Enviros 'feel stabbed in the back' over 'dastardly move' by Obama admin.

The environmentalists now have their own version of the DOMA brief from the Obama administration. Via NYT's Greenwire:

The Obama administration has urged the Supreme Court to toss out an appeals court decision that would allow lawsuits against major emitters for their contributions to global warming, stunning environmentalists who see the case as a powerful prod on climate change.

In the case, AEP v. Connecticut, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a coalition of states, environmental groups and New York City. The decision, handed down last year, said they could proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to force several of the nation's largest coal-fired utilities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Reading the article evoked a lot of memories of June 12, 2009 when we read the Obama administration's despicable DOMA brief. This part sounds really familiar:

Matt Pawa, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said he and his colleagues expected the White House to stay out of the matter. During a meeting with more than 30 administration lawyers at the solicitor general's office on June 24, it seemed they had "a lot of friends in the room," he said.

"We feel stabbed in the back," Pawa said. "This was really a dastardly move by an administration that said it was a friend of the environment. With friends like this, who needs enemies?"

Top attorneys at environmental advocacy groups are buzzing about the brief, sources say. Some feel betrayed by a White House that has generally been more amenable to environmental regulation than its predecessor.

"This reads as if it were cut and pasted from the Bush administration's briefing in Massachusetts," said David Bookbinder, who served as the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel until his resignation in May.

Welcome to our world. The Obama administration's DOMA brief actually was written by the Bush administration.

Now, what these environmentalists don't understand -- yet -- is that Team Obama isn't really on their side. Not in the way they think, anyway. It's a tough lesson and hard to swallow. The gays learned it early on, between Rick Warren and the DOMA brief.

(Mr. Pawa and Mr. Bookbinder should be prepared. They'll see a lot of their colleagues in the environmental movement make excuses and apologize for what the Obama administration did.) Read More......

Kabul, the arrival (Videoblogger BicycleMark checks in from Kabul)

NOTE FROM JOHN: My friend Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, a rather prolific and good videoblogger pen-named BicycleMark, is on his way to Afghanistan for a month. I've asked Mark if he'd consider blogging about his experience here on AMERICAblog, and he's graciously accepted. Here is Mark's second post, on landing in Kabul for the first time. His first post, from yesterday, is here.
_________________

It is perhaps the most internationally built international airport the world has ever known. From the moment your flight lands, the equipment, the buildings, the vehicles, all have some kind of text or flag referring to the country that donated it. What Kabul international airport lacks in terms of facilities it makes up for with one of the finest collections of international aid and military flying machines I have ever seen. Spanning the decades since the 1960's, I start to wonder if someone hasn't been dumping their old military helicopters out back behind the main terminal.

My choice of cheap airlines puts me as only 1 of 4 foreigners on this flight, I really feel the drawback of this as I'm at the end of the customs line while dozens of Afghan men very slowly load their amazingly massive suitcases, crates, jugs of liquids and rugs through the x-ray machine. By the time my tiny suitcase and I reached the machine the customs official seemed to look at me as if to say "where's your massive jug?"

The ride from the airport features a whole lot of machine gun nests and a few Humvee, all manned by Afghan military. Overhead a Blackhawk helicopter flies by, for some reason I wonder if it is American, I wonder if the pilot is from New Jersey.

Speaking of which, up ahead there are several Jersey barriers and Afghan military with machine guns, the blue sign next to them reads "Ring of Steel". If you ever want to make your neighborhood sound 100x cooler, put up a sign that reads "Ring of Steel", a sense of excitement as well as caution came over me. Though it passed fairly quickly as I noticed no one seems to act much different in the Ring of Steel, people walk the streets, figures in Burka's seem to be begging (Is that really what I saw?), and guards stand outside their gates with their machine guns.

After walking through a perfectly beautiful flower garden-court yard, past a pomegranate tree, I'm greeted by the gentlemen at the front desk. "Welcome to Kabul!" I'm handed a form which asks, among other things, for my nationality. As I put the pen to paper I say, "Today I'll be American," making a reference to the fact that I have more than one nationality. Before I could laugh at my own poor excuse for a joke, the gentlemen says with confidence, "Today you are our guest, no matter your nationality, and we are happy you are here, helping our country."

In that moment it didn't seem rehearsed or disingenuous, it just seemed like a man who doesn't judge anyone by where they come from but rather, their commitment to helping others. As I opened the door to my cozy room with a view of a pear tree, I thought to myself: this is a good start.

Note: No photos yet, I'm still not fully aware of when is a good/bad time or where, to photograph. Read More......

Dean Baker: Simpson isn't just offensive; he's also ignorant about Social Security

Most of the commentary on ex-Senator Alan Simpson's Macaca Moment has focused on the Macaca, on the utter offensiveness of it.

