on and will become more constricted by health care reform. It is not apples and oranges. About half of the United States’ health care costs appear on the federal government’s budget, which directly affects revenues and expenditures. European nations plead poverty when it comes to funding their militaries in large part because of the squeeze of social spending (including health care). They spend a smaller, though rising, share of their GDPs on health than does the United States, but more of that spending is direct government expenditure.
If heath care can’t be made more efficient and if access to health care can’t be limited, the only alternative is more revenue. Perhaps taxes will be raised. Some will be increased, but not likely enough to cover rising health expenditures. Democrats promise to only tax the rich. But, as the rich know, tax laws have loopholes. Republicans have run for years on a tax-cutting platform. The way to get revenue is to tax the middle class who are many and who are not as fleet of foot as the rich. But both Republicans and Democrats constantly say the middle class is the victim of everything, and surely overtaxed. Running up the deficit is an alternative, but the wars, the stimulus plan and the bailouts have already done that. The cries for controlling spending are already being heard.
The revenue for more health care exists in the form of defense expenditures, which have doubled since 9/11. The billions needed for reforming health will likely come, in one way or another, from cuts in defense spending. Personnel reductions will be hard to make because of the burdens that Iraq and Afghanistan deployments place on U.S. forces. Fewer and fewer aircraft and ships will be bought. There will also be less training and more restrictions on operations with and for allies. America has a powerful military that will take a while to unravel, but unravel it will. The nation’s defense budget is about to tangle with a really dangerous adversary.
Sapolsky's article is actually one of the more sane pieces that I've read. He at least argues for the urgent need for health care reform, least its uncontrolled growth threaten defense spending. He does note that the defense budget has become an attractive target because of its enormous, unchecked growth (you rob banks because that's where the money is). But I think that he (and others) suffer under a number of false assumptions - notably, that health care costs cannot be restrained, the general perception that the defense budget has grown too large, Democrats like health care and hate the military, therefore, the defense budget will suffer cuts to allow the continued growth of health care.
However, the conclusion is limited by its bad assumptions. There is no question that the health care industry can use a healthy dose (no pun intended) of reform, and Medicare/Medicaid will eventually need to be examined in depth as well for reform. Maybe every senior citizen doesn't need a motorized wheelchair (gasp!). Similarly, the need for defense acquisition reform is well documented, despite numerous failed attempts to correct bad practices and to encourage the services to moderate their demands for high-tech, gold-plated defense platforms.
The challenge is that any reforms to either health care or the defense acquisition processes will impact Big Business hard, and it has gotten fat and happy over the past decade. With the recent Supreme Court decision allowing Big Business to buy politicians, it's going to be increasingly hard to reform either health care or defense acquisition. Not that it was easy now - with the Republican party of "NO," continued obstructionism in Congress will ensure that no tough decisions are made - rather, the politicians will favor incremental steps towards reform as long as they are firewalled from blame or implication to any budget cuts.
The cries of doom from the defense journal op-eds are misguided. No one is going to cut defense funds until the pace of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq changes to allow for a drawdown on operational spending. That doesn't involve any changes to the ridiculously out-of-control acquisition process, unfortunately, but that makes it easy for both Democrats and Republicans. Similarly, no one is going to seriously address mounting health care costs as long as there is no change in willingness to add debt to the federal deficit. I used to hope that a new generation of politicians, replacing the grey, old white men in the House and Senate, might cause change, but that's probably too optimistic.
UPDATE: Rob Farley tears down Sapolsky's argument in detail, where I only pointed to the general failure of the "we can't have both health care and defense programs" argument.
The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market. Software developers who want Apple's approval must first agree to the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement.
So today we're posting the "iPhone Developer Program License Agreement"—the contract that every developer who writes software for the iTunes App Store must "sign." Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked "I agree," public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any "public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple's express prior written approval." But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules controlled the technology they could use with their phones. NASA responded with the Rev. 3-17-09 version of the agreement.
UPDATED: we are now also posting the most recent version of the agreement, dated January 2010.
This "license agreement" is particularly relevant right now, given the imminent launch of the iPad and anytime-now issuance of the U.S. Copyright Office's ruling regarding jailbreaking of the iPhone.
So what's in the Agreement? Here are a few troubling highlights:
Ban on Public Statements: As mentioned above, Section 10.4 prohibits developers, including government agencies such as NASA, from making any "public statements" about the terms of the Agreement. This is particularly strange, since the Agreement itself is not "Apple Confidential Information" as defined in Section 10.1. So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking "publicly" about them.
App Store Only: Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple's SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you're prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone.
Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would "enable others" to reverse engineer, the SDK or iPhone OS.
No Tinkering with Any Apple Products: Section 3.2(e) is the "ban on jailbreaking" provision that received some attention when it was introduced last year. Surprisingly, however, it appears to prohibit developers from tinkering with any Apple software or technology, not just the iPhone, or "enabling others to do so." For example, this could mean that iPhone app developers are forbidden from making iPods interoperate with open source software, for example.
You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so
Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can "revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time." Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.
We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That's pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer's reputational and commercial value in its hands—it's not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.
Overall, the Agreement is a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn. That's not unusual where end-user license agreements are concerned (and not all the terms may ultimately be enforceable), but it's a bit of a surprise as applied to the more than 100,000 developers for the iPhone, including many large public companies. How can Apple get away with it? Because it is the sole gateway to the more than 40 million iPhones that have been sold. In other words, it's only because Apple still "owns" the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform.
In short, no competition among app stores means no competition for the license terms that apply to iPhone developers.
If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition (or "generativity," in the words of Prof. Jonathan Zittrain) than the PC era that came before. It's frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads. If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms and customers who love their iPhones should back them.
Epops: You’re mistaken: men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.
— Aristophanes, Birds
Or, as Pastor Swank more eloquently put it:
US, LEARN FROM JAKARTA HOW TO SPIKE MUSLIM OBAMA
America should learn from Jakarta’s protesters how to clog the streets with cries of imploding the Oval Office imposter.
The lesson here is plain: eat more fiber.
Marxist Muslim Barack Hussein Obama is beheading America by throwing our money into the downdrains.
A conservative Christian would use an axe or a knife to decapitate the country, because it’s more efficient. A liberal, meanwhile, thinks you can solve any problem by throwing money at it, including the problem of how to behead America; but you’d probably have to use coins — sharpened like shurikens, because I don’t think folding money is capable of delivering a neck-severing paper cut — and you’d probably have to throw them really, really hard. On the bright side, at least Obama is cutting our nation’s head off near the downdrains, because I doubt there’s enough paper towels in the world to deal with a blood stain that size, even if they did have thirst pockets.
He’s a liar. He breaks his promises. He plays dictator. His crook and liar cronies stand to right and left of his every move. His wife is team member with him.
I heard his wife was team Jacob, but if she’s team member that’s okay with me too. I like a woman who’s pro-boner and not afraid to admit it.
There is no doubt that Obama is using every means possible to wipe out this Republic. That is the prime purpose of any Muslim—eliminate the infidels. Beheading is the favorite modus operandi. But if one can behead without shedding blood, so much the cleaner.
And Pastor Swank’s violent eschatology takes a weird, sudden swing into Billy Mays territory.
“And if you can behead without blood, so much the cleaner!”
Obama is working night and day with cohorts Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to shred this nation from coast to coast.
The Democrats are bankrupting America, buying all this sick skateboarding gear!
This is most evident with the Obamangst “care”
“Obamangst?” I am second to none in my admiration of the Pastor’s ability to neologize, but like the speed of light, there is apparently a physical limit to Obama name puns, beyond which acceleration, and sense-making, is impossible. And that dull, moist-sounding smack was the Pastor hitting it face first.
bill ram-jammed down our throats.
As you know, Pastor Swank doesn’t always get the latest wingnut talking points (he still thinks “Teabaggers” is a badge of honor), but he must have recently figured out how to use email, since he’s jumped aboard the whole “Obama and Congress are ramming health care reform down our throats” meme. And yet, being Swank, he’s decided this argument would be more effective if it internally rhymed. And that’s why he’s awesome!
Reasonable newsfeeds don’t know how to word their coverage of this insanity. Fox Newscasters in particular are stymied when trying to figure out logical ways to communicate this crazy scene from the White House.
Every day they grope for new verbiage by which to state that the present administration is killing our democracy and no one seems to know how to stop it.
“Verbiage fails me.”
Well, in Jakarta, protesters fill the air with cries that Obama is not to arrive there because he is not Muslim enough. There you have it. In America, Muslim Obama is Muslim Number One. In Jakarta Obama is not Muslim enough.
While in a remote cottage occupied by a family of bears, Obama is just Muslim enough.
Now this brings us to the spiritual analysis. God is at work through this whole mess. Why? Because of the righteous remnant at the time of America’s start and at the present moment. Those prayers match up before heaven’s throne.
It’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost…And they’re all here to play The Family Feud!”
Satan is also at work, evidently.
Not only that, but he just got a big bonus from Goldman Sachs.
Satan wants to destroy America because it is the only country begun with a Christian stand. America is the Christian-heritage nation of the planet.
Just add water, and the Christian Stand™ will reduce the chance of fire and keep your Christian fresh and healthy-looking for up to three weeks! (For best results, lop off the bottom 2 to 3 inches of your Christian before inserting in Stand.)
We must not try to play God. We must let God guide us socially, spiritually and politically—which He will do.
I use the Google God app for iPhone.
Watch how God moves in the future to rescue America from the Marxist Muslim schemes to rid the world of the Christian-heritage United States of America.
And my dad will be able to beat up your dad at some indeterminate point in the space-time continuum.
Jakarta is an example of how to protest Obama at the moment. Other protestations will show up on life’s screen.
I think the Pastor’s telling us he just discovered YouTube.
In each of these, God will work His move.
And God works His move in mysterious way.
Anyway…Keep Watching the Life Screens!
El Rushbo (via The Hill): "I'll just tell you this, if [the health care bill] passes, and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented, I am leaving the country," he told a caller. "I'll go to Costa Rica." Could there be a better incentive than this? C'mon Dems, what the hell are you waiting for? By the way, if Rush's hyperbole isn't enough, he's hypocritical too (surprise!). Because, as I'm sure you may have guessed, Costa Rica offers Universal Health Care and ranked higher than the United States for their health care. If you're a Facebooker, you're welcome to join 1,000,000 Facebookers To Promote Rush Limbaugh's Exodus From The USA.
Washington Post's Ezra Klein explains the reconciliation process that Democrats need to pass health care reform and what Republicans can do to drag it out.
Stephen Colbert opines that Americans don't want health care reform jammed down their throats - "unless it's first battered and deep fat-fried."
From the March 8, 2010 edition of The Colbert Report.
If you missed former New York Rep. Eric Massa's hour-long appearance with Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck earlier today, you missed a landmark moment in the annals of televised political implosions. But, where does Massa's rambling rant that included -- among many other things -- repeated mentions of tickle fights, a chest x-ray used as a prop and a series of personal attacks on White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel rank among the best/worst implosions ever? Below we've nominated five memorable moments. Cast your vote. Did we miss a good one? Offer it in the comments section below.
I really don't know what's going on with Eric Massa, but I'm concerned about him. In the space of less than two weeks, we hear news that he's will not seek re-election because of a recurrence of cancer, then we hear that he's under the cloud of an ethics investigation for sexual harassment (which he at the time termed for "salty language"). Then he decides to resign altogether from the House, claiming he's being pushed out by his fellow Democrats because of his vote on the health care reform, most notably in a odd (and naked) confrontation with Rahm Emanuel. I don't really want to get into the prurient details of the ethics investigation or the allegations that came out today. I don't really care about Massa's sexuality one way or the other. He's sponsored no anti-gay legislation; in fact, he's been at the forefront of repealing DADT. So as far as I'm concerned, there's no hypocrisy there, as there is with Roy Ashburn. Howie Klein has written an account on both politicians, putting it into the context of his own experiences, and I don't think I could state it better. But what I am concerned about is that Massa--clearly reeling and hurting and lashing out--has agreed to appear for the whole hour on Glenn Beck to condemn the Democratic Party. I'm not sure if Massa is aware of how much disdain Glenn Beck holds him in, comparing him to a terrorist this morning: And Beck isn't the only one: Conservatives are already turning on Massa in advance of the Beck interview. Michelle Malkin trashed Beck on his own radio show Tuesday for asking Massa on, while Rush Limbaugh dismissed Massa as a no-name "kook" on his broadcast Tuesday, warning, "Anybody who embraces this guy is going to get caught."
Darcy Burner just sent me this over email:
Michael Frias from Kirkpatrick staff says she's def not a Stupak.
Good-that reduces the possible list of Stupak bloc members to 6 definite and 12 maybes. Here is the ongoing count:
Definite Stupak bloc (6)
Marion Berry (AR-01)
Joseph Cao (LA-02)
Kath Dahlkemper (PA-03)
Steve Driehaus (OH-01)
Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
Bart Stupak (MI-01)
Not Stupak bloc (3)
Dale Kildee (MI-05)
Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-01)
Jim Oberstar (MN-08)
Rumored, but unconfirmed, Stupak bloc (12)
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Jerry Costello (IL-12)
Joe Donnelly (IN-02)
Mike Doyle (PA-14)
Brad Ellsworth (IN-08)
Baron Hill (IN-09)
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Paul Kanjorski (PA-12)
Alan Mollohan (WV-01)
Solomon Ortiz (TX-27)
Nick Rahall (WV-03)
Charlie Wilson (OH-06)
Come out, come out wherever you are.
Beyond Stupak, David Dayen and The Hill seem to have the best info on vote counts right now. Glad to see more media outlets starting to report vote counts-it really helps add a big element of transparency in the whole process.
Contrary to earlier reports, Jerry McNerney is not a "no" on health reform. David Dayen explains:
I just got off the phone with Sarah Hersh, the communications director for Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA). He was quoted in the Morgan Hill Times as opposing the health care bill. However, Hersh told me that his statements were paraphrased and mischaracterized by the reporter.
McNerney certainly has concerns with the Senate proposal, in particular the backroom deals that favored some states over others, and the level of coverage (31 million, down from 36 million in the Senate bill). But McNerney wants to see some fixes, and will hold for language before making a full appraisal of how to vote. When told that the reconciliation fixes under consideration included an elimination of those backroom deals, Hersh said that such changes "would certainly go a long way" toward making the Congressman more comfortable voting for passage. She expected to see "a number of corrections made" in the press about where McNerney stands.
Also contrary to earlier report, Blanche Lincoln is not open to reconciliation:
Lincoln took to Twitter this afternoon to respond to a story published this morning suggesting her mind maybe have changed on reconciliation. In the tweet, she reaffirmed her opposition to reconciliation.
So, there's that. Apologies on my delays in getting this up, as Open Left is a bit understaffed at the moment.
I wonder if Democrats will ever learn that with this gang of right-wing extremists, cooperation is weakness. This story from Think Progress is just appalling:
During his reign as Senate Minority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has led his party to engage in an unprecedented level of obstruction — wielding the filibuster to block even routine bills and nominations while simultaneously lying about his own previous support of majority rule in the Senate. No one has fared worse under McConnell’s blanket obstructionism than President Obama’s nominees to key government positions, ambassadorships and judgeships. A massive 237 Obama nominees presently await Senate confirmation, yet Mitch McConnell has done nearly everything in his power to ensure that Obama’s nominees will never even receive a Senate vote.
Because the government includes several agencies and boards whose members are required by law to be bipartisan, however, the party-out-of-power’s Senate leader traditionally gets to make a few nominations of his own. One such McConnell nominee is Sharon Browne, a nominee to the Legal Services Corporation’s board who fundamentally disagrees with the Corporation’s mission of providing legal services to the poor. Browne has spent most of her career with a right-wing litigation shop that repeatedly fought to cut off funding for indigent legal services; and she was a plaintiff in a court case which claimed that a method of funding legal services for poor Californians violated that state’s law. In other words, McConnell has selected someone to help lead the Legal Services Corporation who is committed to destroying the Legal Services Corporation.
Yet despite Browne’s obvious unfitness for this job, and despite the fact that her patron has fought tooth and nail to prevent President Obama’s nominees from even receiving a Senate vote, Senate HELP Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) scheduled a committee vote on Browne’s nomination this Wednesday. Not one Democratic senator has taken a serious step to slow down Browne — such as placing a hold on the nomination — and she appears to be on track for confirmation.
Call Sen. Harkin's office at (202) 224-3254 and ask why Democrats are allowing the appointment of someone who wants to destroy the agency to which she's nominated.
Rachel Maddow spent the better part of her show recapping her coverage of the health care bill debate and how the Democrats allowing the bill to be delayed in Max Baucus' Finance Committee while they tried to get Queen Olympia Snowe to play nice with them opened the door to the likes of Dick Armey and the rest of the astroturf groups to organize well enough to start disrupting the town hall meetings. And then from there for the Republicans to mislead the public with every ounce of mud they could throw against the wall from death panels to cries of socialism. You can watch the rest of the segments from the Playlist button in the MSNBC embed player once it starts playing.
CORRECTION to original story: See here
Via TPMDC Jerry McNerney joins Rep. Mike Arcuri in switching from "yes" to "no" on health reform:
McNerney criticized the current version of healthcare reform passed by the U.S. Senate for the deals it makes with certain states, its lack of a public option and the inadequate number of people it extends coverage to. He said he would not vote in favor of that version of the bill if it comes back to the House."We want to get our healthcare up to international standards, and we want to do it in a way that is American," McNerney said in response to a question from the audience. "Costs are escalating at a rate that's unacceptable, and the people want something done."
This makes McNerney only the second member of the House to declare he is opposing the bill from the left. Representative Dennis Kucinich has already done so.
It would be nice to have a full transcript of McNerney's remarks, because the sections quoted here don't make much sense.
McNerney does not think the bill covers enough people, so apparently he values covering as many people as possible. Which is why, apparently, he will adopt a course of action that results in fewer people being covered.
On the other hand, if McNerney believes the bill will cause costs to increase more rapidly due to the lack of a public option, and / or simply opposes forcing people to purchase a private product, that is a consistent, non-contradictory position that at least makes sense.
Since this is a partial report at a townhall event, more clarity will be needed from McNerney's office to determine his rationale. Still, no matter what his rationale is, it is a pretty big blow to passing health reform. It is an even bigger blow to passing health reform with giving in to the Stupak bloc.
I keep talking to people about this, and they keep responding, "Oh, Obama probably did it because they don't have enough evidence to win in civilian court." And that's not true, and it's not even the point. The point is, George W. Bush pushed the dangerous idea that the 9/11 attacks were acts of terror by states, not individuals - and that was the rationale for invading Iraq. Trying the 9/11 attackers in military tribunals is saying the Bush-Cheney doctrine was right, and lays the groundwork for bipartisan support of pre-emptive attacks: The Justice Department's restoration was among the most important tasks facing the Obama administration: The Bush administration's political appointees had dismantled the hiring practices that allowed career attorneys to make hiring decisions, and gave more weight to ideological conformity than legal expertise. The result was a Justice Department where incompetent ideologues with political interests in mind were given more power than career attorneys concerned with upholding the law. Michael Mukasey began the process of de-politicizing Justice after he replaced Alberto Gonzales; Eric Holder has continued it. In light of this, I think Andrew Sullivan's observation of the conflict between Rahm Emanuel and Holder over the prosecution of the alleged September 11 conspirators is especially important: But whatever your view, this must not, it seems to me, be a politicized decision. It should be a matter of justice. And to go from a Rove-driven Justice Department to an Emanuel-driven Justice Department is not the change most of us who supported Obama wanted to see. Or believe in. I'm not interested in going from a Justice Department whose behavior is driven by Republican political interests to one whose behavior is driven by Democratic political interests. That's going nowhere at all. Retreating on the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court won't undo all the important changes the administration has made to the Justice Department, but it would reinforce the idea that the Department is a political fiefdom rather than an entity that exists to enforce the laws of the United States and secure the rights of its citizens. A separate point is that Republicans won't budge on Gitmo anyway, no matter what Lindsey Graham says, so Emanuel's choice isn't even smart politics.
Another day brings another lecture on negotiating strategy from Big Tent Democrat. Once again, we are told that the right-wing of the party has received more concessions in health reform negotiations because right-wing Democrats were more willing to defeat the whole bill than were progressive Democrats:
The question was how to bargain with the people who wanted a bill passed (the White House) to maximize your bargaining position. Unfortunately, that required being willing to do something progressives simply were not willing to do - create the real possibility that no bill would be passed because of their opposition. Without that commitment, the progressives were sure to be the first rolled. And they were.
Well, duh. As though this is some kind of deep insight that has escaped the feeble mental powers of the "village bloggers" that Big Tent Democrat so loathes and stands so superior over.
Since we are in the business of stating the obvious, let me state something else that is obvious: it order to be the party more willing defeat the bill if your demands are not met, then your base of support needs to be more willing to defeat the bill if your demands are not met. No matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power.
A necessary condition for the success of the Progressive Block strategy is for voters in the districts of Progressive Block members to demand the defeat of legislation more than voters in districts of Regressive Block members. With, at most, 17-18% of the country (that is the highest number ever recorded in any poll on the subject) demanding health reform legislation be defeated (not just improved, but actually defeated) from the left, lefties demanding the defeat of health reform legislation fail to form a majority of even the Democratic primary electorate in any House district in the entire country. That such voters form a minority of the primary electorate in every single district in the country provides a willing Democratic leadership with enormous leverage over Democrats who seek, or threaten, to defeat the bill from the left. And yes, we are dealing with a White House that is willing to crush Congressional Progressives who cross them.
Now, since the majority of Democratic primary voters in every district in the country want to pass health reform legislation, there is an opportunity to put real pressure on right-wing Democrats who are extorting demands out of the health reform legislation. However, the White House has taken a complete pass when it comes to pressuring right-wing Democrats in such a fashion. Further, not a single left-wing group has declared it will run primary challenges against right-wing Democrats who vote against health reform legislation overall. (Primaries for opposing the public option, yes. Primaries for opposing health reform overall, no). This means there is effectively no pressure on right-wing Democrats to pass the bill, and only pressure on right-wing Democrats has come from corporate groups, large donors, right-wing media, tea partiers, and red district voters to defeat it.
To repeat: no matter how easy it is to be cynical, political power still flows from appropriate leveraging of popular support rather than some Nietzschean struggle over the will to power. Popular support for killing the bill if it lacked a public option never rose to the level necessary to overcome a Democratic leadership willing to leverage the Democratic electorate against the Progressive members demanding a public option. At the same time, popular support among Democrats for passing the health reform bill without right-wing demands was never leveraged against the Democrats making those right-wing demands. Those two dynamics were at the very heart of the Progressive Block negotiation, and why it ultimately failed.
(Note: The level of opposition to health reform because it does not go far enough is actually very impressive. This is the case even if, at most, it only rose to 17-18% of the population. Just over one-sixth national support for a position like that is quite an achievement for the lefty organizations and media outlets who were advocating that position, given both the resources of the opposition groups they faced and the historically low percentage of Americans who say Democrats are not left-wing enough. I personally was no longer engaged those efforts as of late September, focusing instead on other, different, strategies which also didn't work very well.)
Updated, 4:25 pm The Republican National Committee will launch an ad tomorrow aimed at capitalizing on a series of ethics hits Democrats have taken in recent weeks. The ad, which will run on cable stations in Washington, D.C., seeks to link House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (Calif.) pledge to run the "most open and ethical Congress in history" with Rep. Charlie Rangel's recent decision to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Rep. Eric Massa's resignation amid allegations of sexual harassment. "Pelosi's wrong," says the ad's narrator. "It's time to change Washington." While RNC officials would not disclose the size of the ad buy, it's safe to assume the expenditure is in the low five figures -- a minuscule amount of money in the grand scheme of spending on television commercials. That said, the amount of money being spent on the ad is less important than
Three weeks ago, CBS 60 Minutes revealed Iran's continued success in acquiring sensitive, weapons-related U.S. technologies despite the American regime of sanctions. Now, the New York Times has documented a long list of multinational American companies receiving billions in federal contracts while they were doing business with Tehran.
If that seems like an ironic turn of events for right-wingers taking a hard line towards Iran, it should. After all, Mitt Romney's brief divestment crusade backfired when it turned out his old company was doing deals with the mullahs. And Halliburton CEO turned Vice President Dick Cheney was opposed to the Iran sanctions before he was for them.
Even as the Obama administration is seeking tougher UN sanctions to press Tehran into curbing its nuclear program, "of the 74 companies The Times identified as doing business with both the United States government and Iran, 49 continue to do business there with no announced plans to leave."
The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington's efforts to discourage investment there, records show.
That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves.
Among the U.S. contractors also profiting from Iran was Halliburton, which pocketed $27.1 billion from American taxpayers between 2000 and 2009:
Halliburton, former Vice President Cheney's old company, provided oil and gas drilling services to Iran through foreign subsidies. After a political furor erupted over the work, the company announced it would do no new business in Iran, and it exited the country altogether in 2007. While still operating in Iran, Halliburton won huge contacts from the federal government, including a no-bid contract to restore Iraq's oil sector, as did its subsidiary at the time, Kellogg Brown & Root.
As Perrspectives detailed three years ago, Halliburton had side-stepped the U.S. sanctions regime in place against Iran since the 1990's by using a Cayman Islands subsidiary. And what should come as a surprise to no one, CEO Dick Cheney opposed those very sanctions until, of course, he became George W. Bush's Vice President.
In 2004, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes detailed the Iranian business dealings of Cheney's former company, Halliburton. Despite the prohibitions signed into law by President Clinton with his 1995 executive order and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, Halliburton continued to reap the profits of business with Iran through its non-U.S. subsidiaries. While U.S. law bans virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, Halliburton was able to jump through its major loophole: the rules do not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans. As CBS documented:
That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands -- a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly.
Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.
In the wake of the January 2004 60 Minutes piece, the company moved quickly to declare that "Halliburton's business in Iran is clearly permissible under applicable laws and regulations" and cited its October 2003 disclosures to the New York City police and fire pension funds. Despite those assurances, Dick Cheney's old firm was subpoenaed by a U.S grand jury in June 2004. In early 2005, Halliburton announced that it would end its business activities there when after fulfilling its ongoing contracts, including a $35 million gas drilling project it had just won the previous month. Halliburton's exit was completed in 2007.
Though he did not benefit directly from the Iran contracts of Halliburton's foreign-based subsidiaries, Cheney continued to have financial ties to his former firm. Despite Cheney's assurances that "I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest," a 2003 report by the Congressional Research Service found that the Vice President retained 433,000 shares of Halliburton. In addition, Cheney received $162,392 and $205,298 in deferred payments in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
Given the stakes, it's no wonder Dick Cheney had a born-again experience on Iranian sanctions when he entered the Bush administration. While Vice President, Cheney in 2002 denounced Iran as "the world's leading exporter of terror." But during his tenure as Halliburton CEO in the 1990's, Cheney strenuously argued against Clinton's sanctions regime and expanded Halliburton's business with Tehran. In 1998, he complained that U.S. firms were "cut out of the action." And back in 1996, Cheney railed against the Clinton prohibitions on Iranian trade and financial activity for American firms:
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government. The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."
For his part, Dick Cheney never made tough but hypocritical talk about Iran sanctions part of a run for the White House. That comic fate fell to Mitt Romney.
Candidate Romney began his grandstanding on Iranian disinvestment by targeting the Democratic-controlled states of New York and Massachusetts. On February 22, 2007, Romney sent letters to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli urging a policy of "strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime." Romney's theatrics continued:
"With your new responsibilities overseeing one of America's largest pension funds, you have a unique opportunity to lead an effort to isolate Iran as it pursues nuclear armament. I request that you immediately launch a policy of strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime. Screening pension investments and divesting from companies providing financial support to the Iranian regime or linked to Iran's weapons programs and terrorist activities could have a powerful impact. New investments should be scrutinized as long as Iran's regime continues its current, dangerous course."
Sadly for Governor Romney, as the AP detailed within 24 hours of the letter's publication, Romney's former employer and the company he founded had recent links to recent Iranian business deals:
Romney joined Boston-based Bain & Co., a management consulting firm, in 1978 and worked there until 1984. He was CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm, from 1984 to 1999, despite a two-year return as Bain & Co.'s chief executive officer from 1991 to 1992.
Bain & Co. Italy, described in company literature as "the Italian branch of Bain & Co.," received a $2.3 million contract from the National Iranian Oil Co., in September 2004. Its task was to develop a master plan so NIOC -- the state oil company of Iran -- could become one of the world's top oil companies, according to Iranian and U.S. news accounts of the deal.
Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that Romney started and made him a multimillionaire, teamed up with the Haier Group, a Chinese appliance maker that has a factory in Iran, in an unsuccessful 2005 buyout effort.
In response to the revelations, Romney played dumb -- and blind. The former Massachusetts governor claimed his investments were in Boston-managed blind trust beyond his control. And more importantly, Romney feebly declared that his new-found distrust of the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran would only apply going forward:
"This is something for now-forward. I wouldn't begin to say that people who, in the past, have been doing business with Iran, are subject to the same scrutiny as that which is going on from a prospective basis."
As the New York Times noted Saturday, the Iran Sanctions Act was also devised "to punish foreign companies that invest more than $20 million in a given year to develop Iran's oil and gas fields. But in the 14 years since the law was passed, the government has never enforced it, in part for fear of angering America's allies." Which, needless to say, has drawn the ire of one John Bolton. Bolton, American ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush, said:
Failing to enforce the law by punishing such companies both sent "a signal to the Iranians that we're not serious" and undercut Washington's credibility when it did threaten action.
Of course, as the Iran follies of Bolton's allies Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney showed, credibility begins at home.
(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)
I know there has to be a lot of pressure on Dennis Kucinich to change his vote on the health care bill. So far he's standing firm and still says he's not going to vote for it. The other day I watched an interview with him on Fox and it sounded like he was considering changing his vote. He was asked at least five times if he would vote no and he refused to answer. After meeting with the administration, not so much. He just gave a pretty firm "no" here. Sadly they look like they might be more willing to make sure abortion is illegal for poor women who can't self-insure than not have this mess pass. I'm about as disgusted as Susie is right now about this whole process. They should have just found out what they had the votes for in the Democratic caucus and got it passed and quit pussy-footing around with Republicans pretending like they're honest brokers when it comes to anything months ago and explained to the public why they thought it was better than what we have now and lived with the consequences if the public didn't like it. Instead all they've done is demoralize their base. And worse yet, they appear completely tone deaf about what they've done or they just don't care. At this point I'm torn about whether it should pass or not. I think it's terrible for the Democrats politically if it doesn't. I don't know if the House can trust the Senate to make the fixes and the Republicans are going to try to stop the ones they're willing to make. And I'm not sure if the additional people being covered is worth the mandates and the lack of price controls. Dennis is absolutely right with his concerns on what the final product might be. UPDATE: Per Chris Bowers, Rep. Jerry McNerney is joining Kucinich in voting no from the left.
Three important items on health reform vote counting today:
1. No Senators opposed to reconciliation
With Blanche Lincoln's primary-challenged induced flip, not a single Democratic Senator is opposed to using reconciliation to finish health reform. With 50+ Senators publicly open to a reconciliation "fix" to the Senate health bill, procedural issues are not really contentious anymore.
Now, all that stands in the way of health reform passage are substantive disagreements over the content of health reform legislation. Either 216 House Democrats and 50 Senate Democrats (plus Biden) will be able to agree on the contents of a health reform package (in which case it will pass), or they won't (in which case it won't pass).
2. House vote count tally: 197-192
David Dayen has an excellent House health reform vote count up at FDL Newsdesk. Based on public statements and past votes, dday has the count at 193-191 in favor, with the rest undecided.
This is an excellent count, but I think it is possible to tweak it a bit more by allocating the "lean no" and "lean yes" votes. Mike Arcuri sounds like a "no," putting the count at 193-192. James Oberstar is a "lean yes", putting the count at 194-192. Also, while they both tell The Hill that they are undecided, Brian Baird, and Bart Gordon sure sound a like "yes" votes, putting the count at 196-192. , Jason Altmire also sounds like a "yes" vote, putting the count at 197-192.
Dayen lists the 42 undecided members (plus the "lean" votes I allocated here), and places them into useful categories. The Hill has more information.
3. Stupak bloc update
The Stupak bloc of November "yes" votes who are threatening "no" votes unless the reproductive rights language is made more restrictive remain the largest undecided bloc. Here is the current progress on figuring out who is, and who is not, in the bloc:
Definite Stupak bloc (6)
Marion Berry (AR-01)
Joseph Cao (LA-02)
Kath Dahlkemper (PA-03)
Steve Driehaus (OH-01)
Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
Bart Stupak (MI-01)
Marion Berry is a setback. He did not appear to be part of the bloc according to his voting patterns.
Not Stupak bloc (2)
Dale Kildee (MI-05)
Jim Oberstar (MN-08)
Oberstar is an important reversal. Last month, he stated that he was in the Stupak bloc. Yesterday, however, he told The Hill he was leaning yes on the Senate bill. If Oberstar can be flipped, others can be flipped, too.
Rumored, but unconfirmed, Stupak bloc (13)
Chris Carney (PA-10)
Jerry Costello (IL-12)
Joe Donnelly (IN-02)
Mike Doyle (PA-14)
Brad Ellsworth (IN-08)
Baron Hill (IN-09)
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Paul Kanjorski (PA-12)
Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-01)
Alan Mollohan (WV-01)
Solomon Ortiz (TX-27)
Nick Rahall (WV-03)
Charlie Wilson (OH-06)
It shouldn't be this hard to find out who is in the Stupak bloc. You would think that members of Congress who are taking a stand based on deeply-held beliefs would have no problem confirming their principled stand to the public. You would be wrong.
Should Florida Gov. Charlie Crist run for the Senate as an independent? Photo by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News In a radio interview this morning with the Washington Times, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) seemed to rule out the possibility of running for the Senate this fall as an independent. "What I'm doing is running as a Republican," said Crist. "I'm proud of my party, proud to be from the party of Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt." But should he have? There is considerable disagreement on that point among Florida and national Republicans. Let's unpack the argument. Polling conducted over the last few months shows that Crist has fallen behind former state House Speaker Marco Rubio in the Republican primary thanks in large part to the abandonment of his candidacy by self-identified conservative voters. In a January Quinnipiac University poll, Rubio led Crist among conservatives 52 percent to 39 percent
Sadly, the larger meaning of this is completely lost on her fans: Sarah Palin drew a straight line from Alaska to Alberta as she told a sold-out, largely adoring crowd in Calgary that the province gets her message of less government, lower taxes and development of natural resources. In what was billed as her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska last summer, Ms. Palin's trademark folksy charm was on full display Saturday night.[..] The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse. “We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn't that ironic?” Well yes, Sarah, you could call it "ironic" that you feel no compunction about running across the border to avail yourself of the health care you fight and lie and propagandize against to keep your fellow Americans from enjoying. Or you could call it "grossly hypocritical." However, I prefer to think of it as "brainlessly missing the picture" and hoping to take a bunch a tea baggers down with you. If we indeed had "the best health care system in the world", why would anyone go to Canada? Because it was free? Because you didn't need to decide whether the need for a doctor was important enough to pay the associated costs, even if it meant forgoing a few meals or a payment elsewhere? Because you felt you had a RIGHT to good health and the Canadian government agreed that it is in everyone's best interest? Was the socialized medicine safety net of Canada frightening? Of course not. It was a social service that Palin used when she needed...even though she presumably paid no taxes into the Canadian system (remember how important it was to the GOP to make sure illegal immigrants couldn't milk the system). But will any one of her fans or the nut case tea-baggers screaming about how Obama wants to turn us into some socialist state ever put two and two together and realize it's something we should aspire to? Of course not.
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- The Senate would have to work really hard in order to get less done. Why, they're probably working hard at getting less done right now.
- Michigan lost 80,000 manufacturing jobs last year, with manufacturing employment falling by 10.9 percent.
- Before they got good union jobs, Todd and Sarah Palin used to go to Canada for subsidized, government-run health care.
- Still not great to be born a girl in East Asia, among other places.
- Scientists begin an exhaustive investigation of the symbiotic human gut bacteria genome, which may not sound fascinating, but the human health implications of knowing more about the organisms that help us digest our food are vast.
- Imagine what would happen if all food was McDonald's, via.
- Researchers in California have made a chemical engineering breakthrough in highly recyclable plastics by using organic catalysts to start the polymerization process, rather than the usual metal catalysts, and these might hit mass market development within two years.
- Have we started into a permanent recession?
- Feministing put up a great international women's day roundup, and some facts about the wealth gap for women of color.
- FDL is launching the students, not banks, campaign. Do me a solid and join in, if you could.
- Glenn Beck comes out hard against churches that support social justice, encourages his viewers to leave them. I can't figure out if that would be better for the churches or worse for the Glenn Beck viewers.
Like I’ve been predicting, it looks like the Senate’s proposed financial “reform” will be, in the words of the cranky old man in the Woodstock documentary, a shitty mess:
Financial reform tips toward bankers
As Congress this week inches toward a new set of rules to avert another global financial collapse, it is focused on two conflicting goals: reforming the banking system to protect consumers while still giving lenders the freedom to take risks.
So far the score looks like: Bankers 1, Consumers 0.
More than a year after a wave of risky mortgage bets brought Wall Street to its knees, banks and other financial institutions are still playing by the same rules that got them into the mess.
[...]
The banking industry initially lobbied hard to make sure that any new consumer protections were housed within existing bank regulators, such as the Office of the Controller of the Currency or the FDIC.
Analysts who have followed the turf war say the latest proposal gives bankers most of what they wanted.
“This is a bill the industry will love,” said Greg Valliere, chief policy strategist for Soleil Securities.
Wonderful! Hope and change are in the air, baby!
So, look. At this point I’d rather financial reform not pass. Because if the Senate passes a bill that “the industry will love,” then it means we’re heading for another crash no matter what we do. And I’d much rather have the post-crash narrative be, “The government didn’t do enough to rein in the banks” and not “It’s the government’s pesky regulations that caused the banks to fail!”
Just to point out, dudes, I’m not really hoping for another economic collapse. I’m saying that it’s coming no matter what and we’ve gotta position ourselves to win the narrative battle when it comes.
Blanche Lincoln on January 26th:
"I am opposed to and will fight against any attempts to push through changes to the Senate health insurance reform legislation by using budget reconciliation tactics that would allow the Senate to pass a package of changes to our original bill with 51 votes," she said in a statement. "I will not accept any last-minute efforts to force changes to health insurance reform issues through budget reconciliation, and neither will Arkansans."
Blanche Lincoln yesterday, one week after getting a primary challenger:
A moderate Democrat who had vowed to oppose any effort by party leaders to push a health care bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote is rethinking her position.
Sen. Blanche Lincoln said Tuesday that she wants to see what is in the companion bill before deciding.
Steady as a rock, that Blanche Lincoln. Talk about someone who is principled and immutable to political pressure. Given how often she claims that she is speaking for Arkansas, does this mean the entire state is as flip-floppoity as she is?
Less snarkily, after a long stretch of flipping against progressive positions she had pledged to support, it is nice to see movement in the other direction. Primaries work.
DOWNLOADS: 266 PLAYS: 141 Isn't it interesting that Cokie Roberts spends her Monday morning segment on NPR talking about two admittedly disgraced Democrats who will not be holding their positions come Election Day. Charlie Rangel and David Patterson are an admitted embarrassment to the Democrats. Rangel, like much of Congress, is long overdue for retirement, and Patterson's made such a mess of his career the sooner gone the better. But why other than pure partisan hackery would Cokie Roberts spend her Monday morning spot talking about them and not mention that Ensign, Vitter, and Sanford still have jobs? Ensign paid off his mistress's family, Vitter was involved with a prostitute, and Sanford was MIA from his job for days on end. These guys still have the backing of their party? Family values much? Cokie can always be counted on to live up to the old joke by Driftglass: Dick Cheney is caught setting kittens on fire and throwing them at homeless veterans. What are the first three words out of Cokie Robert's mouth? "But the Democrats..." Next she'll be explaining how much Republican scandals help Mitt Romney. Sigh.
While governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney committed the cardinal sin of helping people get health care. Now the wingnut base wants his head:
Conservative Group Rips Romney For Declaring Romneycare “Conservative”
As you may have heard, Mitt Romney went on Fox News this past Sunday and described the universal health care plan he passed in Massachusetts four years ago as “the ultimate conservative plan.”
Romney made the eyebrow-raising claim because he aspires to the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, and thus wants to put as much distance as possible between Romneycare and Obamacare, which is loathed by conservative GOP primary voters — even though the two plans are very similar in various ways.
But guess who disagrees with Romney’s assessment? The Club for Growth, a powerhouse conservative group with a lot of sway in GOP primaries. A top Club official tore into Romney, telling us that if Romney believes this, then he’s “in the wrong party.”
“We can say unequivocally that that is not a conservative plan,” Andy Roth, Club for Growth’s vice president for government affairs, told our reporter Ryan Derousseau when asked for comment on Romney’s claim about Romneycare.
On Sunday, Romney elicited skepticism even from Fox’s Chris Wallace when he said: “There a big difference between what we did and what President Obama is doing. What we did I think is the ultimate conservative plan.”
But Club for Growth’s Roth dismissed this as bunk, citing Romneycare’s individual mandate as proof. “The individual mandate is diametrically against what free-market conservatives believe in,” he said, adding that if Romney thinks his plan amounts to a conservative policy “than I think he is in the wrong party.”
My state’s universal health care system is indeed more conservative than any other universal health care system in the world since it’s the only one that relies upon private for-profit insurers (the Swiss, French and German systems rely on private non-profit insurers, on the other hand).
But that doesn’t matter. To the economic royalists in the Club for Rich Kids, helping any person get health care is a direct affront on their Randroid ideology. And because he committed this wicked and dastardly act, Mittens will find his political career essentially over.
Yeah, I think it’s sad too that helping people get health care is politically poisonous. But that’s America, baby.
Pamalama-ding-dong is horrified to learn that nuts come in many shapes:
GLENN BECK, THINK BEFORE YOU PREACH
Something very disturbing happened today on FOX. Glenn Beck, who has, for the most part, steered clear of jihad, sharia and Islamic supremacism, put his toe in the water, and for the first time since I started fighting the long war, I got nervous.
Beck just called Wilders a fascist, and far-right.
He also mixed up Dominique de Villepin with Jean Marie Le Pen.
What is he doing?
Why would he stigmatize Wilders this way? Wilders is the embodiment of what our founding fathers extolled. Individual rights. Freedom of speech. Not sharia law.
What’s worse: ‘The green traitor is eating it up.’ Which reminds us of how this whole feud between Pam Atlas and Charles Johnson started — not to pat ourselves on the back, but S,N! was there to document the green traitor’s return to the land of the sane way back when.
You may have been under the impression that we don't have a monarchy in this country, but apparently we do - especially if you're part of the Cheney gene pool: Liz Cheney, a mother of five children, has become one of the sharpest and most outspoken critics of the new White House and has needled the Obama administration for failing to protect the nation against terrorism, and mollycoddling terror suspects while pursuing government lawyers who approved water-boarding, a method of inquisition she approves of. She called the president's Nobel Peace prize a "farce". Pushed by friends and family, Ms Cheney is now reportedly contemplating a run for office herself either in Virginia, where she was raised, or in Wyoming, her parents' home state. A former senior state department official on the Middle East, the 43-year-old has already attracted favourable comparisons with as a more substantive version of Sarah Palin, another conservative working mother. "She's likely to seek office," was the judgment of Karl Rove, the former chief adviser to George W Bush. "I'd love to see her run for office someday," said her father, 69, recently. "I think she's got a lot to offer, and it's been a great career for me, and if she has the interest, and I think she does, then I would like to see her embark upon a career in politics." In 40 television appearances in the past year, Ms Cheney has robustly defended her father against criticism that he was the sinister force behind war on terror policies that subverted the norms of American justice, arguing that he and Mr Bush did nothing illegal and kept the country safe after 9/11. Imagine that. She's been on TV forty times in the past year, for nothing more than her DNA and social connections. Yes, Marcy Wheeler calls her "Babydick" and points us to a piece in New York magazine about why NBC loves her so much: Fox is a regular pulpit, of course, but Liz is also all over NBC, where she happens to be social friends with Meet the Press host David Gregory (whose wife worked with Liz ’s husband at the law firm Latham & Watkins), family friends with Justice Department reporter Pete Williams (Dick Cheney’s press aide when he was secretary of Defense), and neighborhood friends with Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, daughter of Carter-administration national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. When Mika criticized Dick Cheney on her show last year, the former vice-president sent her a box of chocolate cupcakes. Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC pundit who engaged in a particularly testy shouting match on Good Morning America with Liz Cheney over waterboarding, says the networks have allowed her a high degree of control over her appearances. “She had up to that point been completely accustomed to having interviews go her way and ceded on her terms,” he observes. “She has been careful to make sure that the interviews worked that way.” Marcy also reminds us that Cheney was her father's eyes and ears in the State Department: What Hagan describes here, of course, is out and out insubordination (or rather, BabyDick’s insubordination layered on top of Bolton’s insubordination). But what he also makes clear is that not only was BabyDick wired into Bolton’s shop (and with it, discussions that would have revealed the genesis of Joe Wilson’s trip), but she also helped Wurmser accomplish his two-fold goal of thwarting State Department efforts to set up a broad-based Iraqi government (where OVP pressed Chalabi instead) and of setting up propaganda efforts–complete with their very own NYT shill, Judy Miller–to support claims they had found WMDs. Not that that should be a surprise. But if you’re looking for news in this big [BJ] of an article, that’s one tidbit of it.
From The Today Show, Karl Rove tries to pretend he isn't just another Lee Atwater Republican dirty trickster while discussing his new book. He also continues to claim he had nothing to do with the whisper campaign against John McCain in South Carolina. I guess Cheney and Bush are next with more of this turd polishing exercise from the Bush administration. (Nicole:) Someone at Media Matters with a much stronger stomach than I got a copy of Rove's book and put it to the old reality test. Guess what? Pretty much an epic fail: Karl Rove's forthcoming memoir Courage and Consequence purports to respond to critics by "putting the record straight," but Media Matters has found that Rove's book is full of falsehoods. Below is an ongoing list of Rove's misinformation in the book, which Media Matters obtained in advance of its scheduled release. 1. Rove distorts Senate report to claim Bush didn't "lie us into the war" 2. Rove falsehood: Obama claims "Obamacare would not add to the deficit ... evidence shows just the opposite" 3. Rove revives tired smear that Gore wrongly said "that he had created the Internet" 4. Rove revives Gore-Love Story smear 5. Rove falsehood: Gore said he had "discovered the Love Canal chemical disaster" 6. Rove pals around with falsehood that Ayers was "Obama's great friend" 7. Rove wrong on number of presidents who left office by "assassination or resignation"
As Americans, we’re accustomed to a certain standard of living. Nothing lavish, mind you. Most of us don’t have big, fancy houses or expensive cars. Most of us don’t have investment portfolios bursting at the seams. But we do have families and we do have responsibilities, and given that we pay our fair share into the system, we expect a safety net when circumstances out of our control force us into the ranks of the unemployed.
However, in especially dire economic times…when the system fails us…it’s appropriate for that safety net to be extended until things pick back up. And, as you read the following, let’s remember why unemployment benefits were created in the first place: The Great Depression.
Why did the Great Depression happen? A systemic failure with the banks and no action taken to save them. Why did the depression continue? Because there were no jobs. And no jobs means no spending which means no economic recovery. And so starts a spiral that was impossible to get out of…until the US declared war on the Axis and we started deficit spending like crazy and sent everybody back to work.
Well, WWIII is not on the horizon so extending unemployment benefits is a pretty simple calculation. And yet…Republicans are starting to grumble about extending them?
But complaints that extending unemployment payments discourages job-seeking have begun to bubble into the political debate. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) recently single-handedly held up the latest extension, a bill to keep unemployment benefits in place for 30 more days, saying Congress should find other cuts to cover its $10 billion price tag.Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) did not join Bunning’s effort, but he defended his colleague’s point of view. Kyl told the Senate he questioned why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy, or to the job market.
“If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,” Kyl said. “I am sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue it is a job enhancer.”
Actually, Kyl is dead wrong about unemployment benefits not being a job enhancer. Sure, on its face it may seems like it’s not, but let me explain why it actually makes very sound economic sense.
The last thing you want a skilled laborer doing is trying to seek employment below his or her pay grade just to make ends meet. See, to stay an economic superpower, we want computer programmers working as computer programmers, not burger flippers. Why? Because not only does that mean no jobs for burger flippers, but the computer programmer may be missing an opportunity to find a job as a computer programmer and is therefore in a perpetual state of “underemployment.” And the rate of underemployment is always the more important number to look at when gauging the economic health of a country.
Right now unemployment sits at 9.7%, while underemployment sits at 16.8%. Now imagine that second number being 10% higher if we didn’t have unemployment benefits.
Buy hey, Kyl knows this. He’s just trying to get it paid for, right?
Well, tell you what…since the top 1% of income earners took billions out of the system with Bush’s tax cuts…how about we get them to give a little back? See, most of them (like Warren Buffet) are only paying 15% on their investment income…I think they can give up some of their tax cuts to make sure the rest of us don’t lose our homes, stop spending and we all fall deeper into recession…which will effect their investment income.
Sound like a deal?
Brookings Institution: A statement condemning the Cheney/Kristol infamy, signed by Bush White House, DOJ, and Pentagon attorneys. Even Ken Starr signed!
TBogg: Who's to blame when situations degenerate? Disgusting things you'd never anticipate
Economist's View:: Enough Already: Venting over four decades of right wing activism
Blue Heron Blast: Separate but unequal
Bildungblog: Senate's shiniest forehead attributed to daily use of Turtle Wax
HOLY CRAP: Beck: Nevermind Jesus...Home-schooled ignorance...Words from a prophet...Choir Boy Practice...Republican Jesus...The wretched of the earth...Arrested...God Blogs...Scientologists prominently dissed...The Week In God...Evil Condoms...Bad Form...Amazing Videos
1. After closing the so-called "national security gap" in the 2006 and 2008 elections, congressional Democrats are losing ground on the issue, according to a new poll done by the Democratic firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. (The survey was done for Democracy Corps and Third Way.) Asked which party would do a better job on national security, 50 percent of likely voters chose Republicans while 33 percent opted for Democrats. Those numbers compare unfavorably for Democrats to Greenberg numbers in May of 2009 when likely voters were deeply divided on the question with 43 percent choosing Republicans and 41 percent Democrats. Even more concerning for the party in advance of the 2010 midterm election is that the erosion between the May 2009 and March 2010 was largest among political independents who now favor Republicans by a 56 percent to 20 percent margin. The reason for the slippage? "Historical doubts
One fairly common narrative in left-wing media is that Democrats will suffer in mid-term elections unless they excite "the base." "The base," we are told, is so disappointed in President Obama and the Democratic Congress, that it will stay home, thus resulting in widespread Democratic losses in 2010.
That narrative is difficult to reconcile with the fact that people who are registered to vote, but who are considered unlikely to vote in 2010, overwhelmingly approve of President Obama's job performance (PDF):
Democracy Corps, February 20-24, 2010Despite the small sample size, this is not an isolated finding. Previous Democracy Corps polls in November (Approve 61%--32% Disapporve) and January (61%--33%) have also found President Obama with a sky-high job approval rating among people who are registered to vote but who are considered unlikely to vote in 2010.
1,001 2008 Voters; 851 Likely 2010 Voters; 150 Drop-Off VotersQ.11 Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?
Likely Voters Registered Unlikely Voters Approve 47% 59% Disapprove 48% 35%
How can "the base" be so disappointed in President Obama that they are deciding not to vote, when registered voters who are considered unlikely to vote overwhelmingly approve of President Obama's job performance?
The argument that "the base" is not going to turn out because they are disappointed in Obama does not hold up to available empirical evidence. And Democracy Corps is, to the best of my knowledge, the only polling organization that is tracking President Obama's job approval rating among people who are registered to vote but considered unlikely to vote in 2010. Other organizations have asked tangential questions, but not the basic questions, such as job performance. That's too bad--every polling organization that publishes likely voter results should publish crosstabs on unlikely voters, not to mention asking the unlikely voters open-ended questions about why they are unlikely to vote.
A better explanation is that the Democratic base is relatively youthful, and younger people don't turn out for midterm elections. Both of these are empirical observations, not conjecture. Until there is better and more frequent polling about what unlikely voters think, it remains the most demonstrable hypothesis on the market today.
… because you of all people will appreciate this. So I’m at a late-winter/early-spring house party in the outer outer Mission and my No. 1 son, Sandy, all of 10, is out in the tiny backyard scaring up frogs or whatnot, and a couple folks go out for a smoke, one of them being his godfather, and Sandy gets it in his head to pop out from a bush and scare him, the godfather, with the line: ‘I’m the ghost of Barry Bonds!’
A top 10 all-time quote from Sandy, and oddly ironic, because after all the fussing and fighting of two to three to four or so years ago, really, who and what and where is Barry Bonds?
He’s a ghost. I laughed and cried — but not really. I just had another beer and kind of processed the whole cosmic joke of it all.
PS Sammy Sosa is a white woman.
Title: You've Lost That Loving FeelingArtist: Telly Savalas The Telly Savalas version of "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" does it for me. (h/t Nicole Belle) We all get the Shatner and Nimoy stuff, so you can skip those, but what other music makes you go huh? It's a music thread and everyone is invited.
As I’ve said before, watch the following and explain to me how this amounts to a government takeover of healthcare. Explain to me why we shouldn’t be doing ALL of these ideas. Because it doesn’t seem like there’s anything in there that 80% of Americans can’t agree with. Sure, you’re going to have your 10% of conservatives who disagree philosophically and the 10% of liberals who think we should just have a government run system, but for the rest of us this makes a lot of sense.
So yes, take a look…
Should have Obama done this sooner? Sure. But he has been stumping for healthcare, talking about these ideas for months now. So when people talk about a lack of leadership on this issue, I shake my head. This isn’t an proposal you can boil down into a sound byte. Of course saying that Obama’s ideas is something that only takes up several seconds, so I can understand why Americans are skeptical. The Republicans have been very consistent with their messaging, and, well, good for them. That’s how this game is played.
But ask yourself…which party will deliver real reform? Those who are trying to figure this out or those who have vowed to vote against most of their own ideas?
I leave you to it…
Happy International Women's Day From Democracy Now -- International Women’s Day Marked Around the World:
Thousands of events are being held around the world to celebrate International Women’s Day, an idea that was launched 100 years ago when a group of women from seventeen countries gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark to champion the rights of women. Activists across the globe are drawing attention to a variety of concerns, including discriminatory laws, the high rate of pregnancy-related deaths in many parts of the world, the skewed sex ratio in China and India, the disproportionately high number of women who are killed and victimized by wars, the comparatively heavier burden of poverty on women, and the continuing disparity between men and women in terms of the quality of available employment and wages received.
The economic rocket scientists at the Wall St. Journal are saying that Paul Krugman is a hypocrite for saying that unemployment benefits won't raise unemployment "but his textbook says they will." Krugman responds with a rhetorical question: Are they really that stupid? He explains:
But anyway, maybe this is a good time to explain the difference between determinants of the NAIRU — the minimum rate of unemployment consistent with a stable inflation rate — and the determinants of the unemployment rate at a point in time.
So: there are limits to how hot you can run the economy without inflationary problems. This is usually expressed in terms of a non-accelerating-inflation unemployment rate; yes, there are some questions about whether the concept is quite right, especially at very low inflation, but that’s another issue.
Everyone agrees that really generous unemployment benefits, by reducing the incentive to seek jobs, can raise the NAIRU; that is, set limits to how far down you can push unemployment without running into inflation problems.
But in case you haven’t noticed, that’s not the problem constraining job growth in America right now. Wage growth is declining, not rising, and so is overall inflation. A wage-price spiral looks like a distant dream.
What’s limiting employment now is lack of demand for the things workers produce. Their incentives to seek work are, for now, irrelevant. That’s why comments by the likes of Sen. Kyl are so boneheaded — anyone who thinks that high unemployment in the first quarter of 2010 has anything to do with workers getting excessively generous benefits must not get out much.
And the truth is that unemployment benefits are a good, quick, administratively easy way to increase demand, which is what we really need. So right now they have the effect of reducing unemployment.
The right has always had their boogeymen, and "Hollywood" has always been an easy catch-all target for them. At last night's Oscar Award ceremony, the movie Hurt Locker won numerous awards, and because the movie showed American soldiers in a positive light, the idiots at Fox News determined that the film and it's director are champions for Republican causes. (warning: link goes to Fox News)
So had you just about given up on Hollywood, regarding the movie capital as simply a collection of hopeless la-la land liberals--or worse, as an elitist gaggle of heartland-bashing snobs? OK, but guess what: Hollywood hears you. They feel your pain, or at least they worry about their own pain, if people don’t buy tickets and DVDs. As we shall see, Hollywood can adapt. Show business, after all, is a business.