But as Dean Baker points out, Simpson is also profoundly ignorant about Social Security, not a feature in the co-chair of a commission that sees its duty as "fixing" the program. Mr. Baker:

I was also a recipient of one of Simpson’s tirades. As was the case with the note he sent to Carson, Simpson attached a presentation prepared for the commission by Social Security’s chief actuary. Simpson implied that this presentation had some especially eye-opening information that would lead Carson and myself to give up our wrong-headed views on Social Security.

While I opened the presentation with great expectations, I quickly discovered there was nothing in the presentation that would not already be known to anyone familiar with the annual Social Security trustees’ report. [...] It was disturbing to see that Simpson seemed surprised by what should have been old hat to anyone familiar with the policy debate on Social Security. After all, he had been a leading participant in these debates in his years in the Senate....

His determined ignorance in the face of the facts is the most important reason why he is not qualified to serve on President Obama’s commission.

Baker also discusses Simpson's ignorance of the world of Social Security recipients, hinted at in Simpson's "people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree" comment. (Only your crowd, Mr. Simpson, drives their Lexus to the mailbox, as it were.)

It's important, I think, not to lose sight of this point — Alan Simpson is profoundly unqualified to do his job, and should be fired for that reason alone.

Team Change? It's not too late to reconsider. It's your retirement too that we're discussing.

(Digby says the same thing here. And Jane has an important summary and update here; a must read.)

GP Read More......

Wall Street banks maintain healthy appetite for risk even after reform

Washington let Wall Street continue to call the shots and decided what is best for the US so there's little reason to be surprised. Too many people forget that modern bankers make their bloated bonuses by rolling the dice. The days of conservative bankers is long gone so the sooner Washington accepts the reality of high risk, high bonus as a central part of the problem the sooner this problem will go away.

The new spin by the banking industry is that no, they won't use their own money for gambling but only the money of those gosh darned clients who are begging for high risk and who want to use their own cash. Uh huh. How could there possibly be a problem there? After all, Wall Street has never been known to find a small gap in the law and then open it up a mile wide and drive trucks through it until their business revolves around that previously little opening.

To think that the Obama economic team or Congress - either party - did not see this as a possibility is hard to believe. The Obama economic team is flooded with Wall Street leftovers who were looking for work after Citi imploded so it's hard to believe that these former Wall Street insiders missed this.

When Congress passed a new financial regulation bill last month, it sought to prevent federally insured banks from making speculative bets using their own money. But that will not stop banks from making bets that some critics deem risky, even as the rules go into effect over the next few years.

That is because many such bets — on the direction of the stock market or the price of coal, for example — are done on behalf of clients. So, the banks say, they will continue to be allowable despite the new restrictions.

Indeed, several trades that were made on behalf of clients went bad for the banks even as the new rules were being debated in Washington this year. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, for example, each lost more than $100 million on transactions handled for customers in the period from April to July.

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Jane Mayer on the hard right-wing Koch family

Joe in DC did an excellent piece yesterday on the hard right-wing Koch family, and their funding of ... I'm still stunned ... the DLC. (Money enables Repubs and neuters Dems.)

And right on time, here's Rachel Maddow interviewing Jane Mayer on her new Koch family article, which Joe referenced. The interview is long, fact-filled, and fascinating. Watch and learn; my notes at the end.



Rather than gloss the main points of the interview, I'd like to gloss the meta-point.

Right-wing billionaires have been drinking our milkshake for literally generations. If it's not the Koch crew, it's Scaife. If not Scaife, it's Ahmundson. Or any of a dozen others.

They're motivated; wealthy beyond your understanding (literally; most Americans can't begin to comprehend the wealth of the very wealthy); driven by the kind of fire that burns in angels, demons, and those with OCD; and they're in it for the very long term.

They think back to McKinley and forward to the adulthood of their grandchildren. (You may want to click that last link; ick.)

That's their billionaires. Where are our billionaires? Selling off Air America because it didn't turn a profit fast enough. You want a poster boy for our billionaires? George Soros is a "former member of the Carlyle Group."

We will not win unless we clean out the Democratic party. And we will not win until our billionaires stop sending patrol boats against their billionaires' battleships. If you consider yourself one of our billionaires (I know you're out there), consider this a call to action. Seriously.

GP Read More......

Anthem Blue Cross gets clearance for up to 29% rate increases in California

It's a good thing the public option was never promoted. Who ever would have gone for such obvious socialism? Corporate socialism is just dandy but when it bleeds into the government, no way. It's much better to support rate hikes that are providing some of the highest executive compensation plans in the country. LA Times:

California insurance regulators cleared the way Wednesday for Anthem Blue Cross to implement scaled-back rate hikes after a previous increase was canceled amid an uproar over its size.

Anthem said it intends to put the new rates — averaging 14% and as high as 20% — into effect Oct. 1 for nearly 800,000 individual California policyholders.

Regulators also allowed one of Anthem's nonprofit competitors, Blue Shield of California, to move ahead with rate increases — averaging 19% and as high as 29% — for 250,000 individual policyholders.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Joe Biden is keeping up the pace while Obama is on vacation. Today, according to the Daily Guidance, he's heading to Manchester, NH "to mark a Recovery Act milestone."