If I might be permitted a point of personal indulgence here, I will say I predicted it. Here in the Fox Forum last month, I wrote, “In terms of the big prize itself, ‘Locker’ has the edge.” And the reason cited was that the Iraq war is safely over, it seems, and Bush is out of office, and so now Hollywood can “afford” to honor the sacrifice--and, yes, the glory--of the war without giving aid and comfort to the political enemy:
Because we know that all non-Republicans absolutely LOATHE our troops. The Fox writer admits later in the story that he has no idea what Bigelow's politics are -- which serves as yet another example of the shoddy faux journalism we see from them.
It really makes my blood boil when these rats claim to somehow be more patriotic -- when in fact, historical record and fact shows that propaganda outlets like Fox News aided the Bush administration in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, and supported Cheney, Rummsfeld and others, who used and abused our troops and gutted our military. Republicans have repeatedly voted against increases in veterans benefits for years, and care little about the soldiers themselves. The damage these awful, greedy people have done to our military and our country will take generations to repair.
It's really nice to see at least one person in the media looking into the activities at the C-Street House by The Family as Rachel Maddow has done. She follows up on the previous show's reporting and continues to ask, who's paying Bart Stupak's rent? She talks to Rev. Eric Williams who along with "12 other pastors have filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service challenging C Street‘s tax-exempt status". MADDOW: In making a name for himself, though, Mr. Stupak has opened himself up to some questions about who he is and where he‘s coming from. Last night on this show, we talked about Bart Stupak‘s long-time Washington, D.C. residence. It‘s an 8,000 square foot, 12-bedroom mansion called C Street. C Street is reportedly run by a secretive religious group called The Fellowship or The Family. And the members of Congress who live at C Street reportedly pay the paltry sum of $600 a month for rent—which is a sweetheart deal and is pretty clearly way below market value for that area. And that raises the question: who subsidizes the rent that Bart Stupak and those other congressmen pay—or paid? Today, Mr. Stupak‘s office responded to our questions by informing us that Mr. Stupak moved out of C Street at the end of December. They provided us with a letter that he sent his constituents upon doing so. But they have, so far, declined to answer our questions about how much Mr. Stupak paid in rent, who he paid that rent to, and who subsidized his rent if anyone. We have looked into it on our own, because we couldn‘t get answers from them. And tonight, we have some big news to report in terms of who Mr. Stupak seems to have been paying. With all of the controversies swirling around C Street in recent months, the secretive religious group, The Family, has attempted to distance itself from that $1.8 million townhouse. The Family now claims it has absolutely nothing to do with C Street. The president of The Fellowship which is, again, also known as The Family talked to the “Columbus Dispatch” about it just last week. Quoting from “The Dispatch”: Richard Carver, the president of the Fellowship Foundation, said “his charitable organization does not own the C Street Center and has no control over its policy. He said he does not know who owns or runs the center. Quote, ‘It is simply not a part of anything we do.‘” So, according to The Fellowship, they have nothing to do with C Street nothing. They don‘t even know who runs C Street. Well, today, we were able to obtain what appears to be the official deed to the C Street house. It‘s a deed that is dated September 23rd, 2009. It‘s a deed that appears to change the ownership of the property from a group called Youth With A Mission to an organization called C Street Center Incorporated. Signing on behalf of C Street Center Incorporated is that group‘s secretary, Marty B. Sherman. Who‘s Marty B. Sherman? Well, here‘s the 2008 tax filing of the Fellowship Foundation, again, or The Family. Right there listed on page seven, hey, wouldn‘t you know, Marty Sherman, associate. So, The Family claims they have nothing to do with C Street and yet one of their associates is the person who‘s listed on the deed to C Street. The mystery deepens. Now, you know, The Family is known to be a very secretive group. And one of the things we noted as being a little weird in our coverage of this last night was that Bart Stupak keeps going out of his way to say that he‘s never signed an oath of secrecy around C Street. And, indeed, in a letter to his constituents that his office he gave to us today, he reiterates, quote, “I have never been asked to sign a contract or oath of secrecy concerning C Street or its residents.” Why does he keep bringing this up? It turns that not that long ago, when talking about C Street to the press, Bart Stupak told “The Los Angeles Times” that he kind of did abide by a code of secrecy when it came to C Street and The Family. His quote to “The L.A. Times” when they asked him about C Street
Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft sings the song he wrote, "Let the Eagle Soar."
Bob McDonnell issues an executive order allowing gay people to be fired, and Ken Cuccinelli says you can't be gay in college.
Liz Cheney wants to know the identity of Justice Department lawyers who represented terror detainees.
In this complete, unedited interview, Marc Thiessen disagrees with the Obama administration's policy on interrogation.
Marc Thiessen lists terrorist plots that were stopped as a result of enhanced interrogation techniques in this complete, unedited interview.
In this complete, unedited interview, Marc Thiessen argues for exposing the identity of lawyers who represent enemy combatants.
"Maybe we can outsmart global warming with gumption and can-do and thousands of tiny robots!" says me."Maybe all we need is a simple technological solution, like installing blinds on the sky or an off switch for the sun," says Giblets."Maybe we could flip the continents over when they get hot in the summertime," says me. "I bet they're nice and cool on the other side.""Maybe if the oceans start
VICTOREEEEEEEEE! After nineteen years of bombs and wars and torture and bombs and torture and ethnic cleansing and torture, America's mission in Iraq has finally been re-reaccomplished through the miracle of symbolic purple-fingered brown people! Oh sure, all the cynics and the critics and the nattering nabobs of payingattentionism will say "Oh but Giblets haven't we had five or six of these
What a shame we didn't get to vote here, huh? Yes, despite some heavy-duty pressure (and the implied threat of being blocked from membership in the European Union), the tiny country voted no to a crushing repayment plan for the British and Dutch debts incurred by a failed Icelandic bank. That plan would have required each Icelander to pay around $135 a month for eight years — about 25% of the average family's salary: REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Icelanders blew whistles and set off fireworks in the capital as referendum results Sunday showed they had resoundingly rejected a $5.3 billion plan to repay Britain and the Netherlands for debts spawned by the collapse of an Icelandic bank. Voters in the tiny Atlantic island nation defied both their parliament and international pressure to display their anger at how their nation was being treated. "This is a strong 'No' from the Icelandic nation," said Magnus Arni Skulason, co-founder of a group opposed to the deal. "The Icelandic public understands that we are sovereign and we have to be treated like a sovereign nation — not being bullied like the British and the Dutch have been doing." [...] Britain and the Netherlands want to be reimbursed for money they paid their citizens with deposits in Icesave, an Internet bank that collapsed in 2008, along with most of Iceland's banking sector. Most ordinary Icelanders feel the repayment schedule was too onerous. [...] The overwhelming margin reflected Icelanders' simmering anger at bankers and politicians as the country struggles to recover from a financial meltdown. President Olafur R. Grimsson — who sparked the referendum by refusing to sign the repayment deal agreed by Iceland's parliament — said Icelanders resented having to pay for the actions of a few "greedy bankers." He said, however, the British and Dutch would get their money back eventually. "The referendum was not about refusing to pay back the money," Grimsson told the BBC. "Iceland is willing to reimburse those two governments, but it has to be on fair terms." Iceland, a volcanic island with a population of just 320,000, went from economic wunderkind to fiscal basket case almost overnight when the credit crunch took hold. And you'll never in a million years guess how that happened! (Stop me if this sounds familiar.) They became a free-market poster child. By deregulating the banking and financial sectors, in just five years, Icelanders saw their wealth increase by 45 per cent. The banks went from domestic lending to international financing, until foreign financing made up two thirds of their debt. Then it all collapsed. The new left-of-center government has been trying to negotiate a plan to repay $3.5 billion to Britain and $1.8 billion to the Netherlands as compensation for funds that those governments paid to around 340,000 of their citizens who had accounts with Icesave, an Icelandic Internet bank that offered high interest rates before it failed along with its parent, Landsbanki. Failure to settle the dispute could have repercussions for Iceland's economic recovery. The International Monetary Fund has agreed to loan Iceland $4.6 billion, and the agreement is linked to repaying its international debts. [...] Many Icelanders remain angry at Britain for invoking anti-terrorist legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic banks at the height of the crisis. Oh yeah, about that last part. Iceland Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir has demanded an apology from the UK for freezing their assets. I wonder how long she'll have to wait? I don't blame them for being furious. Even Icelandic companies that had nothing to do with their banks had their assets frozen by the U.K. government. And of course, the International Monetary Fund is a flock of vultures. Their Structural Adjustment Programs usually increase poverty in the countries they "help," because one of the main conditions is that the governments sell off their national assets - usually to western corporations at fire sale prices.
Last night I produced a list of changes in health reform legislation that progressives have, so far, been able to make to the most right-wing health reform policies that passed through either a Congressional committee or a full branch of Congress. It is a pretty decent list, but the overall analysis still makes it clear that the more conservative Democratic proposals largely won the day.
Why do conservative Democrats hold more sway over the party's policy than progressives? That is certainly a question that not only needs a lot of justification (try this post by Matthew Yglesias for starters), but which also has a wide range of possible, and largely unprovable, answers.
Still, I think it is fairly safe to venture that one reason for the relatively greater success of conservative Democrats in shaping Democratic legislative policy is that, generally speaking, a Democratic President has a lot more potential leverage over progressive members of Congress from blue states / districts than over conservative Democrats from red states / districts.
Consider the case of the Progressive Block, a strategy I wrote a lot about over the summer. The goal of this strategy was to get the White House and the Congressional leadership to pressure right-wing Democrats into supporting a couple of key progressive demands. The plan was to threaten to join with Republicans and block "must-pass" legislation, such as health reform, unless one or two specific progressive demands, such as the public option, were met.
However, there was a serious flaw in this strategy: it was never the path of least resistance for the White House to apply more pressure to right-wing Democrats than left-wing Democrats. Consider the choices facing the White House when threatened by both Progressives and Blue Dogs to comply with their various demands on health reform:
The only way to have reversed this situation would have been if health reform was more popular within Blue Dog districts / donor groups than among Progressive districts / donors groups. While some left-wing opposition to the bill materialized, those seeking to defeat the bill from the left never rose above 12-13% of the population (this is a smaller group than the roughly 35% of Americans who think the bill does not go far enough--most of whom don't actually want to see the bill defeated). Thus, it is likely that those seeking to kill the bill from the left were a minority of Democratic primary voters in every Congressional district in the country.
It is virtually impossible for a member of Congress to have leverage over the White House when the White House is on the side of the majority voters in that member's district, but that member of Congress is not. To truly have had leverage over the White House, and have received much bigger concessions, any member of Congress blocking the bill for left-wing reasons needed to convince a majority, or close to a majority, of his or her constituents that the bill should be defeated without large, left-wing concessions.
To put it a bit more crudely, one reason Progressive members of Congress have relatively less influence over Democratic White Houses is because Democratic White Houses--and their legislative proposals--tend to be very popular in blue states and blue districts. That just makes it easier for Democratic White Houses to get concessions out of Progressives than out of Blue Dogs, at least on a general level. Because of this, we raised about as much hell as we realistically could have done, and still only achieved this list of concessions.
While this is not the only cause of relative Progressive legislative failure compared to Blue Dogs, it is still an important factor.
Older workers really are having a harder time, and this is why opening Medicare to people 55 and older would have helped the group that was slammed so hard in this recession. But, you know, I guess they're just going to let us hang instead.
Washington, DC—Older workers endured a staggering 331% increase in unemployment over the last 10 years, a new analysis conducted by the AARP Public Policy Institute shows. This dramatic rise in older unemployed workers has resulted in declining financial and retirement security for millions of Americans who have little time to make up the losses.
[...] The new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by AARP’s Public Policy Institute shows a dramatic 331.4% increase in the number of unemployed Americans age 55+ and over from January 2000 through December 2009. For age 65+ workers, the increase in the number of unemployed was lower, but still a massive 235%.
During this 10-year period, the number of people unemployed individuals age 55+ increased from 490,000 to 2,114,000. The number of unemployed individuals age 65+ jumped from 143,000 to 479,000.
“Many older Americans are trying to reenter the workforce or stay employed longer for a variety of reasons—for millions of older workers, there is no other choice,” said LeaMond.
On another important measure, duration of unemployment—the length of time an unemployed worker has been looking for a job—older workers also faced an incredibly difficult time.
Average duration of unemployment for workers age 55+ increased from 18.7 weeks in January, 2000 to 34.7 weeks in December, 2009—a jump of 85.6%. Over the same time period, workers age 65+ saw their situation go from bad (24.8 weeks of unemployment) to worse (32.9 weeks), an increase of 32.7%.
World Net Daily's latest cover (h/t FreakOutNation)
To paraphrase my buddy Steve Benen, it's illuminating to hear what Republicans say when they don't think anyone's listening:
Ben Smith had this major scoop yesterday:
The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on "fear" of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."
The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how "ego-driven" wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and "tchochkes."[..]
The party's fundraising presentation suggests the Republican National Committee thinks its own supporters are idiots. All the party has to do is exploit contributors' "fears," and expect the checks to come rolling in.
And to stoke those fears, the RNC's message to these dupes includes telling them that contributions to Republicans will help "save the country from trending toward socialism!" One slide in the presentation refers to U.S. leaders as "the Evil Empire," with a picture of the president as the Joker from Batman, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as Cruella DeVille, and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid as Scooby Doo.
How did such a document reach the media? It wasn't leaked: "The 72-page document was provided to POLITICO by a Democrat, who said a hard copy had been left in the hotel hosting the $2,500-a-head retreat, the Gasparilla Inn & Club."
Oops.
Oops, indeed. Maybe the RNC leadership is about as smart as the donors they sneer at.
While I don't relish the ugliness that is sure to come--and the inevitable lies and distortions--I see this as the last desperate grasps of a party that sees a whole lot more hurt in front of them come Election Day than the media will ever acknowledge.
David Waldman is rightly sounding alarms about how the House could get burned by the Senate, and not get an acceptable reconciliation "fix" to the Senate bill, if they pass the Senate health reform legislation before the Senate passes the reconciliation fix. This is even the case if, as it now seems, there are 50+ Senators publicly open to using reconciliation to finish health reform.
One way the House is looking to avoid getting burned is that they are writing the reconciliation "fix" themselves, and not just trusting it to the Senate:
Earlier today, outside of a caucus meeting, Pelosi said Democrats had already drafted much of a reconciliation bill, meant to amend the Senate package, and sent "a bunch" of its legislative language to CBO.
Pelosi says she will wait until the final shape of the reconciliation fix is known--agreed to by the Senate--she'll present it to her caucus, and round up the votes.
This is the path the House appears to be seeking for reassurance. First, they will write the reconciliation fix on their own, and then they will make sure there are enough votes to pass their desired fix, rather than just any fix, in both the House and Senate before proceeding.
While this is not as much reassurance as writing the reconciliation fix, and waiting for the Senate to pass that fix, it is actually more reassurance than just waiting for the Senate to write and pass a reconciliation fix through an existing spending bill. That was actually the path that House leadership aide suggested to me back in February, so it appears they have adopted a different, more reassuring approach since that time.
And, if I might toot my own horn a second, it was actually the path I suggested back on February 12th:
Later in the day, I countered a House leadership aide about this. She said it was true that the House must pass a bill first, but that the Senate could use any spending bill passed by the House, such as an education bill the House sent to the Senate a couple month ago, to make any budget reconciliation "fixes" to any other piece of legislation. That is, the House does not have to pass a budget reconciliation bill specific to the health reform bill in order for the Senate to amend or "fix" the health reform bill in budget reconciliation.
Even so, I asked the aide why the House didn't just pass a reconciliation bill that included all of the changes they would like to see to the Senate health reform bill. That should speed the process along, after all.
The aide conceded that was a good question, but indicated that both sides are still working on a procedural plan that everyone could agree on.
While I am usually dubious that any strategic suggestion I make has not already been considered by people with more power and influence than I have, in this case I might have actually called it.
Teabaggers are on the move, led by the usual suspects: Michael P. Leahy, Tom Whitmore, Judson Phillips, and social media maven Christina Botteri. They even have marching orders to chant while they pack their signs, their video cameras and their astroturf before coming to Washington DC to "defeat Obamacare". Their Take the Town Halls to Washington website is full of rile-em-up, send-em-out rhetoric fit for bluedog and teabagger alike: The idea is to bring a tea party town hall to the 66 members of the House of Representatives whose support of Obamacare is wavering. We want to let them know there is only one vote their constituents will support: No on Obamacare. We are asking local tea party activists to travel to Washington during this period, and make sure that each of these 66 members is reminded every day that if they fail to vote against Obamacare, they will be voted out of office in November. Except for this: There aren't 66 undecided votes in the House right now. Not even close. (AOL News' full list of undecided Democrats) One of the more interesting, but somewhat bizarre moments in the call came when Dr. Milton Wolf came on the line as their very special guest. The person speaking on the call as Dr. Wolf claims to be President Obama's second cousin (see genealogy here), which of course somehow qualifies him to be a featured "special guest" on this phone call. He didn't say all that much, other than to spout the usual teabagger talking points which you can also find on his Floyd Brown clone of a website. Dr. Wolf's presence was ostensibly to bolster the troops, and fire up the flames of patriot wars on Washington, or something. Being a specialist and all, Dr. Wolf has a special antipathy for those beneath him, sneering at the idea of health care reform as a "middle class entitlement that won't end". I call it access to health care, but for Dr. Wolf, it plays better as a socialist plot engineered by his second cousin, once removed. I recorded the entire call. Most of it was details about flights, hotels and the like. One key excerpt is the Wolf/Leahy conversation and QA session, excerpted below. I loved his accusation that his beloved cousin will take us from "the cradle of freedom into the cauldron of socialism...", which of course is that ugly 'government takeover of health care.' Dr. Wolf fervently believes it will be a 'middle class entitlement.' I think that more or less tells us where Dr. Wolf stands. Unremarkably, Michael Steele and the RNC are throwing their full weight behind the effort, serving up some Michelle Bachmann with a side of Demint and a Blackburn chaser for the tea party. Between repeated warnings about "lefties infiltrating the call", there were the usual mundane questions about signage, travel plans, and where the "war rooms" would be. Pointed instructions about social media, twitter takedowns, calls to representatives out of individuals' districts and admonitions to shoot video of everything in hopes of getting that juicy tidbit comprised the majority of the call. For me, this was the bottom line: health care reform is going to pass whether they like it or not. They understand that this is their last stand, and are deeply fearful that Nancy Pelosi will "ram it through" on Thursday of this week. Underneath the false bravado, there is a strain of elitism, fear, and disdain for anyone suffering from lack of access to health care. They wrap it up in fishy-smelling paper with liberty written on the label, but the stink comes out anyway. Here, then, are the juiciest excerpts along with the complete call. I was recording from Skype and the call was jammed, so some of the audio isn't great, but you'll get the idea. Michael P. Leahy, Milton Wolf, MD, including QA session DOWNLOADS: 551 PLAYS: 43 Teabaggers' social media marching orders DOWNLOADS: 6 PLAYS: 38
Eric Massa will appear on Glenn Beck for an our-long interview tomorrow. This story is going to be a big deal for a while.
It is worth noting, however, that Eric Massa completely changed his story in just 48 hours. On Friday, he posted a letter on his website taking full responsibility for his resignation, and that his desire to avoid national media attention was a motivating factor in his resignation.
Here are the passages taking responsibility:
I own this reality... In fact, there is no doubt that this Ethics issue is my fault and mine alone.... I want to make something perfectly clear. My difficulties are of my own making. Period.(...)
I fell short and I believe now, as I have always believed, that it is not enough to simply talk the talk, but rather I must take action to hold myself accountable.
And here are the passages on wanting to avoid attention:
But in the incredibly toxic atmosphere that is Washington D.C., with the destruction of our elected leaders having become a blood sport, especially in talk radio and on the internet, there is also no doubt that an Ethics investigation would tear my family and my staff apart(...)
I am also aware that blogs and radio will have a field day with this in today's destructive and unforgiving political environment.(...)
I ask that members of the press respect the privacy of my family, my staff, and me at this time.
On both counts, this is a complete reversal. Now Massa is alleging a conspiracy to kick him out of office by the Democratic leadership due to his opposition to the health reform legislation, and he is willing to get as much exposure for his story as possible.
This does not necessarily mean that what Massa is claiming now is wrong. It does mean that he was not always telling the truth--it can't be entirely his fault and a conspiracy to get rid of him.
It should also be noted that Massa has a strong motive to change his story. With his entirely new story, he is going to become a martyr for many opponents of health reform legislation. I guess he has decided that is a better track to take than being disgraced over sexual harassment charges. It would have been a more believable tack if he had taken that approach in the first place, and not claimed full responsibility for the sexual harassment, and if by flat-out changing his story, he is receiving a huge wave of new support.
Act Blue pages which I co-managed supported Eric Massa in 2006 and 2008 to the tune of nearly $100,000. Further, before these charges, I was going to help him win re-election no matter his vote on health care. However, there are good reasons to be suspicious of his actions since Friday. And frankly, while I was very proud of it until Friday of last week, I don't feel very good about my past activism for Eric Massa now. No matter the veracity of his contradictory charges, he is not coming across very well right now.
Ironic that the same week that DC Catholic Charities opted to stop spousal coverage in response to legalized same sex marriages, the Vatican finds themselves answering for a gay scandal taking place right under their collective noses: A police investigation into corruption at the Vatican has taken a twist with the discovery of an organised network of male prostitution. So far a senior aide to the Pope and a Vatican chorister have been removed from their posts over allegations of involvement in the homosexual prostitution ring. The allegations were made public when Italian newspapers published transcripts of phone calls recorded by police. Police had been conducting an unrelated corruption investigation. Apparently the tapes record Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Nigerian Vatican chorister, about men he wanted brought to him for sexual purposes. Balducci held a high position within the Vatican and carried the coffin of Pope John Paul at his 2005 funeral. He has now lost his position as a Gentleman of the Holiness. The taped conversations include Balducci describing precise physical details of the men he desired. Balducci was a member of one of the world's most exclusive fraternities – the Gentlemen of His Holiness, or Papal Gentlemen, the ceremonial ushers of the papal household. The scandal is just the newest scandal in a seemingly never ending series of scandals involving the Catholic Church. There is no telling how extensive the prostitution ring is within the Vatican, or what, if any knowledge, Pope Benedict XVI had of the nefarious activities taking place within his household. The scandal is yet another indication of the corruption and moral hypocrisy which surrounds the Pope, and permeates the Catholic Church. Why is it that those so insistent on controlling and judging others' behaviors always seem to have the hardest time living up to their own standards?
Mark Halperin, Time:
How Obama Is Making the Same Mistakes as Bush
Brad adds: This is classic Halperin political “analysis” in which all of a politician’s troubles are due more to inside baseball bureaucratic fights. The actually reason Obama is in trouble politically is that people are suffering during a recession and his policies have done far too little to help them. At the same time, he’s gone out of his way to kiss bankster ass all while unemployment has continuously hovered around 10%.
Eric Massa has always never been one to shy away from tough language, which is one of the reasons he was able to gather so many grassroots supporters during his campaigns for Congress. As he prepares to leave Congress today admist sexual harassment charges, he is staying true to form and not going out quietly.
First, he is alleging a conspiracy by the Democratic leadership to force him out of office to pass the health reform bill:
"There's a reason that this has all happened, frankly one that I had not realized," Massa said on WKPQ radio on Sunday. "Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they've gotten rid of me and it'll pass."
"Steny Hoyer has never said a single word to me at all, never, not once," Massa said. "Never before in the history of the House of Representatives has a sitting leader of the Democratic Party discussed allegations of House investigations publicly, before findings of fact. Ever."
Hoyer's office denies the charge.
Massa also mentions Rahm Emanuel:
When I voted against the cap and trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff to the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn't heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983. And I gave it right back to him, in terms and words that I know are physically impossible. If Rahm Emanuel wants to come after me, maybe he ought to hold himself to the same standards I'm holding myself to and he should resign.
This certainly isn't the first time that freshman members of Congress have accused the White House of bringing heavy-handed pressure on Progressives to fall in line. Other reports have come from Lynn Woolsey, and there is talk that one of the primary challengers Donna Edwards faces is being supported by Emanuel behind the scenes.
Then again, Massa seems to be making these allegations to save his seat:
Responding to a caller to his weekly radio show on WKPQ Power 105 FM, a recording of which was made available via the Web site of local station 13 WHAM-TV, Massa said: "I'm not going to be a Congressman as of 5 o'clock [Monday] afternoon. The only way to stop that is for me to rescind my resignation. That's the only way to stop it. And the only way that's going to happen is if this becomes a national story."
He isn't exactly taking a progressive position against the health reform bill, either, echoing Republicans about using reconciliation:
By the end of the show, Massa is saying that passing Health Care Reform via reconciliation will tear the country apart and that the only way to stop it from passing is to get his story (presumably the alleged plan to force him out of Congress) on to Fox News to let the public know what the Democrats will do to get the bill passed.
Massa also opened up about the sexual harassment complaint that led to his resignation :
"A staff member made an intonation that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid," Massa said. He responded by saying, "Well, what I really ought to be doing is frakking you." He said the complaint came not from that staffer, but from another at the table.
Wow--Massa watches Battlestar Galactica. Massa apparently also had another unfortunate incident like this about twenty years ago.
As someone who actively supported Massa's campaigns in 2006 and 2008 through both significant fundraising and search engine optimization efforts, the whole situation just seems like a huge frakking mess that I don't want to touch. There is a whole lot of he said / she said going on here. My usual inclination is to believe charges of sexual harassment and strenuous top-down pressure on Progs to fall in line. However, Massa also has appeared to play both sides of the fence during his time in Congress, telling Progs he opposes Democratic bills for left-wing reasons while echoing a lot of right-wing talking points at the same time. His opposition to the housing bill was a pretty good example of this.
I had a lot of hope for Massa, and I am sad he is leaving Congress. That it turned into something this messy is particularly saddening.
DOWNLOADS: (223) PLAYS: (229) It seems that ConservaDem Evan Bayh and Lindsey Graham have come up with a solution to try to "to ease the partisan rancor" in Bob Schieffer's words in Washington DC. Have the rich white boys club in the Senate to get together for some lunch. I feel so much better now. Schieffer didn't bother to ask Bayh or Graham if it meant the Republicans would stop obstructing everything the Democrats try to get passed that doesn't have to do with paying for the military industrial complex. Somehow I doubt highly it's going to put a stop to this -- UPDATING OUR POLITICAL DICTIONARIES....: Josh Marshall had a very short item the other day that I've been meaning to mention. He was helping readers understand the new political "lexicon." "Jamming it through": to vote on a bill. It got me thinking about how we should all update our understandings of political terms that had fairly straightforward definitions up until fairly recently. "Obstructionism," for example, only refers to Democratic minorities opposing Republican proposals. "Tyranny" is found when an elected Democratic majority passes legislation that Republicans don't like. "Reconciliation" describes a Senate process that Republicans are allowed to use to overcome Democratic "obstructionism." "Terrorism" refers to acts of political violence committed by people who aren't white guys. Go read Steve's post for the rest of the list and the suggestions in his comments section. I could add a few more of my own like "Socialism" is passing a corporate friendly bill that could have been written by the Republicans a few years back. "Medicare" now equals Medicare Advantage. "Corruption" only counts when it's Democrats that are corrupt. "Freedom" equals invading and occupying another country. Feel free to add to the list here as well. The possibilities are pretty endless given the amount of bald face lying from the Frank Luntz crowd these days. I'm sure those lunches will put a stop to all that though, right guys? It sure didn't stop Graham from using the phrase "ramming it down somebody’s throat" later in the segment when talking about the health care bill, or from lying about the use of reconciliation -- Graham Falsely Claims GOP Has Only Used Reconciliation With ‘Bipartisan Support’. Transcript via CBS below the fold. BOB SCHIEFFER: And good morning again. Senator Graham and Senator Bayh are with us in the studio this morning. And, Senator Bayh, I must say you really did set Washington on its ear when you said you would not run for re-election, basically, because you said you thought the Senate had become dysfunctional. But you and Senator Graham have joined in a new effort, even though you've decided not to run again, to try to ease the partisan rancor. You sent a joint letter to Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell this week asking that they convene a lunch of Republican and Democratic senators once a month on a regular basis. Senator Bayh, why-- why did you do that and do you-- why would that work? Why would that help? SENATOR EVAN BAYH (D-Indiana): Well, first, Lindsey Graham is my friend and we need more friendships across the aisle because that's ultimately how you get principled compromise enacted. And part of this, Bob, was informed by my father's experience where back in the day he might have philosophical or political differences but you still reach out and try to do the people's business. So little of that takes place because there's so little action—interaction among senators. We have the caucus systems. So the Democrats are over here. The Republicans are over here. They hardly ever meet to listen to one another. The only two times since I've been there where we've actually had a gathering of all hundred in kind of a serious setting to listen to one another was first at the time that President Clinton was impeached, didn't know how the trial was going to work; secondly, immediately following 9/11. And in both of those cases, we acted more like
Funny how this hasn't shown up on any American news show--not one mention on the Sunday shows--isn't that interesting?
According to the complaint filed against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as summarized by Judge Anderson in his order refusing to dismiss the case, two men employed in Iraq by Shield Group Security (SGS) allege that their employer bribed Iraqi Sheiks and trafficked in weapons, activities they worried were illegal. The men allege that on a visit back home, one (with the knowledge and cooperation of the other) contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and became informants, giving regular reports and copying computer files as directed. SGS started questioning their loyalty and took away the identification cards that allowed them to access Baghdad's Green Zone. As a result, their lives were placed at risk; the only safe place to be was the SGS compound. When the men contacted their law enforcement handlers, they claim they were told to barricade themselves in an SGS room and await rescue by the U.S. military. They were in fact rescued and brought to the U.S. embassy, where allegedly they explained their undercover corruption- exposing work, and turned over their laptops, which corroborated what they said.
So far, so good. What happened next is when this made-for-TV patriotic movie goes off-message.
According to the complaint, after the men slept for a couple of hours, several armed guards woke, arrested, handcuffed and blindfolded them, put into a Humvee, and brought them to Camp Prosperity and ultimately Camp Cropper for detention and interrogation. The men were labeled "security internees" affiliated with SGS, a status that enabled the men to be detained indefinitely, incommunicado, without access to due process or an attorney, and interrogated with torturous techniques. This status was a direct result of policies enacted by Rumsfeld and others, and the interrogation techniques used were specifically authorized by Rumsfeld, the men allege.[..]
Based on this alleged treatment and Rumsfeld's alleged involvement, the men sued Rumsfeld in part for depriving them of their well established Constitutional Right to be free from torture.
What kind of torture you ask? The contractors allege that they were subjected to extremes of temperature, sleep deprivation, denial of food, water and medical care, prolonged solitary confinement and threats of violence as well as actual violence.
As would be expected, Rumsfeld's attorneys argued that he should be granted immunity since he was acting as the Secretary of Defense, but the judge surprisingly ruled against that motion.
If this case continues to trial, this may offer us the fullest account of the kind of crimes the Bush administration took so casually and set precedent for other similar cases.
The question is, will the media take notice?
The Fix is taking today off to prepare for tonight's "Politics and Pints" -- our monthly night of trivia and general merriment. The festivities get underway at the Capitol Lounge at 7 pm. Team registration is first come, first serve and it's usually pretty crowded so get there a little earlier to ensure you get a spot! Teams can be as small as one person and as large as six. Don't worry if you don't have a team; we'll find you a good group to join up with. Prizes will be awarded to the winners, the runners-up and the team with the best name. Since we go through rigorous physical and mental preparation for our "Politics and Pints" hosting duty -- we kid, sort of -- posting will be light for the remainder of the day.
The House of Representatives is pretty far along in drafting a reconciliation "fix" to the Senate health reform bill, which they currently plan to pass a couple days after passing the Senate health reform bill. Speaker Pelosi, four days ago:
And, indeed, leadership is pressing ahead with the legislative process. Earlier today, outside of a caucus meeting, Pelosi said Democrats had already drafted much of a reconciliation bill, meant to amend the Senate package, and sent "a bunch" of its legislative language to CBO.
The Senate seemingly has enough votes to pass a reconciliation bill now. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Senate and the House agree on what should be in the reconciliation bill, and the House will undoubtedly wait on passage until such an agreement is reached. However, it still means that the reconciliation "fix" to the Senate health reform bill is not the main obstacle to passing health reform.
By far the bigger obstacle to passing health reform remains Bart Stupak's bloc. As this blog and many others have recounted on numerous occasions, Stupak supposedly has a group of about a dozen Democrats who voted "yes" on the health reform bill in November, but who will vote "no" this time around because the bill lacks Stupak's regressive language on reproductive rights.
In an attempt to circumvent this bloc, the House leadership seems to have secured the votes of at least three House Democrats who voted "no" in November: Jason Altmire, Brian Baird, and Bart Gordon. Still, that is nowhere near enough to cancel out a dozen members of the Stupak bloc. Additionally, Representative Mike Arcuri appears to be a non-Stupak bloc member who is flipping from "yes" to "no."
One problem is that no one seems to know exactly who is in the Stupak bloc. There is a lot of speculation, but little confirmation. What little information we do have is:
However, Kildee's office tells me that his name doesn't belong on the list--he's still reviewing the Senate language.
14 Dems who have voted with Stupak so far (which might be coincidental)
Carney (PA-10)
Costello (IL-12)
Dahlkemper (PA-03)
Donnelly (IN-02)
Doyle (PA-14)
Driehaus (OH-01)
Ellsworth (IN-08)
Hill (IN-09)
Kanjorski (PA-12)
Kirkpatrick (AZ-01)
Lipinski (IL-03)
Mollohan (WV-01)
Oberstar (MN-08)
Rahall (WV-03)
Three other members accused of being in the bloc
Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Solomon Ortiz (TX-27)
Charlie Wilson (OH-06)
Given that is only 17 possible names, why don't we just call up these offices and ask something akin to the following question:
Is Representative [insert name here] insisting that language akin to the Stupak amendment be passed as a precondition for considering support of the health reform bill?
Or something like that. It is only seventeen names, so it should be something that even a small news organization can pull off. Further, the nature of the issue means that even an equivocation from these Congressional offices is actually a "no," making this a particularly easy bit of news gathering. Either they are demanding the Stupak amendment as a precondition for considering the bill, or they aren't. There is no "maybe" on this one.
The number for the Congressional switchboard is 1-866-220-0044. I don't see any reason why we can't get all seventeen of these members on record today. People deserve to know who the members of the Stupak bloc actually are.
Honestly, at this point, I don't even care whether or not this crappy healthcare bill passes. I see so many serious problems with it, and I simply do not have any trust in the integrity of the Obama administration and the commercially-sponsored Congress to fix them.
The only reason I can see for supporting the bill is political - and no, I don't think that's an insignificant reason. (I'd guess it's the only reason Wendell Potter still supports it.) However, as Dr. Marcia Angell points out, the bill is such a confusing mess, what are the odds that its passage will work in the Democrats' favor? It's a complete and utter crap shoot, and for that, I blame the consistent lack of leadership from the top. I have never been so disgusted with the political process in my entire life:
From Bill Moyers Journal:
BILL MOYERS: So, has President Obama been fighting as hard as you wished?
MARCIA ANGELL: Fighting for the wrong things and too little, too late. He gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And then he stood back for months while the thing just fell apart. Now he's fighting, but he's fighting for something that shouldn't pass. Won't pass and shouldn't pass.
What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform. And these companies they profit by denying health care, not providing health care. And they will be able to charge whatever they like. So if they're regulated in some way and it cuts into their profits, all they have to do is just raise their premiums. And they'll do that.
Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge. Now that's a recipe for the growth in health care costs, not only to continue, but to skyrocket, to grow even faster.
BILL MOYERS: But given that, why have the insurance companies, health insurance companies been fighting reform so hard?
MARCIA ANGELL: Oh, they haven't fought it very hard, Bill. They really haven't fought it very hard. What they're fighting for is the individual mandate. And if they get that mandate, if everyone does have to buy their commercial products, then they're going to be extremely happy with it.
BILL MOYERS: But this is all about politics now. It's not about pure health care reform. So given that reality, what would you have the President do?
MARCIA ANGELL: Well, I think you really do have to separate the policy analysis from the political analysis and I'm looking at it as policy. And it fails as policy. Moreover, a lot of people say, "Let's hold our nose and pass it, because it's a step in the right direction." And I say it's a step in the wrong direction.
You're right. Politics is different and there are a lot of people who say, "Look, it's a terrible bill. Even a step in the wrong direction as policy goes. But we need to get Obama elected again and we need to continue with the Democratic majority in Congress. And so we need to give Obama and the Democrats a win. If we don't, the Republicans will come in and take over Congress in the fall, and then the White House in 2012. But the problem with a political analysis is sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. And Democrats and particularly liberals have a history of outsmarting themselves.
And I'm not so sure that if this bill goes down, it's going to make it any harder for them politically. So I think it's difficult times for the President and for the Democrats. But if you look at it as a matter of policy, the President's absolutely right that the status quo is awful. If we do nothing, costs will continue to go up. People will continue to lose their coverage. Employers are dropping health benefits. Things will get very bad. The issue is will this bill make them better or worse? And I believe it will make it worse.
BILL MOYERS: The President, with all due respect, would disagree with you. Let me show you something he said--
MARCIA ANGELL: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: --in his speech on Wednesday.
MARCIA ANGELL: Yes.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: My proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions, families, businesses, and the federal government. Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people's premiums and brings down our deficit by up to one trillion dollars over the next two decades. Brings down our deficit. Those aren't my numbers. Those are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the Washington acronym for the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress.
BILL MOYERS: Not good enough for you?
MARCIA ANGELL: Well, first of all, you have to look at what the CBO is looking at.
BILL MOYERS: Congressional Budget Office.
MARCIA ANGELL: Yes. They're not looking at the cost to the system as a whole, to the larger system. They're not looking at the private system. They're simply looking at the federal budget as a budgetary item.
BILL MOYERS: Right. They look at the government--
MARCIA ANGELL: The government part of that. So if they can save money in Medicare, then they come out ahead, no matter what happens out in the private sector. And so that's what he's talking about. It will take money out of Medicare and put it into the private sector. Medicare is the source for a lot of the funds that are going to go to subsidize the private health insurance industry. So that's the first thing. The second thing is the CBO has to build in assumptions. And those assumptions are arguable, to put it mildly.
And as far as cost-cutting, there are sort of promissory notes. ˜We'll get a committee to look at the cost of effectiveness, of various medical procedures.'
BILL MOYERS: Well, you remind me 45 thousand people, as Wendell Potter said earlier, die every year for lack of health insurance. That should be-- they're--
MARCIA ANGELL: It's not lack of health insurance. It's lack of health care. There is a difference between health insurance and health care. You can have insurance offered that is too expensive to buy or too expensive to use. What good does it do? And what happens when this occurs, is that what you see is instead of improvements, look at my state of Massachusetts.
Instead of seeing improvements, you see it shredded even further. You see more people denied access anyway. Now they're about, I think over 60 thousand people in my state who are exempted from the plan for financial hardship and this is also in the Obama plan. If you're really poor, you don't have to participate, and these are the very people who should be in a plan to cover them.
BILL MOYERS: But, the very poor do get Medicaid.
MARCIA ANGELL: Yes, yes. And one of the things about the Obama plan that I do like is that it expands Medicaid up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level and that's fine. The problem is that could have been a stand alone measure. You didn't need to have it incorporated in this massive Rube Goldberg apparatus.
BILL MOYERS: Is there anything else in there you like, in the Obama plan?
MARCIA ANGELL: Oh yeah. I mean--
BILL MOYERS: What?
MARCIA ANGELL: First of all, the intention is very good. The expansion of Medicaid is very good. Raising the age of dependents to 26, and saying that they have to be covered under parents' plans. I think that's very good. Looking at the cost-effectiveness of various procedures is a good thing to do in its own right.
So yes, there are things in it. But the bill as a whole, the more I look at it, the worse it gets. It's going to increase costs, not decrease them. And it's going to increase the rate of growth. It's not going to bend the curve, except in Medicare.
I think in order to look at a reform and to measure a reform, you have to look at the problem it's designed to answer. You have to look at what's wrong with our system, in order to evaluate a reform. You have to ask yourself, "Why is it that we spent over twice as much per person on health care and yet don't manage to cover everyone?"
- Does the Obama administration want to win in November?
- Banks will face losses after the FDIC auctions off loans from banks that have been seized. As 63% of those loans involve other banks, some of their assets will be forcibly marked-to-market. An economic retrospective of last week over at Calculated Risk indicates there are probably 641 banks already suspected to be in trouble.
- The gender police and the sex police: two arms of a social movement that just can't be happy if other people aren't happy acting exactly like them. Move to Afghanistan, already, @ssholes.
- New legislation's been introduced that could help get mandatory farm-to-school funding in the Child Nutrition Act, which would both support thriving farming communities and get very fresh, wholesome food into schools.
- Iceland's voters don't want to pay back the debts of the failed Icesave bank, which crashed their economy. Nothing but sympathy from me on that.
- Paging Sen. Bunning, the jobs package is back in the Senate.
- These days, crazy is just another word for opposition to rampant corruption.
- Researchers are trying to figure out why our closest primate cousins, the Bonobos, prefer to share their food with each other.
DOWNLOADS: (269) PLAYS: (791) I watched the better part of that Book TV interview Romney did this weekend with Juan Williams and it was about as painful to watch as this debacle with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. When you're talking in circles trying to answer questions from those two, you're in trouble. Our friend Steve Benen weighed in on the interview at Washington Monthly: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is in a tough spot when it comes to health care reform. On the one hand, he seriously thinks he should be the Republican Party's presidential nominee in 2012, and needs as big a gap as possible between himself and President Obama. On the other, Romney successfully passed health care reform in Massachusetts four years ago, and his plan is awfully similar to what the president is proposing now. If Republicans think they hate Obama's plan, and Obama's plan was Romney's plan, they're going to hate the crowning achievement of Romney's limited, one-term political career. Read on... This statement he made was the one that really astounded me. ROMNEY: A big difference -- a state plan versus a federal plan. No new taxes, unlike his plan. No cut in Medicare, unlike his plan. And no controls over insurance premiums, price controls, cost controls like his plan. So very, very different in that regard. It's the difference between a racehorse and a donkey, if you will, so -- they both have four legs, but one works pretty well and the other's not working and would not work at all. So Romney thinks cost controls are bad huh? He went on right after that statement to defend the insurance industry. Maybe he can ask Frank Luntz to include those bullet points in the next memo he sends out to the Republicans. Insurance comanies good, cost controls bad and never mind those pesky CEO salaries and bonuses they're making while your premiums go through the roof. Transcript via Nexis Lexis below the fold. WALLACE: Now, on the domestic side, you call the president and Democrats, quote, "neo-monarchists," and you say that they would replace a culture of opportunity with a culture of dependency. Explain what you mean. ROMNEY: Well, you know, from the very beginning of the country there was a great debate about whether we would be a nation led by a king or a strong central government, or instead whether we would pursue a course where individuals followed their dreams. And the chaos associated with free enterprise and freedom was deemed by the founders to be a greater potential source of strength than having a central government that told us what to do. But in Washington today, among President Obama and many liberals, there's a view that if there's a problem in America, government can solve it best. And the example, of course, is health care. We do have problems in health care, but the idea that government can step in and take over the health care system, and tell insurers and providers and doctors and hospitals how to do a better job -- that, in my view, is as silly as saying that we want to have the folks who run the post office and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Amtrak running one-fifth of our economy. WALLACE: Governor, I want to pick up on this, because we got a lot of e-mail from conservatives this week who said that you are the wrong man to be making that point, and they pointed specifically to your role in passing health care reform in Massachusetts. In your book, you criticize actions by your successor, Governor Patrick, but then you write this, and let's put it up on the screen. "Even with these added costs and policy choices by the legislature and the new governor, the plan is working." But let's look at the record. According to the Wall Street Journal, average Massachusetts health care premiums are now the highest in the nation. Per capita health spending is 27 percent higher than the national average. And fiscal 2010 costs are $47 million over budget. Is that your idea of, quote, "the plan is working?" ROMNEY: Well, let's go bac
Good gravy...they've got an airport, a highway, the largest federal building in Washington DC and a freeway and that's still not enough honor for those Gipper-worshiping acolytes:
(S)ome of the late president's admirers are launching a new effort to add another honor: printing his likeness on a $50 bill in place of Ulysses S. Grant's.
In polls of presidential scholars, Reagan consistently outranks Grant, said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), who introduced legislation to make the change.
But at least one Democrat who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, where the proposal has been sent, isn't ready to jettison Grant for "someone whose policies are still controversial."
"Our currency ought to be something that unites us," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks).
They never stop finding ways to keep throwing Reagan up as some weird conservative messiah (never mind that they sneer at Obama for being messianic). In fact, there is a peak near me called Mt. Diablo. A man--who professed to object to the obvious satanic overtones of the name--has been trying to get the county to rename it Mt. Reagan. Thankfully, the county has so far been unpersuaded.
I've never really gotten the rosy-eyed nostalgia for Reagan. I came of age during Reagan's presidency, and I don't remember things being all that great for most Americans. I do remember being concerned about the cognitive powers of the president when he played dumb for reporters during the Iran Contra scandal, a fear that was--in retrospect--not entirely unfounded. I remember thousands of developmentally disabled individuals dumped on the streets of California, when Governor Reagan turned the mental hospitals over to the Correctional Department, leaving families at a loss as to how to care for them, and the number of homeless in California shot up. I remember watching friends get sick and die of a new and mysterious disease that Reagan wouldn't even acknowledge by name. I know there's a lot of mysticism surrounding "It's Morning In America" meme, but does that really make all these numbnuts forget the massive deficit spending they clutch their pearls over now? Do they forget Iran-Contra when waxing rhapsodic over the end of the Cold War?
Sorry, Grant has his detractors, but I'd much rather keep him on the $50 than give Reagan this particular honor.
The Nation has more on the truth of Reagan's legacy. If you're a Facebook denizen, you may want to join the group "JUST SAY NO" TO RONALD REAGAN ON A $50 BILL OR ANY CURRENCY - EVER!
The Progressive Electorate: And the Democratic establishment can kiss my DFH a$$, too
William K. Wolfrum Chronicles: ""Lazy-ass Americans like being unemployed." A talking point winner for the GOP
The Big Picture: Dylan Ratigan talks reform with Rob Johnson & Josh Rosner
Seeing the Forest: Conservatives caused huge deficits, blame Obama
Sensen No Sen: A sphincter-puckering moment for Rumsfeld...and Cheney
Andy Borowitz: GOP lawmaker demands recall of car that drove him to a gay club!
1. With President Obama's March 18 deadline to pass health care reform through Congress rapidly approaching, the American Future Fund, a conservative outside group, is spending $900,000 on television ads in 18 Democratic-held districts calling on members to scrap the current plan. The ads decry the "massive spending" and "backroom deals" including the now infamous "Cornhusker Kickback" in the legislation and quote President Obama's "lipstick on a pig" comments during the campaign. "Tell Congress to start over and get health care right," says the ad's narrator. The districts that AFF is targeting include: Arizona's 1st, Arizona's 5th, Arizona's 8th, Indiana's 2nd, Indiana's 8th, Indiana's 9th, North Carolina's 2nd, North Dakota at large, Nevada's 3rd, New York's 24th, Ohio's 1st, Ohio's 6th, Ohio's 13th, Pennsylvania's 3rd, Pennsylvania's 10th, Wisconsin's 8th, West Virginia's 1st and West Virginia's 3rd. All 18 Democratic members targeted voted for the health care bill when it passed
Did progressive organizations and members of Congress get completely rolled in the health reform negotiations? Nope.
By comparing the current state of health reform legislation to the most conservative proposals that were passed out of Congressional committee, a healthy list of concessions progressives forced out of the right-wing of the party becomes visible. If there were no alterations from the most conservative health reform proposals that were passed out of Congressional committees in 2009, then the current state of health reform legislation would have:
(Even the best proposals that passed out of committee are a far cry from what many progressives wanted. Then again, there are some conservative Democrats who want no reform at all. As such, I am only looking at proposals that passed committee, since those were the only viable proposals on either side.)
Still, it is an impressive list that should make any progressive activist who participated in the health reform fight proud, even if dissatisfied. You really did improve the bill, and have the opportunity to keep improving it.
In the extended entry, I provide extensive justification for this list of progressive improvements to the health care bill. I do so by comparing the most progressive, and least progressive, proposals to be passed either out of a Congressional committee, or by the full House or Senate in 2009, to the current state of health reform legislation. This analysis looks at ten key fights legislative fights over health reform that have occurred over the past year:
More in the extended entry.
1. Public Option--Total Conservadem victory
Progressive proposal (Passed by House Ways and Means committee, PDF page 6): Public option tied to Medicare rates, available to everyone on the new health insurance exchange. Estimated to cover 10 million people by 2019.
Conservadem proposal: No public option
Result: No public option
How did it happen? (You know this story) After House Progressives were unable to find the votes for the Ways and Means proposal, the House ended up passing a weaker public option that would have covered 6 million. That proposal was further weakened in the bill sent to the floor of the Senate, which was a level-playing field opt-out that would have covered 3-4 million. When even that was dumped at the behest of Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, a Medicare buy-in compromise that would have covered around 1.5 million was adopted. And then, that was dumped because Joe Lieberman backstabbed everyone, and the Obama administration backed Lieberman.
****
2. Anti-trust exemption--Current Conservadem victory, but pending
Progressive proposal (included in House bill): Repeal anti-trust exemption for health insurance companies
Conservatdem proposal (Senate Finance committee bill): Don't repeal it.
Result (Senate bill): No repeal of anti-trust exemption, although the House passed it as stand-alone legislation. Might still have a chance of passing.
How did it happen?: Concession to Ben Nelson.
****
3. Medical Loss Ratio--Mostly Progressive victory
Progressive proposal (In the early December Medicare buy-in agreement): Require a minimum medical loss ratio of 90%.
Conservadem proposal (In Senate Finance Committee bill): No minimum medical loss ratio.
Result (In the February White House proposal): Minimum medical loss ratio of 85%.
How did it happen? The 90% loss ratio was originally included in the early December Senate deal on the public option as a concession to public option supporters. It was nixed by CBO when it declared such a provision would make all private insurance a government program.
****
4. Community health centers--Mostly Progressive victory
Progressive proposal (In the House bill): Increase funding for Bureau of Primary Health Care within the Health Resources and Service administration (aka, the federal Community Health Center program) by $14 billion total over next five years. At current rates of service--$2.5 billion (PDF page 6) for 20.27 million primary care patients in fiscal year 2011-- this would expand community health center patient base by 22.7 million.
Conservative proposal (in the Senate Finance Committee bill): No increase.
Result (in the Senate bill): Increased funding of $10 billion total over next five years. At current rates of service, Community Health Centers will provide primary care to 16.2 million additional patients.
How did it happen?. Bernie Sanders got this result in exchange for his vote in the Senate. Also, while some have doubted the ability of the Community Health Centers to provide primary care for so many patients at such low cost, the simple fact is that they do. Kaiser has more information on Community Health Centers.
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5. Medicaid--Even wash
Progressive proposal (House bill): 150% FPL eligibility with no exceptions; $425 billion in outlays; 15 million people covered
Conservadem proposal (Senate Finance Committee): !33% FPL eligibility with numerous exceptions; $345 billion in outlays; 11 million people covered.
Result (White House proposal). 133% FPL eligibility with no exceptions, over $400 billion in outlays, between 12 million and 14 million covered.
How did it happen? By an odd circumlocution, Nelson actually did something good for the bill.
Congress was looking to expand Medicaid in the bill, but red-state Governors didn't want to come up with additional revenue. So, as the bill progressed through the Senate, the federal government kept picking up more and more of the tab for states--including famous deals like the one Ben Nelson scored for Nebraska. Eventually, by the time the White House released its proposal, the federal government is paying for virtually of the expansion. Just about every state gets Ben Nelson's deal for Nebraska, now. The proposed outlays from the White House might exceed those in the House bill.
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6. Exchange subsidies--Mostly Conservadem victory
Progressive proposal (House tri-committee): $773 billion in subsidies
Conservadem proposal (Senate bill): $436 billion in subsidies
Result (White House proposal): "slightly higher on average in the White House bill than in the Senate bill." In total, the White House is proposing $75 billion more in Medicaid and exchange subsidy spending then the Senate bill.
How did it happen? In September, President Obama demanded the bills cost less than $900 billion over ten years, probably because the administration was afraid of the word "trillion" in the messaging wars. So, one of the two main expenses in the various proposals--exchange subsidies, or Medicaid / CHIP outlays--had to be reduced. Since Congress kept increasing the amount it was spending on Medicaid in the bill, the subsidies ended up on the chopping block.
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7. Tax Structure--Mostly Conservadem victory
Progressive proposal (House proposal): Surtax on high-income households,; no excise tax on high-end health insurance plans
Conservadem proposal (Senate Finance committee): Payroll tax, excise tax on high-end health insurance plans
Result (White house proposal): No surtax on high income households; delayed and weakened excise tax on high-end insurance plans; tax on unearned income
How did it happen? Labor negotiated a delay and weakening of the excise tax, which the White House then expanded to the entire country to avoid appearance of special interest deal. White house largely adopted Conservadem approach otherwise, and closed funding gap with tax on unearned income.
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8. Exchange Structure--Unclear
Progressive Proposal (Mainly the House bill): National exchange that would quickly open up to entire country. The House bill had a national exchange, but from there it gets decidedly mixed. The Senate bill allows more businesses to be eligible at the exchange, and the House bill opens up the exchange to the whole country one year faster than the Senate bill.
Conservadem proposal (Mainly Senate bill): State based exchanges with the reverse of the mixed bag listed above
Result (White House proposal): A state based exchange and a national exchange; no word on starting eligibility or expansion rate.
How did it happen? Kind seems like this one is still happening. Not sure how it will end.
****
9. Reproductive Rights--Mostly Conservadem victory
Progressive proposal (Several bills at the committee level): No change from existing law.
Conservadem proposal (House bill): Stupak amendment that would prevent any insurance plan on the exchange from covering abortion procedures.
Result (Senate bill): Stupak amendment, but on an opt-out basis.
How did it happen?: Democrats apparently elected an anti-choice House of Representatives. Bad candidate recruitment will likely result in backward movement for reproductive rights under a Democratic government. That makes this mainly a Conservadem vistory.
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10. Mandate--Mostly Conservadem victory
Progressive proposal (Mainly House bill): Strong employer mandate, minimal penalty for individuals who choose not to purchase
Conservadem proposal: (Senate bill): Basically no employer mandate; moderately stiff individual mandate (exemption if insurance costs more than 8% of income, fee of $750 for refusal)
Result (White House proposal): Some concessions (for example, refusal fee reduced to $695 or 2.5% of income, whichever is lower), but still closer to Conservadem proposal.
****
There are many more Conservadem victories than Progressive victories. Still, in every case except for the public option and the repeal of the anti-trust exemption, progressives wrung at least some concessions out of Conservadems and the White House. And Progs might yet still win a concession on the public option, and pass the anti-trust exemption.
Progressives really did make the bill better in substantial ways.
Travis and Jonathan on this year's Oscars. Open thread below...
Title: Round The BendArtist: Beck Beck's Sea Change album was a huge departure for him, and is by far, my favorite. This live version of Round The Bend (backed by the Flaming Lips) is probably my favorite track from the album -- abd I think, one of his best songs.
DOWNLOADS: (311) PLAYS: (484) Good grief. Think Progress has it right with their headline on this one. Bill Kristol is wrong about everything. Chris Wallace Calls The Perpetually Wrong Bill Kristol An ‘Expert’ On Iraq: Demonstrating again Fox News’ hilariously low standards, this morning Fox News’ Chris Wallace referred to Bill Kristol as an “expert in [the] area” of Iraq’s elections: WALLACE: Bill, you certainly are an expert in this area. The two leading candidates seem to be the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the original prime minister [Ayad] Allawi. From the U.S. point of view, who would we rather see? KRISTOL: I honestly don’t know. I think — the good news has been the degree of reformist parties and the new leaders who have begun to emerge in the Iraqi political system. Read on...
CQPolitic's Craig Crawford says what he's thankful for, November 2009. Apparently, Craig wasn't really all that thankful for Sarah Palin: In a Friday surprise, MSNBC political analyst Craig Crawford announced on his CQ Politics blog Trail Mix today that he is leaving the network. "Three months short of my current contract," he wrote, "I sent the following to the boss, [MSNBC President] Phil Griffin: 'Phil, Just wanted to give you the heads up that my situation with MSNBC has become so unrewarding for me that I've decided to move on. — Craig'" In an email, Crawford tells TVNewser, "This was a long time coming. I haven't felt like a good fit for MSNBC since the presidential campaign, and their hard turn toward point-of-view programming. "So many of my booking calls lately have been for segments bashing Sarah Palin, for instance. I was boring myself, and surely the viewers. "But no particular event brought this on, just my desire to try other outlets and have more fun. I have a fine and rewarding home with the great folks at CQ-Roll Call. I enjoy blogging for them and doing our web videos. "Perhaps I'm not cut out to be a cable cowboy anymore, dunno. Prefer remaining independent and do my own thing for any channel, including MSNBC, that books me. After a dozen years with one channel, I'd rather play the field for a while." In the interest of disclosure, I have spoken with Craig in the past--as we set up his book chat last year--and I've communicated with him via Facebook on this as well. I like Craig as a person, and I can certainly understand a level of frustration if the only subject for which he's invited is Palin. However, I don't know if that's the whole truth. In the comment section of his blog, he revealed some more: i simply could not any longer endure being a cartoon player for lefty games, just gotta move on to higher ground even if there's no oxygen Lefty games? Oh dear. I asked Craig to explain what that meant, but he refused. In fairness to Craig, since his appearances were basically with Countdown, I don't think that anyone will argue there isn't a lefty slant, but games? It's a troubling characterization. Craig commented again: i have never and never will forgive Chris [Matthews] for calling me a racist after the West Virginia primary (the last time I will ever go on air with him). Probably should have resigned then and there, but better late than never. What was that again? I watched an excruciating number of hours of election coverage on MSNBC (and have the high blood pressure and heart troubles to prove it), I missed Chris Matthews calling Craig racist. Mediaite was more successful than I in getting a clarification from Craig: I haven’t felt like a good fit for MSNBC since the presidential campaign, and the hard turn toward point-of-view programming. No particular event brought this on, just my desire to try other outlets and have more fun. As far as Chris is concerned, on Morning Joe after the West Virginia primary he accused me of always defending Clinton and what he claimed to be her racially motivated campaigning. That’s the problem. Trying to be fair became seen as bias in the new thinking over there. But I do wish my many pals at MSNBC nothing but good things. This appears to be that incident from Morning Joe. (link goes to Newsbusters) The truth is, there were times that the anti-Hillary coverage got to me, and I wasn't a Hillary-supporter. But that was over a year ago, and claims of loyalty aside, leaving with bad blood three months shy of your contract ending seems to be a strong statement to make for transgressions more than a year old. Now, I'd like to think that Craig was taking a principled stand against "point of view" programming, but as Mediaite points out, Crawford announced he was going from the frying pan into the fire: Crawford says on his blog he will be on Fox & Friends as a guest on Monday, although FNC says he won’t be. He also writes in the comments that he is a “free agent.” Update
DOWNLOADS: (261) PLAYS: (102) (h/t David at VideoCafe) This Week marks the passings of film and television composer Nathan Scott, photographer Fabian Bachrach and skateboard pioneer Bob Biniak. In addition, the Pentagon has released the names of eight service members killed in Afghanistan: Army SSG William S Ricketts, 27, of Corinth, MI Army SPC Josiah D Crumpler, 27, of Hillsborough, NC Army SPC Matthew D Huston, 24, of Athens, GA Army SPC Ian T D Gelig, 25, of Stevenson Ranch, CA Marine LCpl Carlos A Aragon, 19, of Orem, UT Army SGT Vincent L C Owens, 21, of Fort Smith, AR Marine LCpl Nigel K Olsen, 21, of Orem, UT Army SPC Anthony A Paci, 30, of Rockville, MD According to iCasualties, this brings the total number of allied servicemembers killed in Iraq to 4,698; in Afghanistan, 1,680. During this same period, Iraq Body Count lists 51 Iraqi civilians killed. The civilian casualty count in Afghanistan remains frustratingly undocumented in American media, but according to a recent article, it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-400 civilians killed per month.
Okay, okay...I know the purists among you don't care about the Oscars. Just move along then. There will be other posts coming soon. I personally love the Oscars. My family has a big Oscar party every year, lots of munchies, lots of wine and even better, lots of snarky remarks on dresses, dates and lame acceptance speeches. We're movie crazy. Before I had kids, I prided myself on seeing all of the nominated movies, even the foreign films and shorts. I think my brother still does. But now, it's a little more complicated to see films. I do see them still, but more often than not on DVD, long after the ceremony (hooray for Netflix). If you want to play along with the prediction game, a list of nominees is available here and use this thread to let us know what movies knocked you out this year, what you like and didn't like tonight and what you laughed out loud at.
DOWNLOADS: (397) PLAYS: (4048) On Meet the Press, E.J. Dionne and Orrin Hatch continue their argument that started on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. More on that from Steve Benen: Sen. Orrin Hatch's (R-Utah) Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday has generated quite a bit of criticism lately, and for good reason -- it was an embarrassing mess, filled with obvious and demonstrable falsehoods. It was encouraging, then, to see the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr. use his column today to call out the conservative Utahan for publishing dishonest arguments. [...] Dionne also explained that Hatch deliberately misled readers about quotes from his Senate colleagues and misstated the record in terms of Senate use of reconciliation. The columnist concluded that he's "disappointed in Hatch." Read on... Transcript via NBC below the fold. MR. GREGORY: All right. So let's get to this whole business of reconciliation, which budget reconciliation means you, you have a separate bill here that would only need a simple majority, that would just deal with some of the spending provisions of health care. You two, Senator Hatch and E.J. Dionne, had some words about this on the pages of The Washington Post, and let me--Senator Hatch, let me put a portion of what you wrote about reconciliation on the screen: "This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship." E.J., your response on the pages of the Post included this: "I'm disappointed in Hatch, co-sponsor of two of my favorite bills in recent years. One created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. The other, signed last year by Obama, broadly expanded service opportunities. Hatch worked on both with his dear friend, the late Edward M. Kennedy, after whom the service bill was named. "It was Kennedy, you'll recall, who insisted that health care was a `fundamental right and not a privilege.' That's why it's not just legitimate to use reconciliation to complete the work on health reform. It would be immoral to do otherwise and thereby let a phony argument about process get in the way of health coverage for 30 million Americans." Discuss. SEN. HATCH: Well, Democrats--this is not a fight between Republicans and Democrats in a real sense, it's between Democrats and the people out there. Fifty-eight percent of the people are against this bill and very few are for it. The fact of the matter is they're going to abuse the reconciliation rules. And let me tell you, the reconciliation rules have never been used for such sweeping social legislation like this. This is one-sixth of the American economy. It's sweeping in, in effect. There--and, and, and there have been three sweeping social bull--not sweeping, but social bills that have been approved through reconciliation. One was, of course, the, the welfare reform. That had 78 positive votes, but--huge bipartisan vote. Another one was the SCHIP bill, my bill with Senator Kennedy. That had 85 votes. The third one was college tuition, and that had, I think, something like 78 votes. The fact of the matter is, is that it has never been done before, it's never been used before. To do this is just very, very dangerous. It's going to cause an awful lot of problems. And in the end, in the end, you're going to--and let's, let's look at one other thing. The Senate bill was passed. Now, E.J. seems to accept the fact that the House bill was passed, but they're two different bills. Now they're going to take the Senate bill, they say. But if they had the votes, it would already have been voted on. They don't have the votes. So I suspect they're going to manipulate the rules even further in ways that were never contemplated in order to get this dog through... MR. GREGORY: E.J.... SEN. HATCH: ...this 2700
John Oliver celebrates the Iraq invasion, Jason Jones exposes the Catholic conspiracy, and Jon compares Harry Markopolos to Bruce Dern.
Gretchen Carlson smells the wings as she announces Mouthful Mondays at Hooters.
Harry Markopolos expresses his anger over the SEC dismissing his multiple warnings about Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
Jason Jones reveals the Catholic Church conspiracy behind the Mother Teresa commemorative stamp.
There are so many people John Oliver wants to thank for the success of the Iraq invasion.
The big moment at the Oscars occurred when Roger Ross Williams was interrupted while accepting his award.
This is Part Four in my diary series, "The Myth That Conservative Welfare Reform Worked". Part 1 began this project by debunking the conservative narrative that liberals and Democrats were uninterested in reforming welfare, drawing principally on Diana Zuckerman's artlce, "Welfare Reform in America: A Clash of Politics and Research ", published in the Journal of Social Issues, Winter 2000 (pp587-599). Part 2 began the presentation of a five-section argument with the first two sections, "Section 1: The Rightwing Hegemonic Framing Of Welfare Reform" and "Section 2: A Common-Sense Take-Down of the 'Welfare Reform Worked' Myth". Part 3 was devoted to a detailed debunking of Charles Murray's Losing Ground. This part will look at National US data, both long-term trends and a set of snaphsots.
Section 3B: The Story of National Data--Long-Term Trends And Significant Snapshots
We begin this diary by looking at long-term trends, which provide us with the big-picture story. We then examine a few significant shorter time-frames to see what was going on a crucial periods of time, taking a closer look at how different factors interacted.
Long-Term Poverty Rate Trends--Two Warning Shots
First we look at two trend graphs. The first tracks deep poverty--below 50% of the poverty line. It clearly shows that deep poverty grew dramatically in the late 1970s, and through the beginning of the Reagan years:
The late 90s did show a significant imporovement, but it began before "welfare reform" and did not come close to returning us to the pre-Reagan levels of relative success.
The second shows that poverty began dropping well before "welfare reform" was implemented, and that there was no appreciable change in the declining trend when "welfare reform" was instituted:
Thus, there is no empirical foundation for any claim that "welfare reform" was "a success".
Long-Term Poverty Rate Trends--Linked To Unemployment
We begin our more detailed analysis by noting the most basic of relationships, embodied in the old adage that most effective anti-poverty program is a good job. While often wielded by conservatives in recent decades, this is every bit as much a slogan of the labor movement, which has repeatedly had to battle conservatives to make work pay well enough to make this adage true.
As shown in the US Census table, Work Experience and Poverty Status for People 16 Years Old and Over [xls] , the poverty rate for full-time workers 16 and over has fluctuated in a narrow range from 2.4% to 2.9% from 1987 to 2008. This compares with a range of 11.8% to 14.6% for those who worked part-time and 19.8% to 24.2% for those who did not work at all. Of course, this doesn't mean that roughly 97-98% of all full-time workers earned enough from one full-time job to rise out of poverty--not with the rise of minimum-wage jobs and the fall of the minimum wage. But with multiple wage-earners and sometimes multiple jobs, very few people who had at least one full-time job have found themselves in poverty for at least several decades now. Which is why it's no surprise to find that the unemployment rate is closely related to the poverty rate, as can be seen in this chart:
Of course, the chart includes those over 65, most of whom aren't in the labor market, as well children, whose welfare comes through the intermediation of their parents or guardians. A more helpful chart breaks down the poverty rate accordingly:
The correlations between between the unemployment rate and the poverty rates for different demographic groups is as follows:
The correlations are stronger for child poverty, which is an indication children both benefit more when jobs are more plentiful, and suffer more when they are not. This obviously should not be the case in any country that is truly civilized.
It should now be apparent why I spent so much time on the debunking of Charles Murray. Once his baseless fantasies about welfare keeping people from working are cleared out of the way, we can see quite clearly and unambiguously that people work when they are able to find work, and when this enables them to work full-time, it almost always means they can make it above the official poverty line, one way or another. However, when there simply isn't enough work available-as there never is for everyone who wants to work-then the individual alone is powerless, which is the whole point of having socioeconomic policies in the first place.
Long-Term Teen Birth Rates--Already Declining BEFORE "Welfare Reform"
Even without Murray and his false and misleading arguments, however, there certainly was an increase in single-mother families with much higher rates of poverty. The fact that other countries dealt with this much more successfully than we did is a subject for next weekend's diary on international comparisons. For now, we should simply note that the increase in teen pregnancies that formed the heart of the hysteria had already peaked well before the enactment of welfare reform:
The CDC provides a more detailed breakdown, showing that declining pregnancy rates resulted in both declining birth rates and declining abortion rates, for mid-teens as well as late teens:
As can be seen, there is no appreciable change whatsoever following the passage of "welfare reform" in 1996.
Four Snapshots in Time
For closer snapshot examinations of poverty and "welfare reform" I'm going to draw on four different papers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The first came out almost simultaneous with the passage of "welfare reform" and documents how much good was being done by the welfare system then in place. The second came out two years later, and reflects the immediate aftermath period. The third came out about two years later than that, and provides a look at the time period 1993-1999, surrounding "welfare reform" by three years on either side. The fourth came out in 2006, and was a 10-year retrospective.
Snapshot 1: The Safety Net Delivers BEFORE Welfare Reform
"The Safety Net Delivers: The Effects of Government Benefit Programs in Reducing Poverty", (final revision November 15, 1996) presents a wide array of data showing the effectiveness of the very array of programs that had just been done away with, or radically altered--although a number of factors would intervene to soften the blow. Still, the successful trajectory chronicled in this article was substantially altered. I will confine myself to a just two passages. The paper is a study that focuses on the differences between per-transfer poverty--the poverty rate before people receive any government assistance--and "post-transfer poverty", the poverty rate afterwards. The first passage contrasts the effects on seniors with those on children. The second highlights the role of the safety net during recessions, underscoring how much stronger the safety net was in late 80s and early 90s compared to ten years earlier:
Comparing Effects on the Elderly and on ChildrenOf particular note, safety net programs reduced the elderly poverty rate in 1995 from 50 percent before receipt of government benefits to 9 percent when the benefits are counted, a stunning 41 percentage point reduction in the poverty rate. By comparison, the safety net programs reduced the child poverty rate from 24 percent before benefits are counted to 16 percent when benefits are taken into account, an eight percentage point reduction.
The social insurance programs were far more effective in reducing poverty among the elderly than means-tested programs and taxes together were in reducing child poverty.
This reflects a number of related factors which combine to treat seniors more like the citizens of Continental European welfare states, while children are treated more like the citizens of the Britain and other English-speaking countries, where market forces are more dominant.
Effects of Government Programs During Recessions....
During recessions, poverty generally increases. Hence, poverty rose from 1989 - the last year before the recession of the early 1990s - to 1993. Between 1989 and 1993, the number of people in poverty before government benefits are counted rose from 49.9 million to 60.6 million, with more than 10 million people being added to the ranks of the poor. After government benefits are counted, however, the number of poor people increased during this period by only 5.5 million. The effect of government programs was to cut nearly in half the growth of poverty during this recession.
During the recession of the early 1980s, the impact of government programs on poverty was much smaller. Between 1979 - the last year before the onset of that recession - and 1983 when the poverty rate peaked, the number of people who were poor before receipt of government benefits increased almost 10 million. This increase was of a similar magnitude to the increase in the number of people poor before receipt of government benefits during the recession of the early 1990s. But when poverty is measured after government benefits are counted, poverty grew more than 11 million people during the 1979-1983 period. During that period, the increase in the number of people who were poor after receipt of government benefits exceeded the increase in the number who were poor before receipt of government benefits. This occurred because various safety net programs were cut between 1979 to 1983, causing a decline in the number of people lifted from poverty by government benefits.
Of course, the increase in post-transfer poverty from 1979 to 1983 is yet another demonstration that Murray's thesis was wrong. Anti-poverty programs reduce poverty, just as they are supposed to do. They do not increase it.
Nest we turn to the immediate aftermath of "welfare reform".
Snapshot 2: Just After "Welfare Reform" The Poor Trail A Growing Economy
The paper "Poverty Rates Fall, but Remain High for a Period With Such Low Unemployment" painted a picture of things getting better for some at the bottom--but not as good as they should be in a time of growth, while those still in poverty actually saw things getting worse as a whole:
Strong economic growth and low unemployment reduced poverty and raised incomes in 1997, with especially strong gains occurring among minorities. A number of years of growth have returned the poverty rate and median household income to the levels at which they stood in 1989, the last year before the recession of the early 1990s. The Census data show that 13.3 percent of Americans lived in poverty in 1997, down from 13.7 percent in 1996.The poverty rate remained high, however, for a year in which the unemployment rate
averaged 4.9 percent, its lowest level in 24 years. The poverty rate in 1997 was at about the same level as it was in 1987 through 1989, years in which unemployment averaged between 5.3 percent and 6.2 percent. The 1997 poverty rate was substantially above the poverty rates for every year of the 1970s, even though the unemployment rate was close to or above six percent for more than half of the years of the 1970s. More than one of every eight people in the United States continue to live in poverty.
The lagging gains for those on the bottom can be seen in this chart:
But that was actually comparative good news. For those who remained in poverty, things got worse:
On average, poor families became poorer in 1997. The average amount by which families that are poor fall below the poverty line increased $200, the Census figures show, from $6,395 in 1996 to $6,602 in 1997. (These figures are both expressed in 1997 dollars.)This increase in the depth of poverty for the average poor family appears to be related to a weakening of safety net programs in 1997; the decline in the number of families receiving assistance was much greater than the decline in the number of families that are poor. The proportion of poor families with children that receive basic cash assistance that can lessen the severity of their poverty has decreased. The proportion of such families receiving food stamp assistance also has fallen, although food stamp receipt is not reflected in the Census Bureau's standard measures of the incidence and depth of poverty.
The decreasing benefits surpassing the decline in the poverty rate can be seen in the following chart, showing the shortfall grew significantly, as soon as "wlefare reform" passed:
Snapshot 3: Progress Stalls After "Welfare Reform" Starts
The paper "Poverty Trends for Families Headed by Working Single Mothers 1993 to 1999" clearly showed that by cutting the safety net, "welfare reform" had an immediately deleterious effect. The beginning of the executive summary laid out the broad frameworks of the findings:
In recent years, large numbers of families headed by single mothers have moved from welfare to work. This report addresses the question whether and to what degree those who work have improved their economic situation.Among people in families headed by working single mothers, there was no progress in reducing poverty between 1995 and 1999, despite an expanding economy. Reductions in poverty as a result of economic growth were entirely offset by increases in poverty due to contractions in
government safety net programs.This is in contrast to the earlier 1993 to 1995 period, when poverty rates dropped for people in working single-mother families, both before and after counting government benefits and taxes. During this period, which preceded enactment of the 1996 welfare law, safety net programs for low-income working families expanded and had a larger impact in reducing poverty among these families. This added to the effect of the economy in reducing poverty.
- Before counting the benefits of government safety net programs (including cash and non-cash programs such as food assistance and housing subsidies) as well as taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit, the poverty rate for people in working single-mother families fell from 35.5 percent in 1995 to 33.5 percent in 1999. Poverty measured before counting government benefits and taxes primarily reflects the impact of changes in the economy on private sources of income, especially earnings.
- But after counting government benefits and taxes, the poverty rate among people in working single-mother families was 19.4 percent in 1999 - not significantly different from their 19.2 percent poverty rate in 1995.
A few select charts serve to underscore these broad findings. First we see that the total poverty gap (amount of money needed to lift people out of poverty) declined significantly from 1993 to 1995, but tailed off after that for all families, while actually increasing for single-mother families as "welfare reform" kicked in:
The picture was even starker on a per-person basis:
The growth in the size of the earned income tax credit (EITC) offset the declines in other programs, for an over-all net gain, but the benefits did not necessarily offset for those in the deepest need:
Indeed, the biggest growth in EITC effectiveness came from 1993-1995, while the biggest drops in cash assistance effectiveness came after that:
These early results were then followed up by a 10-year report.
Snapshot 4: TANF At 10: Mixed Results
TANF AT 10: Program Results are More Mixed than Often Understood
Ten years after "welfare reform" passed, most of Versailles thought it was a great success. But CBPP pointed out that a lot was being left out of these accounts. Indeed, it found that more than half the decline in caseloads--the primary measure of "success"--was due to people who were eligible and needed help not receiving the help they were entitled to. That's some success!
Many discussions of TANF focus on three sets of trends - the decline in the number of families receiving cash assistance through TANF programs, the increase in employment rates of single mothers during the 1990s, and the decline in child poverty during the 1990s.While important, these three sets of trends miss important information about the functioning of the TANF program and the impacts on low-income families over the last decade. Examining a broader set of indicators reveals these important facts:
- Child poverty fell during the 1990s, but has increased significantly in recent years as has the number of children living below half the poverty line. While child poverty remains below its levels in the mid-1990s, the recent trends are disturbing. Between 2000 and 2004, the number of children living in families with cash incomes below half the poverty line increased by 774,000. Over the same period, the number of children getting assistance from TANF declined. While other safety net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid provided assistance to increasing numbers of individuals as the labor market weakened and poverty rose, TANF did not, failing to serve as a bulwark against deep poverty for many children.
- Employment rates among single mothers are higher today than in the mid-1990s, but they have fallen since 2000. Single mothers who leave welfare for work typically have higher incomes than they did when they received TANF, but remain poor or near-poor, often face significant work expenses and material hardships, and see only modest income growth over time.
- The number of poor single mothers who are jobless, do not receive cash public assistance (from TANF or other programs), and do not live with others who work or receive cash income support has increased significantly. Between 1996 and 2004, the number of single mothers who were working increased by about 1 million. But from 1996 to 2003, the number of single mothers who fall into this "no work, no welfare" group in an average month increased by more than 400,000. There are now roughly 1 million poor single mothers - with 2 million children - in an average month who fall into this "no work, no welfare" group.
- TANF now helps a much smaller share of the families that are poor enough to qualify for the program than it used to. Program participation has fallen sharply among families poor enough to qualify for the program under state eligibility rules (and who meet the other eligibility criteria as well), from about 80 percent in the early 1990s (under the former Aid to Families with Dependent Children program) to just 48 percent in 2002, the last year for which data are available.
Startlingly, this drop in TANF participation among eligible families accounts for more than half of the decline in TANF caseloads since 1996. Stated another way, more than half - 57 percent - of the caseload decline during the first decade of welfare reform reflects a decline in the extent to which TANF programs serve families that are poor enough to qualify, rather than to a reduction in the number of families who are poor enough to qualify for aid.
Very poor families that do not receive TANF miss out not only on the income assistance that could help these families meet their children's basic needs, but also on programs that could help them prepare for and find employment.
Here's a chart of the reduction in family participation rates:
And here's the reduction in children served:
Now that's what conservatives call a "success"!
How about you?
DOWNLOADS: (292) PLAYS: (467) Byron York repeats the nonsense that someone actually pays him to write in his column at The Washington Examiner that the Democrats in the House voting for the health care bill a second time is somehow akin to Tiger Woods cheating on his wife. Dems turn risky health vote into manhood contest: I called a Democratic strategist with a question: Say I'm a moderate Democrat. I voted for the House bill last November, but I've seen the polls, I know a majority in my district opposes the bill, and I feel certain that voting for final passage will end my time in office. Why should I vote yes? "Look, you voted for it before," said the strategist, who asked to remain anonymous. "You should have thought about that then. You're stuck with the vote, it's around your neck, you're going to wear it like an albatross. The ad that's going to run against you is going to be the same whether you vote for it now or not. [...] What about this argument, I asked: Yes, I voted for it once, but why compound the damage by doing it again? Say you've cheated on your spouse. You can tell them you only did it once, that it was a mistake, and that you won't do it again. Or you can assume the damage has been done and carry on like Tiger Woods. Which is more likely to save the relationship? I'm sure York just has their best interest at heart and would never turn around and call them flip floppers if they listened to him...right? The last thing any Democrat should do is listen to this hack. That strategist he talked to was right. If they vote against it at this point, the Republicans will use it against them if their only concern is getting reelected. If they really cared about making good policy, they'd have been pushing for single payer at the beginning. Listening to York and his ilk and flip flopping now just makes them look like they're weak and can't govern.
DOWNLOADS: (279) PLAYS: (267) From C-SPAN’s Book TV, Mitt Romney attacks President Obama while discussing his new book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and praises George W. Bush for his "strength in defending this country" and says that President Obama “is going to have to move in that course or he will be seen as being a weak President on the international stage”. He also claims that Bush would not have attacked Iraq if Saddam had just let the weapons inspectors in. And yes that is Juan Williams interviewing him and not asking any follow up questions to this nonsense. Williams: So people are going to say it looks like you’re on a campaign tour. And the one line in the book that is so critical of President Obama is given all the foreign policy issues we’ve touched on, that this President seeks to present himself as somehow transcendent, transcendent of America, American values and American interests, as opposed to being an advocate for American values and Americans’ interests. That would seem to be almost like a campaign slogan where you have to reduce it in size… but the idea is that you believe we needed an American President who stands for America and you do not see that in this President Obama who seeks to transcend, to be greater or larger than America. Romney: Well I think any time the President of the United States travels the world and is critical of the United States that it’s going to lead to the kind of stories that came out of the British press saying this President has been more critical of his home country of foreign soil than any American President in history and that creates a very real impression that he’s somehow thinks he is above America and its history, or there’s something he needs to distance himself from. I think that’s a mistake. He goes on yammering about how we need to be spreading our “values” and “freedoms” and uses the old campaign rhetoric that we heard about Obama being on an “apology tour”. He then heaps some praise on President Bush with this bit of revisionist history. Romney: We were hit on 9-11. He took out the Taliban in Afghanistan. We believed we were receiving threats from Saddam Hussein who by the way could have removed the threat instantly by saying come on in, all of my facilities are open, the international inspectors could look in the palaces, they could look in the, you know the COM military fissile and take a look here because we don’t want to have America come after us. He did not do that. He could have done that and would not have suffered the fate he did had he been willing to open up his nation to that kind of inspection; but those things being said I respect President Bush’s strength in defending this country and I think President Obama is going to have to move in that course or he will be seen as being a weak President on the international stage. For more on Romney's book there's this article by Spencer Ackerman. Romney’s ‘No Apology’ Outlines Foreign Policy for Fantasy World: Mitt Romney’s just-published book, “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,” is a bid to bolster the former Massachusetts governor’s nonexistent national-security and foreign policy portfolio ahead of a possible 2012 presidential run. But a glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all. Romney’s central contention is that there are four “strategies” for global power: the United States’ blend of benevolent, market-based hegemony; the Chinese model of political autocracy and unrestrained industry; Russia’s energy-based path to resurgence; and the “violent jihadists,” an agglutination of scary Muslims. Trouble in paradise, according to Romney, comes from President Obama’s “presupposition” that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.” As a result, Romney must warn the n
Last week, President Barak Obama proclaimed that the firing of teachers at a Rhode Island school was a rational and effective solution for low test scores and high dropout rates. He said, "If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability." The "accountability" that the President is referring to continues the drumbeat of rants against educators and schools that has been ongoing for decades. Only now, the rant has been adopted systemically as policy by the federal government in the form of Race to the Top and other incentives.
Goaded by the prospect of getting a share of the multi-billion-dollar RTT funds offered by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, state leaders, mayors, and school superintendants are implementing "turnaround models" for school improvement that rely on taking severe measures, measures that make educators primarily bear the full burden of school reform.
All four turnaround options being pushed by Mr. Duncan have profound effects on teachers and how they do their jobs, if they're lucky enough to be left with one. And all four are based on a notion that improvement will happen only through threatening educators.
This whole notion of making increased "accountability" the leverage point to push failing schools toward success is borne from the musings of free-market enthusiasts and corporate leaders like Bill Gates. The rationale, we are told, is that "our students are falling behind those in other countries." The reason for this is that schools lack the "marketplace accountability of schools competing with one another." So therefore, "accountability is sorely needed," but educators so "resist the idea" that they need to be subjected to harsher threats and incentives. Never mind that the record for turnaround approaches used in the private sector has shown no "evidence of boosting performance."
The desire to make schools "more accountable" has been so broadly accepted by politicians and the media that virtually no one outside of the education profession speaks out against it. But the finger pointing solves nothing other than continuing to give life to the notion that education is something other than a shared, community obligation - in short, that we're all accountable for educating children.
The irony that President Obama made his remark in the headquarters of the US Chamber of Commerce seems to have been totally lost on the reporters covering the event. For if there is any sector in the American economy that resists accountability it's big business. Examples of the utter irresponsibility of US corporations abound. A year after investment bankers led the US economy over the cliff into the Great Recession, those very same bankers rewarded themselves with record-high bonuses. Architects of our nation's dilapidated health care system continue to give themselves raises as more and more Americans go without health insurance. And even when business leaders are let go, they're rewarded with unbelievable amounts of largesse.
There's this standard line that businesses are successful because they're accountable to their customers, and educators aren't held to that same standard. But this quaint notion that businesses operate under the tenant that "the customer is always right" was thrown to the financier wolves of Wall Street years ago - if it ever really was true to begin with. If you believe that businesses are successful by pleasing customers then just try to get someone at Google on the phone. Businesses succeed for a variety of reasons, but total abdication to the will of customers isn't one of them.
Free market cheerleaders are always quick to point to "teacher tenure" as particularly evil because of its resistance to marketplace forces that periodically purge employment in private industries. But attempts to fire anyone from the executive echelons of the business world are no less difficult - and are often accompanied with way more in legal fees - than getting rid of incompetent teachers. What critics of teacher tenure are really asking for is not parity with the private sector but the same subjugation that factory and farm workers had before the existence of unions and labor laws.
Some have suggested that parents and school board members need to be more of the focal point for hiring and firing teachers. They point out, as Mary Elizabeth Williams did Friday at Salon.com that "when Obama talks about accountability, he's supposed to be talking about accountability to us" (emphasis not added.) But can you imagine what the results would be if parent-teacher firing boards became the rule in schools? How could I, for instance, make an impartial decision about the statistics teacher who almost flunked my kid in his senior year in high school? How could a school board made up of people who don't believe in evolution make an impartial decision about the biology faculty?
The contention that educators are solely responsible for student achievement is so easily refutable that one wonders why the argument has to be made. Even parents and students in the Rhode Island school district where teachers were threatened with being lined up and summarily fired recognize the fallacy of this argument:
"'It's not fair,' said Angela Perez, who has a daughter at the high school. 'They shouldn't be punished because the students are lazy. The teachers care so much,' said Perez's daughter, Ivannah Perez, a recent Central Falls graduate. 'I've seen them stay after school. I've seen them struggle. It's the students. They don't want to learn.'"
As noted in comments by a teacher responding to this article, the fallacy of holding teachers solely accountable for achievement seems obvious on its face:
"I once read an article where a teacher was talking to a dentist, about a 'new' rating system that would list dentists according to how many cavities their patients had at the ages 4, 8, 12, 18 and so on. The dentist was shocked and argued 'But I have no control over how they care for their teeth! Parents might let their kids eat sweets, not make them regularly brush or floss. They could be genetically pre-disposed to tooth disease. I can only do so much and control a small portion of these kids lives!' The teacher said, 'Exactly why you can't expect a teacher to be the only factor in a child's success in school.'"
There's ample research pointing to a broad array of factors that affect student academic achievement. For sure, teachers are a significant factor but in no way the sole determinant of success. In fact, there's evidence that teachers may be too docile and overly willing to take on the blame of failing schools.
Surveys of teachers show that the vast majority of them feel obligated to "prepare students for more than high school graduation;" in other words, do more than just get kids to graduation. And they don't particularly feel that they need to be paid more to do so. What they would appreciate is, as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, put it, the "tools, time, trust, and support to do their jobs well."
Even the much-maligned teacher unions are generally falling in line with the dictates of prevailing policies. Despite opposition to Race to the Top from teacher unions in New York and California, most state union chapters support their state's proposals to compete for the funds.
In contrast to the image of lazy teachers and obstinate unions being painted by politicians and the media, the reality for most educators is more like what principal Judy Grace relates in comments to a recent article:
"How do we justify tying promotion, retention, and evaluation for teachers to student growth when we continue to look the other way when it comes to the complete breakdown of the nuclear family and common values in our society? These are the same teachers who spent an entire Sunday the weekend before Christmas this year cleaning the home of one of our family[ies] in order to rid it of the infestation of head lice. If we were afforded the luxury of just addressing our students' academic needs, it would make sense to evaluate teachers on academic growth. I worked with a fourth grade student in my office last evening until 5:30 because his drug addicted mother won't get up in the morning to get him to school. He's a sweet little boy who spent the morning watching a movie instead of coming to school. This is the kind of challenge my staff face everyday."
DOWNLOADS: (303) PLAYS: (775) The Republican National Committee is trying to manipulate their donors by playing on "fear" of President Barack Obama and the top Republican in the Senate doesn't like it. Politico revealed a GOP PowerPoint presentation last week that recommended using fear and extreme negative feelings about Democrats to raise money. "That sort of thing is certainly not helpful. I can't imagine why anybody thought that would be helpful," Sen. Mitch McConnell told ABC's Matt Dowd Sunday. "I don't like it. I don't know anybody that does," he said. When asked if someone should be fired for the presentation the Senate Minority Leader tried to distance himself from the RNC. "Look, I don't run the RNC. That's up to them," he said.
DOWNLOADS: (219) PLAYS: (831) (h/t David at VideoCafe) Tom Delay thinks Jim Bunning is "brave." (But then, this is the same man who said, "By the way, there's no one denied health care in America. There are 47 million people who don't have health insurance, but no American is denied health care in America.") Like most Republicans, he thinks you should be desperate enough to take any job you can get, even if it doesn't begin to meet your family's basic needs - especially the dignity-free, low-wage, low-security jobs so beloved of top Republican donors: Appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," the Texas Republican said that Bunning's fiscal responsibility was commendable, even if his shenanigans (refusing to allow unemployment benefits to be considered by unanimous consent) nearly brought the Senate to a halt. "Nothing would have happened if the Democrats had just paid for [the benefits]," Delay said. "People would have gotten their unemployment compensation. I think Bunning was brave in standing up there and taking it on by himself." Asked whether it was bad strategy to make a budget stand on a $10 billion extension of unemployment (as opposed to, say, the Bush's $720 billion prescription drug package), Delay insisted that if the PR had been done right, Bunning would have been applauded. Helping the unemployed with federal assistance, he said, was unsound policy. "You know," Delay said, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs. In fact there are some studies that have been done that show people stay on unemployment compensation and they don't look for a job until two or three weeks before they know the benefits are going to run out. Host Candy Crowley: Congressman, that's a hard sell, isn't it? Delay: it's the truth.
DOWNLOADS: (234) PLAYS: (521) Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told ABC's Matthew Dowd that health care reform has been slowed by attempts to get support from Republicans. "I think part of the pace of this debate was a real attempt to have a bipartisan approach," said Sebelius. (Nicole:) What a polite way to say "If the Republicans weren't such lying, fear-mongering obstructionists, we'd be in a much better place right now." And even with all the assistance the Republicans are receiving from the media, who NEVER challenge their oft-repeated meme that Americans don't want reform, a recent Gallup poll shows that Americans actually are seeing past the gamesmanship and trust Obama more than the Republicans. This Gallup poll released yesterday notes: Americans remain more confident in the healthcare reform recommendations of President Obama (49%) than in the recommendations of the Democratic (37%) or Republican (32%) leaders in Congress. But these confidence levels are lower than those measured in June, suggesting that the ongoing healthcare reform debate has taken a toll on the credibility of the politicians involved. I'd imagine those numbers would be significantly higher if we didn't have such an enabling media, only too happy to mis-inform the public. As Plumline points out, the majority of those polled in key states support the public option over the watered down Senate bill. SEBELIUS: Well, actually, I think part of the pace of this debate was a real attempt to have a bipartisan approach. The House bill had Republican support. In the Senate bill, there were months spent with six senators, three Republicans and three Democrats, in a room, negotiating, adding ideas to the bill, trying to figure out a strategy to move forward in a bipartisan fashion. As you know, the Senate bill didn't pass 50 plus one, it passed with 60 votes, a supermajority, and I think the president would love to have Republican votes. What he has is lots of Republican ideas -- selling insurance across state lines, making sure that we crack down very aggressively on fraud and abuse, you know, moving forward. But there is a fundamental difference. The Republicans feel strongly that insurance companies should have less regulation than they do now, less consumer protection, less oversight. The president feels strongly that we need to change the rules of the road, that we can no longer have a private health system where insurance companies get to pick and choose, where they can lock people out and price people out. And that's really one of the fundamental divides. And even though there are lots of Republican ideas in the bill, I'm not sure -- you know, we are hopeful that there will be Republican votes, but I'm not sure there will be. So yes, in the strictest sense, the Republicans are correct: Americans are not happy about the Senate bill. But not because they don't want health care reform, but because they want a STRONGER bill. That's not going to happen if the Republicans have anything to do with it, so while the attempt to reach out for a bipartisan solution was admirable, it's long past the time to just get it done.
At Truthdig, the good E.J. Dionne raises his head in a column, "Can't We All Just Get Along? No", which begins thus:
The word partisanship is typically accompanied by the word mindless. That's not simply insulting to partisans; it's also untrue.If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?
Amen to that. But what about the flip side? If partisanship actually reflects real differences in ideas, how much does bi-partisanship reflect a mindless approach that ignores not just ideas, but reality itself? (Including, of course, the mindless use of the term "mindless partisanship.") Take, for example, the mindless bipartisan approach to education, exhibited by Obama's support for firing all the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, which Jeff is going to be writing about 4 PM.
The bottom-line reason given for the firing in many news reports was a 48% graduation rate. Now, that rate is nothing to be proud of--even though it would have been quite respectable for the "Greatest Generation", which sent a lot of high school dropouts off to war. But 48% is still almost halfway to perfection. Contrast that with the violent crime rate for Oakland, California, 1917.8 per 100,000 in 2007 (the most recent year for which statistics are available in the DOJ online database). You'd have to double their performance (cut their violent crime rate in half) eleven times before you'd get close to perfection, a violent crime rate of less than 1 per 100,000.
Obviously, the entire Oakland Police Department should be fired. No other conclusion is possible. It's a no-brainer.
But why stop with Oakland?
The safest community in California is Laguna Woods, and it's violent crime rate is 16.4 per 100,000. You'd have double their police performance four times to get close to a violent crime rate of 1 per 100,000 and five times to get under 1 per 100,000. If perfection's your measure (and why shouldn't it be?) then the Laguna Woods police are spectacularly worse than the Central Falls High faculty and staff.
The conclusion is obvious: Every police department in America should be fired en masse.
Of course, some might argue that perfection is an unreasonable standard. Some would argue that we need to look at things in context. So here's a list of the ten most and ten least dangerous communities in California in 2007, in terms of violent crime rates...along with their crime rates as a multiple of the crime rate of Laguna Woods:
That's quite a disparity between the top and the bottom. And since we're talking about basic levels of physical safety--which even the most conservative politicians argue is a basic function of the state--it's a remarkably graphic representation of just how fundamentally our system fails to protect and provide for its citizens as a whole... not counting the elite, of course.
Just to provide some context, here some basic information, first, Laguna Woods:
Laguna Woods is both one of California's newest and oldest cities. Incorporated in 1999 as Orange County's 32nd city, the average age of Laguna Woods residents is 78. Ninety percent of the City's 4 square miles is contained within the senior citizen gated community of Laguna Woods Village (formerly Leisure World, Laguna Hills). The balance of the City contains three additional senior residential communities and several thriving commercial centers.
Wow. With an average age of 78, one might almost regard that violent crime rate as remarkably high.
Let's move on to Hillsborough:
Hillsborough is an incorporated town in San Mateo County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hillsborough is one of the wealthiest places in America and has the highest income of places in America with populations of at least 10,000. It is located seventeen miles (27 km) south of San Francisco on the San Francisco Peninsula, between Interstate 280 and SR 82 (El Camino Real). The population was 10,825 at the 2000 census. The town is served by Hillsborough City School District. Hillsborough is home to some of the Bay Area's wealthiest people, and the landscape is dominated by large homes; the city enforces a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) minimum house size and half-acre minimum lot size to preserve exclusivity.[1] As a result, there are no apartments, condominiums or townhouses in the city limits; however, it is not unusual for the homes along the eastern edge of Hillsborough to face condominiums in neighboring Burlingame, with which it shares ZIP code 94010. Hillsborough is one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, with a median home price of over $3.8 million.
Compared to Hillsborough, Palos Verdes Estates is downright downscale. Still, these brave people manage to soldier on:
Palos Verdes Estates is a city in Los Angeles County, California, USA on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was designed by the noted American landscape architect and planner Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. The population was 13,340 at the 2000 census. According to the 2000 US Census, Palos Verdes Estates is the 81st richest place in the United States with at least 1,000 households (based upon per capita income). The 90274 ZIP code was listed as the 47th most expensive U.S. ZIP code in 2007 by Forbes.com.[5] Palos Verdes Estates is one of the most affluent communities both in Los Angeles County and the nation.
On the other hand, there's Oakland:
Oakland is the eighth-largest city in the U.S. state of California[2] and a major West Coast port city, located on San Francisco Bay about eight miles east of the city of San Francisco. Oakland is a major hub city for the Bay Area subregion collectively called the East Bay, and it is the county seat of Alameda County. Based on United States Census Bureau estimates for 2008, Oakland is the 44th-largest city in the United States with a population of 404,155.[3]...
During the 1940s, thousands of war-industry workers moved to Oakland from the Deep South, and the late twentieth century saw a steady influx of immigrants from around the globe. According to the 2000 U.S. census, Oakland is the second most ethnically diverse city in the United States, with many languages spoken.[4]
Oakland has struggled with significant challenges, including high unemployment, widespread poverty, and an elevated rate of violent crime.
Of course, it should be obvious that if Hillsborough or Palos Verdes Estates had crime rates like Oakland does, then heads would roll. And yet, the vast disparities in crime rates are politically acceptable, even though they represent a far greater level of disparity in minimal safety than the disparities in minimal educational achievement.
Once upon a time, the Democratic Party stood for the proposition that some basic level of equitable treatment was due to all Americans. This outlook represented what E.J. Dionne called "authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing" than those promoted by the GOP.
Those days are now gone. The Democratic Party has become the party of mindless bipartisanship, and nothing shows that more clearly than Obama's eagerness to see an entire school faculty thrown out into the cold in the midst of a deep recession.
Yesterday, in "OUR 'Tea Party Movement': California's students march forth, leading fight for public education", I mentioned that Democracy Now! had an interview with Diane Ravitch, long identified as a leading conservative education scholar. But Ravitch was never a true ideologue, and when the data failed to support the policies she supported, she changed her mind:
In a companion piece focused on primary and secondary education, Democracy Now! interviewed education scholar Diane Ravitch, long a leading proponent of charter schools, privatization and testing, who has changed her mind, based on the overwhelming record of failure of these "bipartisan" "reform" ideas, as she details in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which jeffbinnc will be reviewing for Open Left next weekend.
Without stealing Jeff's thunder--indeed, to whet your appetite a bit, I'd like to quote what Ravitch had to say about a key turning point in which the extremely meaningful partisan differences were done away with to create a "great leap forward" in bipartisan mindlessness in the war on public education. It's actually a two-step: On the one hand, there's a coming together on "accountability", which translates into demonizing teachers. But there's also the abandonment of actual, substantive standards--what students are supposed to learn. In place of standards based on knowledge, we have devolved to measuring "skills"--an obsession with process that should sound chillingly familiar:
DIANE RAVITCH: Right. Well, when I went to work for the Department of Education, I came in as a Democrat, and I thought, somewhat naively, that education was somehow a nonpartisan issue. And so, I came in to work on the idea of promoting arts education, science education. And in the department-part of the department I was in, we gave grants to different professional associations of educators to develop voluntary national standards of the arts, science, history, geography, economics, civics, lots of different areas. We wanted people, educators across the country, to say this is what an education is, this is what all American children should have. It was not a race to the top. It was based on the idea of equal educational opportunity means that all children get these wonderful things.But I think, within the Bush administration, the more important dialogue that was going on, that I was just very peripheral to, was the idea of school choice, vouchers, charter schools, and then also accountability. And where the Democrats and the Republicans began to make common cause was around this theme of accountability. And what accountability ultimately meant, not just in the Bush administration, but in the Clinton, and now in the Obama-in the, you know, next Bush and then this administration, accountability means who should be punished. If the scores don't go up, who should be punished? Teachers. Teachers should be punished. The unions should be demonized.
But you asked me about Lynne Cheney. The reason that Lynne Cheney gets into this conversation is that she was the one who saw that the history standards were-you know, she attacked them. And there got to be a huge national brouhaha back in 1994, 1995, about whether the history standards were politically correct. And it caused such an uproar in the press with-you know, the right-wing talk-show hosts jumped all over it, and then you had people on the left defending it. Congress and the administration just said-and this was in the Clinton administration years. They said, "Let's not touch this whole idea of standards. Let's just stick with basic skills." And that's how we today have inherited this legacy of the only thing you're allowed to really talk about is reading and math, don't touch science, the arts. They're all too controversial. You might get into an argument over evolution if you try to talk about science.
JUAN GONZALEZ: But you also say that in many state curriculums that have been developed now, even in reading, it's more about the functions of reading-
DIANE RAVITCH: Right.
JUAN GONZALEZ: -than the actual content of the literature that people are reading.
DIANE RAVITCH: Right, sure. I mean, this is-to most people, it would come as a shock, if you pick up your state standards and you say, "Well, where's the literature?" Because what they talk about is strategies and processes and previewing and reviewing and predicting. And you think, you know, why aren't kids getting good literature? Aren't they reading the great stuff, you know, world literature, American literature, English literature, Spanish literature? No, it's not there, because if you make a choice about literature, then choosing this means you're not choosing something else, therefore choose nothing at all.
"Choose nothing at all." Mindless bipartisanship in a nutshell.
DOWNLOADS: (239) PLAYS: (504) The panel on the Chris Matthews show seems to forget the media’s part in selling the Iraq invasion during this discussion on KKKarl Rove’s new book. They’re more than happy to tell us now that it was some sort of common knowledge that the Bush administration and Cheney wanted to go in there no matter what, but that sure as hell isn’t what they were peddling before we invaded. Someone needs to ask all of them to watch Buying the War from Bill Moyers Journal and see if that helps them to remember the part they played in fear mongering and how the media is just as responsible as the Bush administration for scaring the hell out of the public and that the Congress would not have voted the way they did without the media's help scaring the hell out of them just before they were up for reelection. It doesn't excuse the Congress for going along, but this bunch has got a bad case of selective memory about what actually happened in the lead up to the invasion and their part selling it. If the public had known what they're saying here was some sort of common knowledge, the fear mongering by the Bush administration might not have worked. Matthews: Welcome back. Former Bush political mastermind Karl Rove is out with his book; the first of a line of memoirs coming to the Bush team, including Bush and Cheney themselves. They’ve got books coming. Rove writes that he regrets not making a stronger defense of Bush when WMD’s were not found in Iraq. But at the same time Rove seemed to confirm the suspicions of many Iraq war critiques. Here’s what he wrote. “Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it. Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the WMD threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam.” Matthews: Dan what I read into that, perhaps too tightly was a sort of veiled admission that WMD was merely the sales case in the war with Iraq, to get into that war and they had other reasons for going; they wanted to go anyway whether they found weapons or not. Rather: Well, based on that quote that would be a proper assessment. We know that Dick Cheney, the Vice President and others came in saying “What do we do about Iraq?” So this all fits with what we knew before. I would see it as confirmation of what we pretty much knew before. Matthews: Andrea that question, I remember, I think you alluded to what I’ve always heard and have confirmed recently from Bill Cohen, Secretary of Defense under Clinton. First question Cheney said to him when he met him was “What you doing on Iraq?” That was his obsession. He said I don’t want no (?) zone of what’s going on in the world. I want Iraq news. Mitchell: Well, the bottom line is that you know Rove said in that same quote, he said that we did not lie about WMD. But the bottom line is that months, months before they ever went with the war resolution they, the Brits were told that the President made up his mind. Condi Rice told Richard Haas that the President made up his mind in July of 2002. Matthews: Yeah. Mitchell: They were down—they were headed down that track. Matthews: Yeah, Katy the question is about—I mean this is always going to be part of our history of everybody of this generation is watching is watching this. It’s always going to be a debate. Why’d they go to war and what was it. Was it ideological? Was it getting even for the father, the attempted assassination; was it just Cheney’s brain soup? What was it that made them go to war? Katy Kay goes on to say that we’ve never had a satisfactory answer. No Katy, we've had a satisfactory answer. The press just didn’t report on it and you’re all still having these phony conversations like all of you don’t realize you helped the Bush administration sell the lies. At least Dan Rather bothered to call this book by Rove and upcoming from Bush and Cheney what they are, revisionist history. But no Dan, future history is not needed
The unusual aspect to this story is that this clown is the CEO of a company which supposedly tries to portray a welcoming image for Nashville to tourists. Video and story from WKRN, Nashville. The e-mail can be viewed at Nashville Scene. The Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau has since decided to drop its contract with Walt Baker's marketing firm. NASHVILLE, Tenn. - After accusations of racism and calls for him to step down, a prominent local businessman says he's sorry for forwarding a controversial email. Walt Baker, the CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association, is at the center of controversy after forwarding an e-mail that compared First Lady Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. Metro Councilman Walter Hunt said he started to get phone calls about the e-mail on Friday. "I don't know what he was thinking," Hunt told News 2, "and the people who got [the e-mail] said I don't think it's funny." "It was demeaning, insulting, racist -- not only to her, but to every citizen in the city of Nashville and the state of Tennessee," said Hunt. Walt Baker initially brushed off the e-mail controversy, telling the Nashville Scene on Friday it was in good fun, but on Saturday he apologized. "It was wrong, my initial reaction to the story was wrong," Baker told News 2. "It was stupid and I am alone the responsible party in this." UPDATE: Baker is now being portrayed as the victim by some in the local media. Nashville Man Loses Friends, Job Over Email
Clearly a case of geographic standards, since I can tell you for a fact that many of the parents of Catholic school kids in Philadelphia's inner city are "living in disaccord with Church teachings." In other words, the rules are much more flexible when the schools don't have enough paying students. Hell, many of the Philadelphia students aren't even Catholics!
I can tell you, though, that even teachers here are rather intimidated by the contractual requirement that they lead pristine Catholic lives that are an inspiration to students. (Unlike, say, the pedophile priests who are groping kids or the Papal court members who are running prostitution rings.) For teachers, parochial schools mostly get devout Catholics who believe in Catholic schools, or ex-public school teachers who are burned out by the discipline problems. It's definitely not the salary (they make the pre-visitation Ebenezer Scrooge look like a spendthrift).
If I taught in Catholic school, I'd find some dirt on the pastor, blackmail him and go about my merry sinful way. But that's just me!
BOULDER - Some parents are considering pulling their children out of a Catholic preschool after the school told a family a student could not return because the parents are homosexual.
A meeting was held to discuss the issue at Wesley Chapel in Boulder Friday evening.
"This could be one of those moments where the community is holding a mirror up to the church for it to take a look at its policy and reconsider what they've been doing," Wesley Chapel Pastor Roger Wolsey said.
Teachers at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School were told about the situation earlier this week. Staff members say they were told a student would not be allowed to re-enroll because of his or her parents' sexual orientation.
The Denver Archdiocese says the student's parents are two women and their homosexual relationship violates the school's beliefs and policy.
"They're entitled to do what they want," Wolsey said. "And I would respect them no matter what they decide. [But] I think a lot of churches are doing a lot of soul searching right now."
In a statement sent to 9NEWS, the Archdiocese said, "Homosexual couples living together as a couple are in disaccord with Catholic teaching."
According to the Archdiocese, parents who enroll their kids at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School are expected to follow the Catholic Church's beliefs.
I need your help. Which states can be governed by a simple majority? If the current US Senate rules are so great, you'd expect them to be replicated in lots of States right? And if any state does dare entrust its governance to the tyranny of the bi-cameral legislature, with their penchant for spending less on redistribution, well we should expect those states to be doing very poorly right, what with all the crazy laws and socialism they will have.
It turns out this is surprisingly hard to answer. The National Conference of State Legislatures produces items like this and this which highlight the complexity of this topic. I started out reading various State senate rules but states like California, with its two-thirds budget requirement mean that majority rule isn't as simple as the absence of a filibuster.
Inside I will try and lay out an approach to answer this.
So here's how I propose to group the states:
Majority rule: These are states which can pass most things with only a majority. Extraordinary items like impeachment or constitutional amendments can still require supermajorities, but no filibuster in either house, and no supermajorities for routine state business like tax increases or the budget.
Mixed: These states do not qualify as "majority rule" but are still distinctly more democratic than the US senate. Delaware is an example, as it requires three-fifths in the legislature to raise taxes, but otherwise can govern on majority rule.
Supermajority needed: These are the ones that are as bad or worse than the US Senate. States with supermajority budget requirements or filibusters fall here.
For some others, categorization is hard to do. Florida's Senate needs two-thirds to end debate. This seems worse than the US Senate, but it is two-thirds of Senators "present and voting" - whereas the US senate is three-fifths of Senators "chosen and sworn." However as that is not clearly better than the US Senate, I would group it with the supermajority states.
Mainly I am interested in states where the majority can get its way most of the time, so marginal cases between the latter two are not too big a deal. For grey area cases between majority and mixed, I will round down and group them as mixed.
I've made a start but frankly run out of steam, as each state's legislative rules are wildly different in format, style, and sometimes just not findable online. Even as I read the rules I am not sure I'm reading them right. Nebraska's rule 7-4 allows a majority to end debate, but rule 7-10 requires a two-thirds majority to invoke cloture. What does that mean in practice?
So help out. In the comments, if you're reasonably well acquainted with any state's legislative procedures, put the name of the state as the title of the comment, and suggest a category. The more detail the better. Feel free to challenge the ones I have already categorized. I didn't burden the chart with my notes on why each state landed where, but if necessary I can provide those notes. Find state legislatures here.
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DOWNLOADS: (241) PLAYS: (619) McCain repeats Bart Stupak's lie on Greta Van Susteren's show that the Senate bill will allow for federal funding of abortions even though that talking point has been debunked by ABC News and their "truth squad". From Media Matters: For more on why McCain and Stupak are wrong, from Slate: Why Stupak Is Wrong: A central puzzle of the health reform debate is why Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., keeps saying that the Senate-passed bill allows taxpayer dollars to be spent on abortions. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says it, too. This dispute concerns (or at least pretends to concern) matters of fact, not belief. The question of whether the government funds a given medical procedure is not like the question of whether human life begins at conception. It's empirical, not ideological. And Stupak happens to be wrong. Read on... h/t jwh22 at Daily KOS who has an action update with contact info for several of the networks SAT. ACTION UPDATE -- ABC News ACTUALLY DID THEIR JOB!.
They gave us a republic.: GOP supports survival of the fittest
We are respectable negroes: Behold the Ugliness of the Right Wing: Breitbart compares ACORN to the KKK
Crooked Timber: Bookblogging: the reanimation of trickle down
Southern Beale: Nut Allergies
The Washington Monthly: "Stupak happens to be wrong"
Mad Kane’s Political Madness: Chip Off the Old Crock
ABOVE: Michael Bresciani, The American Prophet*
Shorter Michael Bresciani, Ruhnoo Murku
The PC Wars of 2010
*Mr. Bresciani has written a book claiming that his technicolor dreams are visions from God and that he is a prophet. He also claims that his columns are read in “every country in the world,” which is, apparently, just another way of saying that he has posted them on the Internet.
As David Kaib notes in Quick Hits, a Houston trial judge has declared the Texas death penalty law unconstitutional. The Death Penalty Information Center explains:
On March 4, Houston District Judge Kevin Fine granted a pretrial motion in a capital case and declared the death penalty in Texas unconstitutional. Judge Fine said the state's law violates a defendant's right to due process because of the risk of executing an innocent person. The judge based his ruling on studies around the country and in Texas that indicated, "it can only be concluded that innocent people have been executed....Are you willing to have your brother, your father, your mother be the sacrificial lamb, to be the innocent person executed so that we can have a death penalty so that we can execute those who are deserving of the death penalty?" Green's defense attorneys were pleased with the judge's decision, although they believe the ruling will be appealed and probably reversed. Sandra Guerra Thompson, professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said trial judges sometimes issue rulings that are unlikely to stand up on appeal to start a dialogue in the judicial branch. While Texas has consistently led the nation in annual executions, the state has followed a nationwide trend with a decline in new death sentences in 2009.
An evangelical Christian hate group called "Repent Amarillo" is reportedly terrorizing the town of Amarillo, Texas. Repent fashions itself as a sort of militia and targets a wide range of community members they deem offensive to their theology: gays, liberal Christians, Muslims, environmentalists, breast cancer events that do not highlight abortion, Halloween, "spring break events," and pornography shops. On its website, Repent has posted a "Warfare Map" of its enemies in town.
Calling Repent an "American Taliban," blogger Charles Johnson notes that the group's moniker "Army of God" is a rough translation of "Hezbollah." Led by a man named David Grisham, a security guard at a nuclear-bomb facility called Pantex, Repent first gained media attention in Texas following a campaign to boycott Houston for electing a gay mayor. The group, which is associated with Raven Ministries, collaborates with other Christian groups as well as forced pregnancy advocacy associations like "Bound 4 Life."
According to a new expos? by the Texas Observer, Repent set out earlier this year to destroy a discreet club of swingers they discovered in town. On New Years eve, the harassment began, with Repent members, almost exclusively young men, showing up in military fatigues and bullhorns, blaring Christian music at the swingers' club building. The swingers, made up of "regulars" of middle aged, working class couples, were then stalked at every following visit to the club. Repent not only took video of each member, but obtained the swingers' license plates and dug through their trash, informing neighbors and coworkers of what was once private.
As I noted last week, a forthcoming UN report will detail enormous costs to the world's ecosystems from current business practices that result from treating the social and physical commons as an unpriced commodity, to be damaged or destroyed at will. The following chart, from the UK Guardian story I referred to in my post, gives a broad overview of how much damage various different sectors are responsible for:
On a more localized level, there's a new report from the RAND Corporation, which has a special project devoted to air pollution costs to Californians.
"Failing to meet federal clean air standards cost health care purchasers/payers $193,100,184 for hospital care alone," over a three-year period, according to a new report released by RAND on March 2, "The Impact of Air Quality on Hospital Spending." The total cost to the state is far higher--nearly $30 billion a year, according to a 2008 study--but the vast majority of that cost--94 percent--is due to premature deaths that can't be specifically pinpointed, much less organized politically. RAND's study is far more targeted, and could be a great help in overcoming the severe imbalance currently favoring the small handful of economic winners from the current high-pollution status quo.
The study focused on exposure to fine particular matter (PM2.5) and ozone--which cause respiratory problems, chronic and acute bronchitis, heart attacks, etc., restricted activity, school absences and work loss, hospital admissions/ER visits, and doctors' visits, etc., and premature mortality. State data was used to identify why, where and when ER visits and hospital admissions took place, and who paid for them.
Epidemiological studies were applied to actual care delivered to patients from each zip code. Equivilent data for care outside hospitals--such as for doctors visits--does not exist, so actual health costs are significantly higher.
America's Biggest Megachurches
Jesse BoganRock bands, jumbotron screens, buckets of tears and oodles of money. Meet the next wave of Christian worship.
....
Featuring huge stages, rock bands, jumbotron screens, buckets of tears and oodles of money, as well as the enormity of the facilities, pastor personalities and income--over $8.5 billion a year all told--these churches are impressive forces flourishing at staggering rates....
Megachurches, considered Protestant, with more than 2,000 people attending each week, cut a wide swath across the country. In 2005, California led the nation with 178 of them, followed by 157 in Texas and 85 in Florida, according to the book Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn From America's Largest Churches.
"We believe it is only a matter of time until every state has a congregation of megachurch size," write authors Scott Thumma and Dave Travis. "Americans have not only grown accustomed to large organizations, but they have even had their character and tastes shaped by them."
Thumma, a professor at Hartford Seminary, has since his book reported that the average megachurch income was $6.5 million in 2007, up from $4.7 million in 1999. About 50% of it was spent on salaries, the rest divided evenly between missions and buildings. Meanwhile, he says nine out of 10 megachurches more than doubled in size between 2002 and 2007....
But questions over tax-exemption status and squabbling over high-profile pastors are growing concerns. In recent years, none more than Joel Osteen, 46, the best-selling author and pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, the largest megachurch in the country, has been questioned more about his riches.
"God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books," says Osteen, who gave up his $200,000 salary about five years ago, when royalties started flowing from his Your Best Life Now. He adds of he and his wife, Victoria: "I don't think it has changed our lifestyle, it has just given us the opportunity to help more people."
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.--Matthew 19:24
In comments, metamars explodes in ecstasy:
Thank goodness, there's a coffee party movement underway which is growing explosively. I kept asking why there is not a progressive Tea Party, but it looks like there finally is one. While the leader is putting an emphasis on civility (which may preclude the sort of outspokeness that a healthy democratic ecosystem demands, at least as a component), there is still much to recommend to it. Indeed, yours truly has already joined the online group, and I am thinking of starting a local, face-to-face Coffee Party chapter.
In reality the Coffee Party stands for "cooperation" as in the bipartisan war on public education, I guess:
MISSION: The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.
At FDL, Stan (AKA TheCallUp) is not impressed, asking "Is The Coffee Party Shilling for the DNC?":
"Cooperation"?! That sounds A LOT like "BI-PARTISANSHIP" to me. You know, the term Obama uses as a means to promote corporatist (anti-populist) policies under the cover of "a need to compromise with Republicans or 'Centrists'." Let's face it, President Obama has rhetorically opted for bi-partisanship as a means to crush meaningful change since the very first day he took office. And yet this Coffee Party is ironically parroting Obama's key talking point in their 'grass routes' mission statement? Could this group be shilling for Obama's political arm - the now crumbling Organizing For America?There's nothing in that Coffee Party's mission statement that suggests a move towards populism or an effort to pull Obama further to the Left (back towards the promises he ran on). Wouldn't that be the equivalent to what the Tea Party is trying to accomplish from their end? Aren't Tea Partiers, as delusional as they may be, trying to pull Republican politicians towards populist policies important to them?
Whereas Tea Partiers seem disenchanted with both the Republican party and the government, Coffee Partiers seem contented with the Democratic Party and the government. The only issue that seems to resonate with the Coffee Party is Republican obstructionism. In fact, I couldn't find a single criticism of the President, nor a mention of Democratic betrayals on their entire site. Some 'grass routes' movement!
The group asks every Coffee Party member to sign the following Civility Pledge:
"As a member or supporter of the Coffee Party, I pledge to conduct myself in a way that is civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagree. I value people from different cultures, I value people with different ideas, and I value and cherish the democratic process."
It appears this group is more interested in making a statement about the ugliness they see at Tea Party gatherings than they are in actually promoting policies that might improve Americans' lives. Their elected Democratic representatives (who control all branches of government) have been selling them out for one year now by putting entrenched interests above their own, and Coffee Partiers don't have a single thing to complain about with regards to their own party?
Defying Gravity from the musical, Wicked I love meta-fiction; that which takes an established story and turns it on its ear and gives a different point of view. The story of Wicked is an interesting example of that kind of meta-fiction. Elphaba is an emotionally-neglected but principled witch who tries to do the right thing, but she runs up against people in power who are only interested in self-preservation and who don't care if those they are charged with representing are hurt in the process. Because she refuses to play along with dishonest and immoral power grabs, she is smeared as 'wicked', blamed for all manner of evil actually done by the Wizard of Oz and run out of town. Elphaba, in this scene, chooses to embrace the epithet (and thus the Wicked Witch of the West of the original L. Frank Baum story is born) and defy the gravity demanding that she give up her principles to succeed in Oz. She knows that she'll be blamed, even if she is innocent, so she chooses to follow her own path and do what's right. It occurs to me that we could use a few more Democratic politicians willing to defy gravity. Anthony Weiner, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson and Al Franken is a pretty pitiful number of congresspeople to count on doing what's right even if they get labeled as wicked erroneously. More's the pity, do you see any of those names on the list of bobbleheads invited to add their two cents to the national dialogue? Of course not. It's much less wicked to give more airtime to Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham and Tom Friggin' Delay. Sigh. ABC's "This Week" - Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sens. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. NBC's "Meet the Press" - Sebelius; Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Dan Rather, Katty Kay, Andrea Mitchell, Joe Klein. Topics: Critical Care: Can President Obama Pass Health Care Reform By Easter? Rove's Rewrite: The Architect's Plans To Rehab George W. Bush's Reputation CNN's "State of the Union" - Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas; Reps. Brian Baird, D-Wash., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - Gen. David Petraeus, Iraq's former Prime Minister, Ayad Allawai. CNN's "Amanpour" - The son of a founder of Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef, tells Christiane about his espionage for Israel and conversion to Christianity. "Fox News Sunday" - Former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.; Rep. John Adler, D-N.J.; Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa. So what's catching your eye this morning?
This ol' thing? I only wear it when I don't care what I look like...
Open thread below...
Title: Auf WiedersehenArtist: Cheap Trick Live at Budokan, circa 1978! I wore out two copies of this album. Budokan put Cheap Trick on the map, and as with a lot of bands, I always preferred their lesser known songs to the hits. Feel free to share your favorite tunes from these guys, or from other artists who made it big in the 70's, or any other music you want to share with the class. And our sister site Newstalgia has for its weekend concert Ride, live in London from 1991.
DOWNLOADS: 332 PLAYS: 641 WBAI’s Talk Back! interview with Michael Moore - Monday March 1, 2010 5:00pm At 56:55: “There’s so many great websites now. I mean you could just go down the whole list of them: Crooks and Liars and — If I start going down that list they’re going to get mad at me for forgetting them so I better not do that.” Michael Moore has an offer for President Obama: Dear President Obama, I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff. I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement. I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for $1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp. And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don't need much, just a cot in the White House basement will do. Now, don't get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to be up at 5 in the morning, 7 days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and you will repeat after me: "THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF! NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!" Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's, then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!" I know this is the job Rahm Emanuel was supposed to be doing. Now, don't get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don't count his getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the '90s which destroyed towns like Flint, Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time -- a no-apologies, take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them. That's certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done. But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt. They had never been so scared. More importantly, though, he instilled a sense of hope in the Democrats that they could actually score the mother of all hat tricks in 2008 -- and with you, an African American no less, in the pole position! It worked. The Darkness ended. The vast majority of nation wept with joy on the night of the election (those who weren't weeping went out and bought a record number of guns and ammo). Unlike the last president, you didn't "win" by 537 votes in Florida (although Gore won the popular vote by a half-million), you beat McCain nationally by 9,522,083 votes! The House Democrats got a walloping 79-vote margin. The Senate Dems would caucus with a supermajority of 60 votes unheard of in over 30 years. The wars would now end. America would have universal health care. Wall Street and the banks would, at the very least, be reined in. Hardworking citizens would not be thrown out of their homes. It was supposed to be the dawning of a new age.
Here's your weekly Driftglass and Bluegal podcast.
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(Warning, slightly not safe for work.)
Dissatisfaction with Congress is at an all time high, with the Congressional Job Approval polls at about a 19% approval rating. Usually a poor showing in these polls leads to an increase in the minority party’s rating, but the GOP is still showing lower than expected strength.
Third parties haven’t caught on, either, but grass roots campaigns like the Tea Party movement garner more respect. Disgusted voters may like to see strong, independent candidates, but the barriers to entry can usually be overcome only by an organized, well financed political party. Reformers have yet to come up with a way to break through unless the candidate is independently wealthy.
Now comes GOOOH.com from a computer analyst who thinks he has found a process that may work. Tim Cox believes strongly in a citizen legislature.
Tim’s plan is to sign up people who want to remove professional politicians in favor of local citizens. In each congressional district, these folks would answer a questionnaire, caucus together in groups of ten, and advance one of the ten to the next round. A congressional district with 100 interested citizens would start with 10 groups, all feeding their best candidate to the final group of ten for a decision. At the end of the process, each of the 435 congressional districts would have a candidate to run against the established candidates. Because Tim realizes the citizens of San Francisco may want a person with different views than the citizens of Salt Lake City, the only requirement is that the candidate agree to limit their term in Congress.
But the real question is funding. How can a local caucus of volunteers compete with the billions spent by the parties? The process is free too join as a voter, but people who decide to become “declared candidates” pony up $100 at the beginning. The funds are then distributed to the final 435 candidates to pay for filing fees, etc. The caucus members themselves provide the necessary signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Tim has addressed some of the difficulties in getting “regular people” to serve as legislators, including removing partisan influences. But I suspect the real story will be if the caucuses themselves hold together as differences become magnified through the selection process.
Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com
Surgical strikes, my eye: A new report from the New America Foundation states that one of every three people killed in the U.S.'s not-so-secret drone war in Pakistan is a civilian. The report also discloses that none of the strikes in 2009 targeted Bin Laden, and that they have had little impact on the Taliban's ability to plan operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To the contrary, the drone strikes serve as a powerful recruiting tool for the Taliban and al Qaeda. According to New America Foundation's Peter Bergen and Kathren Tiedemann (emphasis mine): Our study shows that the 114 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan from 2004 to the present have killed between 830 and 1,210 individuals, of whom around 550 to 850 were described as militants in reliable press accounts, about two-thirds of the total on average. Thus, the true civilian fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 32 percent. The authors note that the rapidly escalating use of drones by the Obama Administration far exceeds the rate of use by the Bush Administration, with 2009's 51 strikes exceeding the total number of strikes under the entire Bush Administration. Forget "is our children learning?", the only thing that's clear to me is that our government is NOT learning. We are creating yet another front of radicalized people who hate us and who have nothing left to lose to fight us. I've joined the Rethink Afghanistan Facebook group, and subscribe to Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan organization as well. It's time we start being smarter about how we fight terror and put an end to these drone strikes.
As Dave Neiwert has so often documented, the online right wing communities are a breeding ground for rage directed at the government. But you know what I find fascinating? That these angry "patriots" are taking out low-level employees, plain old working people doing their job.
In other words, the very same philosophy al Qaeda used to justify the World Trade Center attacks on civilians. Interesting, huh?
The setting was seemingly random: an outer gate at the Pentagon at evening rush hour. But John Patrick Bedell's violent rampage Thursday made him only the latest in the growing ranks of the disaffected and disturbed to take aim at a symbol of official Washington.
The shooting contained jarring echoes of other recent attacks, from last month's plane crash at an IRS building in Texas to the shooting last June of a museum guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the District. Although the circumstances differ greatly, all were acts of rage by men who blamed their personal misfortunes on what they perceived to be sinister forces within the government.
All three also appear to have drawn ideological nourishment from the same well: online communities of like-minded people who validate and amplify extreme views. Today, more than in recent years, such communities are tapping into a broad undercurrent of anti-government discontent fueled by economic recession, joblessness and concern over the growing federal deficit, according to experts who have studied the phenomenon.
For Bedell and others like him, Washington and its institutions are an irresistible target -- the "ultimate symbol of power for the powerless," said Jerrold Post, a professor of political psychology at George Washington University.
As I do from time to time, this is an article republished from the current issue of Random Lengths News.
 By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Dummy Asks: What's the difference between deficit and the debt? And why do they matter? Stimulus For Dummies Responds: The deficit is the annual shortfall between government income and expenditures. The debt is the total of all past deficits, offset by past surpluses (the last of which occurred under President Clinton.) By themselves, neither the deficit nor the debt are good nor bad, it depends on the context-just as taking out a loan to buy house or a car isn't the same as taking out a loan to go to Vegas. What's more significant is the debt-to-GDP ratio, the debt divided by the size of the economy, which should go up in the case of an obvious need as it did for World War II, for example. The debt-to-GDP ratio should stabilize or go down when things return to normal. There is nothing wrong when the government runs a deficit, but the debt-to-GDP ratio goes down. Long-term growth will more than compensate for the short-term shortfall. What's problematic is when debt-to-GDP ratio goes up and there's no obvious need for it to do so, as happened under conservative Republican presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. |
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Dummy Says: Families across America are cutting back on their spending. Government should cut back, too!
Stimulus For Dummies Responds: When times get hard, people cut back on spending. While this makes sense for the individual, it's bad for the economy because everyone cutting back on spending means less income for everyone else, creating a vicious circle that drives the economy deeper into recession. Government spending can break this vicious circle by pumping money into the economy when everyone else is pulling money out. But it has to be enough spending to make a difference, just as it takes enough effort to push a car uphill and over the top. Otherwise, the car will just run back downhill again. Not spending enough in the first place or cutting back prematurely will undercut the effectiveness of spending to get out of a recession. This happened when Franklin D. Roosevelt prematurely cut back on spending in 1937, causing a recession that lasted two years. And, it happened repeatedly in the 1990s in Japan, giving rise to what's known as the "lost decade."
Stimulus For Dummies Responds: You've heard this a lot from Republican politicians when they're in the District of Columbia. They said this when almost all of them voted against it originally and they've said it repeatedly since then. But either behind the scenes or out in public when they're in their home districts, they sing a very different tune. "Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama's economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt," the conservative Washington Times reported on Feb. 9. "But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state." The Times reported that, "More than a dozen Republican lawmakers" joined Bond in lobbying for stimulus funds from the Department of Agriculture. But that's just one department. The liberal "Think Progress" blog has a list of Republican lawmakers - currently 114 of them - who tried to block the stimulus, but later praised it and/or took credit for its success. First on the list: House Minority Leader John Boehner, who said that stimulus funds would create "much needed jobs" in a June 15, 2009 statement. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has done a number of segments featuring other particularly high-profile Republicans making similar statements denouncing the stimulus on the one hand, while touting it on the other. "When push comes to shove and it's their constituents on the line, Republicans know that the stimulus works," concluded Steve Benen, blogging for the Washington Monthly. Finally, "About one-third of the stimulus was tax cuts, not spending," said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the The Center for Economic and Policy Research. Republicans have always touted tax cuts for stimulating the economy and creating jobs. But most economists agree that tax cuts do less to stimulate the economy than government spending because tax cuts more often go to paying down debt, rather than generating new economic activity. Nonetheless, the stimulus has been effective enough to dramatically reverse the mounting job losses that preceded its passage:  Dummy Says: Democrats say the stimulus has "saved or created" more than a million jobs. What's this mumbo-jumbo about "saving jobs"?
Stimulus For Dummies Responds: New job creation through spending was only a small part of the stimulus plan. "The infrastructure part of the stimulus was relatively small. It was about 13 percent," Baker told Random Lengths. "Most of the spending went to support state and local governments so they wouldn't have to make cutbacks and for unemployment insurance." Still, that support for state and local governments wasn't enough and will do even less as stimulus funds dry up. These job losses will offset the job-creating impact of the stimulus. A recent report from the non-partisan Pew Center on the States noted the "$300 billion in budget gaps states have faced since the start of the recession in December 2007," and went on to say, "[H]istory shows that the worst budget crunch for states comes in the year or two after a recession ends and that a full recovery can take years. Magnifying the problem facing states, the federal stimulus dollars that helped plug almost 40 percent of budget holes will start drying up at the end of 2010." In addition, a November 2009 research brief from the National League of Cities warned that the municipal sector faced an "estimated shortfall of anywhere from $56 billion to $83 billion from 2010-2012". What's needed now is much more stimulus funding to keep states and cities afloat to prevent massive job cuts in the next two years, but no one in Washington seems focused on this. "It's clear that the existing model of federalism is broken, and will not recover," University of Texas economist Jaime Galbraith told Random Lengths. Dummy Says: The Stimulus is driving the government to bankruptcy!
Stimulus For Dummies Responds: First, it's virtually impossible for the government to go bankrupt. The post-World War II debt-to-GDP was 115 percent -- much higher than today -- and we cut it rapidly in the following few years. Japan's current debt-to-GDP ratio is almost 200 percent and no one is panicking over it. Second, the vast majority of our current deficit is the result of Bush-era policies, including tax cuts and military spending. This will remain so for the next decade and more:  Third, almost every President since World War II has reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio, except for so-called "conservative Republicans," Reagan and the two Bushes:  Dummy says: The stimulus has made us dependent on foreign lenders like China!
Stimulus For Dummies Responds: Baker said it best. "We don't need China to lend us money and in fact would be better off if they didn't," Baker told Random Lengths. "China's lending is how it 'manipulates' its currency by keeping it low against the dollar. If it lent us less money, the yuan would rise and our trade deficit with China would shrink."
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DOWNLOADS: (353) PLAYS: (1271) One of the things that happens major political parties and major media figures indulge in naked fearmongering is that -- surprise! -- a lot of people get fearful. Really fearful. Some of them become downright paranoid, and start believing in all kinds of looming conspiracies against them. Which means you wind up with outfits like the Oath Keepers, who clearly are one of the major "Patriot" groups leading the recent surge in Patriot movement activity. You can watch Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers' leader, at the recent CPAC conference being interviewed by the ever-friendly Bill Whittle and come away with the impression that, gosh, these are just folks who want to uphold the Constitution and apple pie. Paranoid, us? As with all Patriot groups and their leaders, that's the schtick when the cameras are on. When the mask comes off, it becomes quite a different picture. That's clear from reading Justine Sharrock's in-depth piece on the Oath Keepers for Mother Jones, a must-read. [Full disclosure: I am quoted in several places in this article.] As Sharrock makes clear, one of the more disturbing aspects of this group is that it has the effect of radicalizing the very people who are supposed to be upholding the law and protecting us from violent extremists: There are scores of patriot groups, but what makes Oath Keepers unique is that its core membership consists of men and women in uniform, including soldiers, police, and veterans. At regular ceremonies in every state, members reaffirm their official oaths of service, pledging to protect the Constitution—but then they go a step further, vowing to disobey "unconstitutional" orders from what they view as an increasingly tyrannical government. Moreover, recruiting from military and police veterans increases exponentially the lethal competence of these extremists. As we observed back in our first post on the Oath Keepers: This is an example of why I've called the Iraq War "the Timothy McVeigh Finishing School": Inevitably, there are going to be competent killers either joining the far right from our military ranks -- especially if they've been recruited into those beliefs either before or during their service -- or enacting far-right "lone wolf scenarios," and they are going to have the ability to wreak a great deal of havoc. ... Remember, too, that there have already been concerns raised about concerns raised then by the FBI hold true in this situation as well: Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement. FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color. ... The prestige which the extremist movement bestows upon members with military experience grants them the potential for influence beyond their numbers. Most extremist groups have some members with military experience, and those with military experience often hold positions of authority within the groups to which they belong. ... Military experience—often regardless of its length or type—distinguishes one within the extremist movement. While those with military backgrounds constitute a small percentage of white supremacist extremists, FBI investigations indicate they frequently have higher profiles within the movement, including recruitment and leadership roles. Rhodes and Whittle are eager to portray the core of the Oath Keepers' creeds -- the "ten orders" they "will not obey" -- as involving merely ordinary rights that everyone naturally would stand up for, and in a way, that's true. But only deeply paranoid people would believe there is any reason to be concerned that these rights violations might be looming. Here they
Riley (avec Moondoggie):
Riley: I’m glad to have this opportunity to speak directly to my fans…
Moondoggie: Hey, why does she get to be in front? You said the camera loves me…”
And Moondoggie:
Moondoggie: Yes, yes…This is more like it. Snap away, Helmut Newton! That’s right…work with me…!
This is kind of strange, isn't it? I mean, he says he's resigning over his language? I know lots of people who work on the Hill and believe me, there are a lot of congress members who are verbally abusive to their staff. We have lots of Republicans guilty of far worse (*cough Mitch McConnell cough*), yet all they have to do is clutch Jesus to their bosoms, smile into the TV cameras and deny, deny, deny. It's a puzzle. I'll give Massa credit for this: at least he admitted he was guilty. (Unlike almost every Republican Congress member accused of, well, anything.) On the other hand, this means the progressive Eric Massa's "no" vote on the healthcare bill (he was holding out for the public option) not only goes away, it means Nancy Pelosi needs one less vote to pass the admittedly half-assed Senate bill: WASHINGTON (AP) -- New York Democratic Rep. Eric Massa, facing a harassment complaint by a male staffer, said Friday that he is stepping down from his seat with "a profound sense of failure." "I am guilty," Massa said in an interview with a Corning, N.Y., newspaper columnist. Later in the day, Massa released a statement saying that after discovering he had a recurrence of cancer, he learned he was the subject of an ethics complaint by a male staffer who felt "uncomfortable" during an exchange with Massa. The exchange reportedly had sexual overtones. "I will resign my position," Massa said in the statement. "There is no doubt in my mind that I did in fact, use language in the privacy of my own home and in my inner office that, after 24 years in the Navy, might make a chief petty officer feel uncomfortable," Massa added. "In fact, there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone." Earlier Friday, a visibly upset Massa said he didn't want to put his family through an ethics committee investigation. "It would tear us apart," Massa said, according to Joe Dunning, a columnist for The Leader newspaper. "It's not that I can fight or beat these allegations, I'm guilty."
Or Liz "CheeNee", as Chris Matthews likes to say.
I hate to even acknowledge Cheney's existence, because she already gets plenty of play from the corporate media for no apparent reason other than her gene pool and her ready mean streak.
But even Republicans are saying Lizzie "Borden" Cheney has crossed the line with her bloody little ax this time.
And Rachel's Beckesque rant about it is pretty funny - and educational.
The Cheney family is nothing but a clan of vampires, sucking blood, money and sanity from a tattered democracy left weakened by far too many years of their twisted influence.
And of course, you know who that makes Rachel.
This is Part Three in my diary series, "The Myth That Conservative Welfare Reform Worked". Part 1 began this project by debunking the conservative narrative that liberals and Democrats were uninterested in reforming welfare, drawing principally on Diana Zuckerman's artlce, "Welfare Reform in America: A Clash of Politics and Research ", published in the Journal of Social Issues, Winter 2000 (pp587-599). Part 2 began the presentation of a five-section argument with the first two sections, "Section 1: The Rightwing Hegemonic Framing Of Welfare Reform" and "Section 2: A Common-Sense Take-Down of the 'Welfare Reform Worked' Myth".
In the interests of digestibility, I've decided to split both the diaries planned for this weekend into two parts each, running a two-part diary on national data this weekend (splitting Section 3 into two sub-sections) , and two separate diaries on international comparisons (Section 4) and state-level comparisons (Section 5) next weekend. In this diary, I will look at national data that helps explain the main false assumptions used in the conservative anti-welfare arguments made popular by Charles Murray in his 1985 book, Losing Ground. In the next diary, I will concentrate on data that illustrates what the real problems actually were, and how welfare reform failed to perform as promised.
Section 3A: The Story of National Data-Debunking The Conservative Frame
In this part, we examine national level data showing that conservative welfare reform was not a success as it widely believed in Versailles. To do this properly, however, we must take account of the arguments advanced to make the contrary point-no matter how misleading, and yes, downright dishonest they may be. Thus, before any number-crunching can begin, we need to discuss how conservatives portrayed welfare as a failure in need of reform. At the end of 1970s, no one would claim that America's social welfare policies were a roaring success, but liberals would point to two major factors-first, a relative lack of effort compared to Europe, and second, the abysmal economic performance of the 1970s, which had stalled economic progress even for the middle class, much less for the poor. An obvious solution would be to take lessons from Europe-but that would be too logical. Instead, conservatives came up with a facade of research to "prove" their charge that not only had Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs failed to reduce poverty, it had made things worse.
This was logic of Charles Murray's 1985 book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (whose very subtitle was a lie--see below), and it was reflected in Ronald Reagan's claim in his 1988 State of the Union that "some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won." But this had not always been the conservative position. Indeed, in late December 1980, Martin Anderson, an Ayn Rand acolyte and a researcher at the Hoover Institute, had just been announced as Reagan's first chief domestic policy adviser, and an AP story quoted from his writings:
The 'dismal failure' of welfare is a myth. There may be great inefficiencies in our welfare programs, the level of fraud my be very high, the quality of management may be terrible, the programs may overlap, inequities may abound and the financial incentive to work may be virtually nonexistence.But if we step back and judge the vast array of welfare programs, on which we spend billions of dollars every year, by two basic criteria--the completeness of coverage for those who really need help, and the adequacy of help they do receive--the picture changes dramaticll. Judged by these standards our welfare system has been a brilliant success. The war on poverty is over for all practical purposes.
This was, of course, delusional. But it was a very different delusion than the one the right would later embrace.
"Losing Faith in Losing Ground"
There were many flaws in Murray's book, as was revealed in a devastating review in The New Republic by Robert Greenstein, "Losing Faith in 'Losing Ground,"' The New Republic, 25 March 1985. Unfortunately that review is no longer available online--or even in Lexis/Nexus. But Daniel was able to find it for me in a Canadian database... not, however, before I had taken a different tack, drawing on a more exhaustive refutation in a multi-author booklet, Losing Ground: A Critique, Institute for Research on Poverty [IRP] Special Report Series #38, which was summarized in Focus, IRP's nesletter, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall and Winter 1985.
Since Daniel was able to provide me with a copy of Greenstein's review, I'm going to focus briefly on the most central, devastating part of his critique, and then continue with the diary as I had prepared it before Daniel's late save.
The crucial part of Greenstein's review starts off thus:
But before Murray s view that the programs have failed becomes the new conventional wisdom, careful examination of his use of the facts and figures is very much m order. Could it be that Losing Ground, with its endless recital of statistics, actually rests on deceptive numbers juggling? That Murray has, in the service of a radical political agenda, consistently omitted or concealed critical facts and research findings that do not support his case? Close scrutiny of Murray's data suggests that this is precisely what has occurred. This is the untold story behind Losing Ground.Consider, for example, the "case of Harold and Phyllis." Harold and Phyllis are a fictional couple that Murray creates to illustrate one of his principal contentions--that the social programs have led to unemployment and illegitimacy among blacks by encouraging the poor to live off welfare rather than to work, Murray presents Harold and Phyllis as a young couple facing fundamental decisions about their lives. Phyllis is pregnant, and the couple must decide whether to get married. More important, they must also decide whether Harold should take a tedious minimum-wage job, or whether Phyllis should go on welfare and Harold should live off her benefits rather than work.
Naturally, Murray's analysis shows that the incentives in 1960 were clearly pro-work, whereas by 1970, they were anti-work. Just one tiny problem, Greenfield explains--the analysis is "flatly wrong":
The Harold and Phyllis example is at the heart of Murray's case and is critical to the entire book. It is also flatly wrong, First, Murray's family budgets for l960 and 1970 are not based on welfare benefit levels in an average state. Instead, his data is for the state of Pennsylvania, a fact buried in footnotes at the back of the book. Welfare benefits grew twice as fast in Pennsylvania from 1960 to 1970 as in the nation as a whole. This allows Murray to portray the shift in incentives over the decade as being twice as great as they actually were. [Emphasis added]
If only Murray had had the integrity of Emily Litella, and just said, "Never mind," after Greenstein's review came out, he could have saved us all a great deal of grief. But as Senator Al Franken is learning anew every day, national politics sorely lacks the integrity of Saturday Night Live, and so it was not to be. There was another equally basic problem, however:
Murray makes a second error, In calculating the family's budget if Harold works, Murray incorrectly assumes Phyllis and her child cannot obtain food stamps, even though poor families who work are eligible for food stamps. In figuring the budget if they went on welfare, however. Murray does not make the same mistake and adds in food stamps when computing tho family s income. The error makes working, compared to welfare, appear less attractive than it actually was.When the welfare vs. work comparisons are computed accurately, they show that taking a minimum-wage job was more profitable than going on welfare in most parts of the country in 1970. In some states with low welfare payments, such as southern status, minimum wage jobs paid almost twice as much.
These two problems were each enough, separately to have torpedoed Murray's thesis in the realm of serious research. Together, they reveal Murray's thesis as a blatant fraud. But there's much more wrong with his argument than that....
Three Main Criticisms From The Institute for Research on Poverty [IRP]
We now shift gears, turning to the IRP analysis, both in Losing Ground: A Critique and in the condensed report of its findings in Focus.
The critique explained:
"Dr. Murray argues that the growth of female-headed families during the past two decades was a response to increases in the generosity and availability of welfare programs. His solution to the problem, which he offers at the end of his book, is to eliminate welfare benefits to single mothers and their children. He claims this will 'drastically reduce births to single teenage girls...reverse the trendline in the breakup of poor families...[and] increase the upward socioeconomic mobility of poor families" (p. 227).
What's more, Murray also denied something that was obvious to anyone else at the time-the fact that the 1970s had been very rough, economically:
All agree, however, that progress against poverty was disappointing in the 1970s.... But why is poverty higher today than in the early 1970s?Murray hypothesizes that the cause was the shift in social policy, not a lagging economy. He argues that the period from 1970 to 1979 was one of strong economic growth: "Even after holding both holding both population change and inflation constant, per capita GNP increased only a little less rapidly in the seventies than it had in the booming sixties, and much faster than during the fifties. Growth did not stop. But, for some reason, the benefits of economic growth stopped trickling down to the poor" (p. 59).
It would be far too time-consuming to try to go through all of Murray's misleading or downright dishonest statistical tricks, but for our purposes, it's sufficient to just address three of them: The misrepresentation of the 1970s as a prosperous time when the poor ought to have been advancing, the misrepresentation of the timing of changes in black family structure, and the misrepresentation of the scope of his critique. Together, exposing these three tricks is sufficient to discredit the main thrust of Murray's arguments, and to clear the way for a straightforward understanding of the actual statistics involved.
Murray's Misleading Claim About Scope
We take the last of these first, as it requires very little more than quoting a passage from article in Focus:
Poverty as officially measured among the aged has been reduced by between 30 and 50 percent since 1967 (see Table 1). Public speneding on this group and the totally disabled, primarily through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, accounted for over 75 percent of all 1980 expenditures for major income transfer programs. Another approximately 18 percent was spend on programs for those who were neither elderly nor totally disabled--chiefly Unemployment Insurance and Workers' Compensation. Thus, though the subtitle of Murray;s book is broad: "American Social Policy, 1950-1980," he is in fact emphasizing one the 7.3 percernt of the 1980 income transfers that go to nondisabled,nonelderly recipients of AFDC and food stamps.
The upshot of this is quite simple: The Great Society/War on Poverty involved quite a bit more than just assistance to poor women, and once this is admitted, one must not only limit any conclusions drawn after the fact from Murray's arguments to only those policies he discusses, one must also .question ahead of time why his arguments about the supposed destructiveness of the Great Society/War on Poverty don't also apply to all other programs that came under that umbrella, such as, for example, Medicare.
Murray's False Claim About 1970s Prosperity
You'll recall from above that:
Murray hypothesizes that the cause [of stagnation in poverty rates during the 1970s was the shift in social policy, not a lagging economy. He argues that the period from 1970 to 1979 was one of strong economic growth: "Even after holding both holding both population change and inflation constant, per capita GNP increased only a little less rapidly in the seventies than it had in the booming sixties, and much faster than during the fifties. Growth did not stop. But, for some reason, the benefits of economic growth stopped trickling down to the poor" (p. 59).
But everyone knows the 1970s were a tough time, economically. The was stagflation, two unprecedented oil price shocks, and two debilitating recessions. The (inflation-adjusted) GDP expanded 36.85% during the decade, but this was dramatically below the 50.77% expansion during the 1960s, and about 10% behind the 40.76% expansion during the 1950s. Murray tries to get around this by fiddling with basis for comparison-choosing per capita GNP (roughly equivalent to GDP), and pretending that this chose of measurement disadvantages the 1970s. But he's actually doing is fairly easy to see through. During the 1950s and 1960s, the population grew more rapidly, due to the baby boom. But during the 1970s, the potential workforce grew much more rapidly as the boomers entered the workforce in large numbers. Making no distinction in age and ignoring the difference between GNP/GDP and total household income, Murray has fastened on a statistic that's convenient for his argument, but entirely divorced from the reality he's pretending to analyze. If one looks at the changes by decade for GDP, population and households, then things start to get much clearer:
The GDP per population measure makes the 1970s look better than the 1950s-by more than 20%, whereas just by GDP growth, the 1970s were about 10% worse. But if we look at GDP per household, then the 1970s are suddenly more than 40% worse than the 1950s, which turns Murray's argument upside-down, and returns the analysis to the realm of reality, as can readily be seen by looking at the changes in median income (a 3-year average is used to smooth out annual fluctuations):
As we can see, there's no real mystery why "for some reason, the benefits of economic growth stopped trickling down to the poor" They were no longer even trickling down to the median wage-earner--whose incomes were falling more often than not throughout the 1970s, whereas they had never fallen during the 1950s and 1960s. In times that tough, what chance did the poor have?
Murray's Convenient Confusion Over Illegitimacy Rates vs. Ratios And Timing
The third way in which Murray misleads is by confusing the birth rates outside of marriage with percentage of births outside of marriage. As we'll see below, black birth rates outside of marriage started growing significantly long before the Great Society programs were enacted, and were actually headed downward at that time--a trend that continued for a decade after the programs were put into place. But because fewer black women were getting married--and they were having fewer children when married--the percentage of black births outside of marriage rose at an increasing rate after 1965. Murray's arguments logically depended on welfare causing an increase in illegitimate birth rates, but the data show the opposite. So he used illegitimate birth ratios instead.
From here on, to explain the foregoing in detail, I quote extensively from one section of the Losing Gound: A Critique:
Sarah McLanahan: Charles Murray and the FamilyDr. Murray argues that the growth of female-headed families during the past two decades was a response to increases in the generosity and availability of welfare programs. His solution to the problem, which he offers at the end of his book, is to eliminate welfare benefits to single mothers and their children. He claims this will "drastically reduce births to single teenage girls...reverse the trendline in the breakup of poor families...[and]increase the upward socioeconomic mobility of poor families." (p227).
Murray's claim for the importance of welfare programs in producing the growth of female-headed families is based primarily on his analysis of the trend in illegitimate births. In Chapter 9 he presents a figure showing the trend in the illegitimacy ratio for blacks and whites between 1950 and 1980. Both trendlines increase substantially during the sixties and most of the seventies. However, the black line jumps sharply in the mid-1960s, coinciding almost prefectly with the initiation of the Great Sociaety programs. Murray places a good deal of emphasis onthe jumps in the two trends and argues that the increase in welfare has caused the increase in illegitimacy.
All of the evidence presented by Murray is based on the illegitimacy ratio, which is the ratio of nonmarital births to all live births. If, however, we look at the trend in the illegitimacy rate, which is the ratio of nonmarital births to the total number of women at risk for such an event (single women between the ages of 15and44), a very different picture emerges. The trends in illegitimacy rates fro blacks and whites are presented in Figure 1 below.
After the charts (there is one--less dramatic--for whites as well), McLanahan notes:
For black women, the illegitimacy rate rose sharply between 1945 and 1960,levelled off between 1960 and 1965, and began to decline after 1965.
This, of course, directly contradicts Murray's thesis. Which is arguably why he ignores the illegitimacy rate and concentrates on the illegitimacy ratio for the rest of his analysis, as McLanahan goes on to note:
Murray, is aware of the discrepancy between the two trends and says so at the beginning of his discussion. Having acknowledged the difference, however, he focuses exclusively on the illegtimacy ratio which, of course, is consistent with his explanation.
Next, she explains what's so important here:
Why, one might ask, is the illegitimacy rate any more valid than the ratio? And how does one decide which statistic to use for examining a particular trend? The answer is as follows: If one is interested in describing the experience of a particular group, e.g. children, the ratio is the appropriate statistic. It tells us what proportion of children are born to nonmarried women and presumably what proportion are at high risk for being in poverty. If, however, one wants to talk about behaviors or propensities, the rate, not the ratio, is the appropriate statistic. The illegitimacy rate tells us what proportion of nonmarried women are having children out of wedlock. If the propensity of nonmarried women to have children is increasing, it should be reflected by an increase in the illegitimacy rate.
In short, the rate tells us about the choices and behavior of women as a group-what proportion of unmarried women are having children. The ratio tells us about the experience of children as a group-what proportion of children are being born out of wedlock. It is Murray's core assumption that the former by and of itself drives the later. To a certain extent he's right. If all other things are equal, that's exactly what it will do. But the chart above shows that all other things aren't equal at precisely the point in time that he identifies as crucial-the point in time when the Great Society programs began. Rather than trying to make his argument-which the statistics are overwhelmingly against-he simply assumes it to be true. That's what he does when he uses the ratio and ignores the rate.
The following chart indicates how misleading and oversimplified Murray's argument is:
As the chart makes clear, not only can the illegitimacy ratio be increased by a decrease in the "legitimacy rate", the number of children raised by single mothers can also be affected by the divorce rate for women with children as well as the marriage rate for single mothers. The obsessive focus on single motherhood--particularly among teens--is indicative of a pathological narrowing of attention.
What do I mean when I call Murray's focus "obsessive" and "pathological"? Am I just being hyperbolic? Not at all. He is focusing attention on a fixed object in the midst of a complex dynamic. And his fixation--as well as the response his "analysis" gained--is clearly informed by centuries of white male obsession with black female sexuality--particularly among young girls. This obsession was clearly attended by a good deal of guilt and shame, giving rise to negative projections onto young black women and girls. Murray--and those who championed his work--were so deeply in the grip of this dynamic, that were utterly oblivious to the conceptual confusion their arguments wallowed in.
Returning to McLanahan's discussion of the two statistics, and the significance of how they differ, she explains:
Why are the trends in the two statistics so different? First, it is clear that the illegtimacy ratio jumped during the mid-sixties, not because of an increase in the rate of births to single women, but because of a dramatic decrease in marriage rates and a decline in the fertility of married couples. Now Murray might argue that his theory is about the decvline in marriage--teh decision of Phyllis and Harold [fictional characters Murray uses to illustrate his arguements] NOT to marry. But in truth, his explanation speaks only to the decline in marriage among persons eligible for welfare, i.e., poor pregnant women. It says nothing about the behavior of middle-class women or nonpregnant women who in fact experienced an even greater decline in marriage during the late sixties and early seventies than the women describd by Murray, even though they had nothing to gain from the expanding welfare programs.
But, of course, Murray's argument has nothing to say about "the behavior of middle-class women or nonpregnant women who in fact experienced an even greater decline in marriage" because they aren't the objects of his lust/guilt/projection-based fixation. They might as well not exist for him, because they are irrelevant to the underlying psycho-sexual fantasy which has permeated race relations in America since the first slaveholder raped his first teenaged female slave, thus giving rise to entire literatures of lies. (For example, in one of his essays in Ronald Reagan: The Movie Michael Paul Rogin makes note of the fact that in Birth of a Nation, a leading "carpetbagger" is given a mulatto mistress, thus transferring the secret shame of Southern aristocrats onto their most immediate white enemies.)
And liberals, of course, are condescending (according to the narrative promoted by Gerard Alexander)--not because they bring up this psycho-sexual subtext--which Murray's social science criticis at the time did not--but because they dare to write the sort of painstaking critical analysis that McLanahan did, rather than just taking Murray's word for it that "welfare policies... discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills... with devastating effects," and they were the principal cause of poverty in Ronald Reagan's America.
Conclusion
In this diary, we've seen how Charles Murray made at least five major errors in interpreting--or constructing data--that when corrected utterly destroy his argument. (This vastly understates the number of errors pointed out--it only refers to the ones I've presented.) Greenstein points out two of them: First that Murray usese data from an unrepresentative state--Pennsylvania--to construct an argument about the country as a whole. Second, that he fails to include food stamp benefits in his calculations of how well off a working poor family would be.
The IRP authors pointed out three major errors that I discussed: First of all, the programs Murray discusses are only a small fraction of those he targets in his argument. He not only makes no effort to extend his argument to programs not covered, he basically pretends they aren't even there. Second, Murray pretends that the 1970s were a rosy time economically, so only the poor themselves (or those who have lead them astray!) can be at fault for not getting out of poverty. Third, Murray pretends that the Great Society unleashed a tsunami of illegitimate children when the illegitimate birth rate was actually declining at the time those programs came into effect. With these three lies cleared out of the way, Murray's entire thesis is swept away as well.
This is not to say that there's nothing at all to Murray's arguments. There's certainly some tendency for some people in any population getting "something for nothing" to become dependent and irresponsible. We're certainly seen that throughout the financial sector, for example. And we can see it in the monopoly sport leagues, where George W. Bush made his millions off of the taxpayers of Arlington, Texas. But once we realize that Murray's story is a fantasy, and we turn our attention to the national data presented in the next diary in this series, we will clearly see that things generally tend in the opposite direction, and that the negative incentives that Murray dwells upon are relatively trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Via Houston Chronicle:
A Houston judge who declared the death penalty unconstitutional Thursday clarified his ruling in an impromptu hearing Friday, saying he ruled the procedures surrounding the process in Texas are illegal. ...Fine maintained at the hearing that he believes innocent people have been executed.
Fine's clarification came in the wake of a firestorm of criticism from District Attorney Pat Lykos, the Texas Attorney General's Office and Gov. Rick Perry protesting that Fine ignored well-settled law.
When asked direct questions Thursday about his ruling, Fine said he was declaring the death penalty unconstitutional because he believes innocent people have been executed.
Read more....
We've been having a tough time finding even very progressive candidates willing to think for themselves on Afghanistan and not just go along with Obama and the Pentagon. Bill Hedrick, as you can see from the above video, is not one of those. Maybe it's because so many of his children are or have been serving in the military overseas, but Bill has a very clear vision of America's role in Afghanistan-- and it sure isn't as an occupier or as a nation-builder. We'll talk with Bill about that below in the comments section as Blue America formally endorses him in his race for the congressional seat currently held by one of the most corrupt men-- according to, of all sources, Fox News-- in the U.S. Congress, Ken Calvert. Bill Hedrick has been a public school teacher in Riverside County, California for 35 years. And his wife is a public school teacher too. Bill is also serving his 5th term as president of the Corona-Norco School Board, one of the biggest in the state, responsible for over 50,000 children. In 2008 he stepped up and ran against Calvert. But a school teacher running against an entrenched favorite of Wall Street? The DCCC had no interest in helping-- and they didn't. Outspent 5-1, Bill ran an effective grassroots campaign and came closer to dislodging a Republican incumbent than any other Democrat in the country who didn't actually do it. Bill spent $191,461 and Calvert spent $1,150,432. Bill received 123,890 votes and Calvert edged him with 129,937. This year is different... kind of. Sensing a winner, the DCCC has given Bill their blessing-- but not much else-- and certainly no money. So for Bill, it's all about volunteers and grassroots tactics again. But that makes sense for someone with deep roots in the community anyway. He told me that the big issue in CA-44, a Republican-leaning district that Obama won in 2008, is jobs and that almost all the other issues flow from that overarching one. Sometime he seems frustrated that the Democratic Party, Inc in Washington isn't getting it when it comes to the pain real people are feeling in the heartland. The national Democratic Party needs to focus more on stimulus that supports small business recovery and job creation. In a region like this small businesses are the economic engines of recovery and job growth. The big banks aren't lending. I think the president is moving in the right direction but what we need is an infusion of money for community banks with an obligation that they will make loans to small, local businesses. Calvert voted for Bush's massive Wall Street bailout twice, a bailout with no accountability. I opposed that last time and, believe it or not, found some commonality-- on that-- with the Ron Paul folks who were also opposed. Calvert has also been a big supporter of so-called "free trade," which is not how I see the economic future of this country and is exceedingly unpopular in this district. We've been hemorrhaging jobs. This district used to be a manufacturing area-- steel, light industry... but no more. NAFTA and policies like that sent the jobs overseas and those jobs never came back. Many in the Tea Party movement out here have stopped talking about all that anti-immigrant stuff and started focusing on the real problem: the old fashioned extreme greed that maximizes profits no matter what the cost to everyone else. People are starting to wake up to the fact that companies that became successful in America and because of America have been off-shoring jobs and have no loyalty to our country, our workers or our interests. Calvert always claims to be an "independent voice for Riverside County;" it's baloney. He never differs from his party. I will do what's best for my constituents even if it's at odds with party policy. We need an emphasis on community banks, not Wall Street. We need job creation here and we seem to be stuck in policies that create jobs in China. We need policies that encourage manufacturing in the United States. That's why Blue America
On Thursday, March 4th, California's college students staged statewide protests that were the epicenter of an international day of action against the mindless bipartisan war on public education. The actions were called for coming out of student protests last November, and were joined in by teachers and staffs from K-12 as well as all three branches of California's higher education system, along with student-lead actions in 30 other states and some countries overseas. At Democracy Now, Juan Gonzales reported:
Students and teachers held hundreds of demonstrations on Thursday as part of the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education. Hundreds of thousands took part in what was the largest day of coordinated student protest in years.Much of the day's focus was on the university and state college campuses of California, where students face a 32 percent tuition hike. Thousands of California students staged a one-day strike and took part in rallies from San Diego to Sacramento to Humboldt County.
At UC Santa Cruz, students blocked both entrances to the school before 7:00 a.m., essentially shutting down the campus for the day.
At UCLA, 300 students staged a five-hour sit-in outside the chancellor's office.
In addition to its own reporting from UCLA and UC Irvine, Remaking The University posted a slew of links to coverage of protests from UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Riverside, and UC Davis (video) to as far away as South Africa
At Huffington Post, Leah Finnegan live-blogged events throughout the day. At 8:20 PM, she reported:
The blog StudentActivism.net, written by Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism and student government, offers a great wrap-up of the day (not that things are necessarily wrapping up). California -- not to mention the rest of the country -- saw a ton of activity today. A huge day for students.But the real challenge is what happens tomorrow. As Johnson writes --
Today was more about activists talking to each other, working with each other, than it was about talking to or working with -- or working to overthrow -- university power structures.
At Calitics, Courage Campaign Public Policy Director Robert Cruickshank (aka "Eugene" or "Robert in Monterey")--also a speaker at one of the protests--reported:
From Anger To ActionYesterday's outpouring of protest against the deliberate decision to destroy California's public education system was characterized by one dominant emotion: anger. And that was exactly as it should be. If you're not angry at the collapse of our schools, colleges, and universities, and the stealing of an entire generation's future, then you're really not paying any attention.
I spent the day at Cal State Monterey Bay, hearing student after student take the microphone to express their anger at what has happened to their dreams. This was not a violent anger, but instead the kind of deeply rooted anger that anyone would quite rightly feel when they have been betrayed. The state of California has betrayed these students, having asked them to work hard to succeed in school and promising an affordable quality education, only to yank that promise away from them in order to deliver tax cuts to huge corporations.
On other campuses, anger was clearly the dominant emotion, such as the students at UC Santa Cruz who shut down the campus, or the students at UC Davis who tried to block Interstate 80 in order to show the rest of the state what it feels like to have your life disrupted by forces beyond your control.
Anger can be a very healthy emotion. It focuses the mind, and can create a sense of determination. That too was on display at the events I attended - a belief that this anger was being expressed in order to build a mass movement of students, faculty, staff, parents, and other Californians who know that this state has no chance whatsoever at prospering in the 21st century if these cuts are not reversed. It is further evidence of how effective and valuable the March 4 actions were.
Students now understand what is happening to them and why. Their education is being gutted and their already meager financial resources are being stolen from them by a state government that believes corporations matter more than students. That propping up the failed status quo matters more than building California's future. Most of the speakers I heard understood this very clearly, almost instinctively. It has been beaten into them these last two years.
AMY GOODMAN: Protests were also held on campuses across the country Thursday. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, police used pepper spray to break up a student protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society. Fifteen students were arrested. At SUNY Purchase in New York protesters took over the Student Services Building. Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill staged a sit-in at the chancellor's office. In Washington state, the Olympia Coalition for a Fair Budget held a mock funeral for public education and healthcare and brought a coffin to the state Capitol building. And here in New York City, students and teachers at the City University of New York rallied outside Governor David Paterson's office.Here are some of the voices from that rally....
PROTESTERS: The students, united, will never be defeated!
JACKIE MARIANO: My name is Jackie Mariano, and I am a student at CUNY Hunter College. I've come out here today as a student of a public school to put pressure on Governor Paterson, the New York government and all public school administration to stop cutting the budget of education. Students of public schools are suffering a lot because of this economic crisis. CUNY is made up of 75 percent of people of color, a lot of working class. About 40 percent of CUNY students work part-time. And 75 percent of Hunter College students are women. So a lot of marginalized communities continue to feel the blow of the economic crisis. And the New York government hasn't done anything yet to solve that.
KEVIN RANKIN: I came from the Borough of Manhattan Community College. My name is Kevin Rankin. And I came from a life where I neglected school, a life where I didn't have a future. But then I came to the United States, and I found school. And it changed my life. And I know school has changed a lot of your lives, also. And because of that, I ask, why would we antagonize the schools? Why would we continue to hike tuitions? Why would we continue to cut the budgets towards school?
This is the United States of America. We claim to be the most powerful country in the world. And indeed we are. But if we continue to antagonize the education, how long can we proclaim that we are the leader of the world?
In the Borough of Manhattan Community College, we have men and women, young and old, from the different walks of life. We have single mothers, single fathers, trying to get an education, because they know they have to provide for their families. We have students who are trying to break the generational gap of poverty within their family, knowing that education is the only way. And we are trying to antagonize education today. This is unacceptable!
PROTESTERS: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!
BARBARA BOWEN: We want to teach the students. We want to teach students in great conditions, not substandard conditions. We want funding to make our university a great university, and that takes money. So don't believe anybody from the Governor's office, which is right up here, when they say that budget cuts are inevitable, that CUNY and SUNY will have to tighten their belts this year. We have already tightened too hard. We wait in lines for classes. We sit on windowsills to be in a class. We stand in line to get to a lab. We wait all day to register. That is not acceptable. And if we have more cuts, we'll only get more of that. CUNY and SUNY have been cut proportionately more than any other state agency in New York. Think about that for a minute. CUNY and SUNY, the public higher education system, has been cut, proportionately to its size, more than any other state agency in New York. What does that tell us? That someone has an agenda of your not getting an education, not getting a first-rate education. We have to change that political agenda. That's what we're here for today.
PROTESTERS: Bail out the students! Not the banks!AMY GOODMAN: That was Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress in CUNY, speaking Thursday at a protest outside New York Governor David Paterson's Manhattan office.
In a companion piece focused on primary and secondary education, Democracy Now! interviewed education scholar Diane Ravitch, long a leading proponent of charter schools, privatization and testing, who has changed her mind, based on the overwhelming record of failure of these "bipartisan" "reform" ideas, as she details in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which jeffbinnc will be reviewing for Open Left next weekend.
I hope to post more about what Ravitch had to say in another diary later this weekend. But for now I'll just say that her book, and the change of heart and mind it reflects are signs of hope for a broad-based alternative and opposition to the direction of the braindead bipartisan elite consensus that has declared a de facto war on education in America.
The emerging movement that demonstrated this past Thursday is a potent force because it seeks to unify all those who are being short-changed by the current elite consensus-students, parents, teachers, staff and society at large, from kindergarten through graduate school. This the logical, natural, organic place for a new coalition of progressive forces to coalesce. It's happening already. It's up to us to look and see what we can do to support it.
DOWNLOADS: (233) PLAYS: (609) On Morning Joe, Karl Rove's ex-dancing partner David Gregory is asked whether President Obama will be seen as courageous for sticking to his guns if the health care bill passes. There are so many things wrong with his response it's hard to know where to begin, but I'll just start with how completely, utterly ridiculous it is to compare invading another country that was not a threat to us to passing this health care bill, no matter how flawed it might be. And Bush was "courageous"? Really David Gregory? And Iraq is in a "better place now" after we bombed the hell out of that country and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees? Are you f-ing kidding me? And surprise, surprise he throws in a bit of fear mongering Republican rhetoric that the government can't run anything for good measure. Gregory: Look Bush was courageous too on Iraq. He stuck to his guns on Iraq and that didn’t work out so well. Even if Iraq is in a better place now it didn’t help him politically. He certainly stuck to his guns. I think health care is different and I think Tom is right because the White House does make an argument that once you get it passed, once you have the achievement it starts affecting people’s lives, then they see some of the benefits of it. But it’s how long that takes and look this is also not happening in a vacuum. It’s not just that we’re waiting for health care reform. There’s a lot of things that are happening all at once the government is involved in. The lack of trust in government is what’s so ah… really the backbone of this argument against Washington and whether Washington is broken right now. Americans don’t trust government to run complex systems. They need to just move this whole show over to ClusterFox and be done with it.
DOWNLOADS: (254) PLAYS: (233) (h/t David) Nothing like kowtowing to the fear-mongers on the other side, who will only use this move to prove you're weak and a flip-flopper: President Obama's advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City. The president's advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said. While Obama has favored trying some terrorism suspects in civilian courts as a symbol of U.S. commitment to the rule of law, critics have said military tribunals are the appropriate venue for those accused of attacking the United States. If Obama accepts the likely recommendation of his advisers, the White House may be able to secure from Congress the funding and legal authority it needs to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and replace it with a facility within the United States. The administration has failed to meet a self-imposed one-year deadline to close Guantanamo. The "bipartisan" buzzword comes from the inclusion of Blanche "How do we pushback on members of our own party?" Lincoln and James Webb. Interesting that the frightened bunny contingent pulls more weight than those of us who want to see the US uphold our ideals and laws and don't want to submit to the fear that the terrorists seek. As would be expected, .the ACLU is very unhappy about this possible reversal: According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this regrettable reversal under political pressure will strike a blow to American values and the rule of law and undermine America’s credibility. There have been over 300 terrorism-related convictions in the federal courts, while there have been only three in the military commissions, two resulting in sentences of less than a year. The following can be attributed to Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU: “If this stunning reversal comes to pass, President Obama will deal a death blow to his own Justice Department, not to mention American values. “If the president flip-flops and retreats to the Bush military commissions, he will betray his ca