The President returns from the Vineyard over the weekend. On Tuesday night, he's giving an address about Iraq to the nation from the Oval Office. (Note to White House media team: I know you're all geniuses, but that Oval Office address on the oil spill was a real dud. This one needs to be much, much better. Better speech. Better delivery. Work on it, please.)

Yes, Ken Mehlman is gay. Yes, it's good that he's helping to raise money for the marriage equality. He should -- and it's the least he could do. He spent a good part of the last decade politically bashing gays. This is another example of how quickly our society is changing. (Team Obama should realize how more and more out of touch their looking every day.)

Okay....what else? Read More......

Regulation never works, except when it does

Once again, the Republican myth of self-regulation is a key part of the problem. Whether it's food safety, insurance, banking, you name it, the fantasy world that has been a key component of GOP policy since the Reagan years has repeatedly been proven to be a joke. Unfortunately consumers keep having to pay the price for bad policy. In theory the Democrats could and should start running harder against self-regulation but their cooperation over the years was critical for any of this legislation to succeed. NY Times:

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.

But when American regulators created new egg safety rules that went into effect last month, they declared that there was not enough evidence to conclude that vaccinating hens against salmonella would prevent people from getting sick. The Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens — a precaution that would cost less than a penny per a dozen eggs.

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Home sales plummet

WSJ:

U.S. home sales plummeted in July to a level not seen in more than a decade, spurring fears of renewed weakness in housing prices and the broader economy.

Sales of previously owned homes fell 27.2% from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday, the lowest level since the industry group started its tally in 1999.

The expiration of a home-buyer tax credit in the spring was expected to damp buying, though less severely. Economists said the sales drop—together with a corresponding rise in the inventory of unsold homes—meant another decline in housing prices was on the horizon. House prices had stabilized last year after declining since 2006.

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WikiLeaks to release CIA paper on Wednesday

After that rape thing, I suspect WikiLeaks is only going to do more of this now.

WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that infuriated the Pentagon when it published thousands of classified military reports, said it will release a fresh set of documents Wednesday.

The group posted on its Twitter page Tuesday: "WikiLeaks to release CIA paper tomorrow." It did not specify a time.

The website set off a firestorm recently when it posted some 76,000 U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The group has said it has another 15,000 documents, which it plans to release soon.

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Consumers cutting corners on prescriptions to save money

From Consumer Reports:

Consumers, in a turn of the tables, have given their doctors a checkup and the diagnosis looks pretty grim: They think doctors are too cozy with big pharma, according to the 2nd annual prescription drug survey conducted by Consumer Reports National Research Center. The survey of more than 1,150 adults who currently take a prescription drug found that the vast majority object to the payments and rewards pharmaceutical companies routinely dole out to doctors because they feel these are negatively influencing how they treat patients.

In the past year, 39 percent reported taking some action to reduce costs. Some of these actions were potentially dangerous. Overall, 27 percent failed to take a drug as prescribed, for example, by not getting a prescription filled (16 percent), taking an expired medication (12 percent), or sharing a prescription with someone else to save money (4 percent).

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White House: We accept Simpson's apology; he'll continue to serve

The White House has reacted (some would say predictably) to Alan Simpson's Macaca Moment, making it (I would say) their own (h/t Gridlock; my emphasis):

Jennifer Psaki, the deputy communications director, said, “Alan Simpson has apologized and while we regret and do not condone his comments, we accept his apology and he will continue to serve.”

What's to say? They're doing it because they want to.

A Krugman reminder (again my emphasis):

At this point, though, Obama is on the spot: he has to fire Simpson, or turn the whole thing into a combination of farce and tragedy — the farce being the nature of the co-chair, the tragedy being that Democrats are so afraid of Republicans that nothing, absolutely nothing, will get them sanctioned.

When you have a commission dedicated to the common good, and the co-chair dismisses Social Security as a “milk cow with 310 million tits,” you either have to get rid of him or admit that you’re completely, um, cowed by the right wing, that IOKIYAR [It's OK if you're a Republican] rules completely.

And no, an apology won’t suffice. Simpson was completely in character here; it was perfectly consistent with everything else he’s said, and with his previous behavior. He has to go.

Is this an admin throw-down? You decide.

GP

UPDATE: Hmm. As Teddy Partridge points out, the White House can't accept Simpson's "apology" since it wasn't the White House he insulted. Nice catch. Read More......

Another chance for Obama DOJ to support Prop 8 in court

Joe reports over at AMERICAblog Gay:

Team Obama keeps hoping to avoid the issue of marriage equality. But, they can't ignore it. Over the next few months, we're going to find out if the DOJ is defending DOMA's constitutionality in the Massachusetts cases. And, we'll find out if Obama meant it when he said he supported the Prop. 8 decision. The crack team of lawyers in Obama administration can go on-the-record with its support of Judge Walker's decision. They can. But, will they?

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New forecast shows Dems losing 6 to 7 Senate seats

Not enough to lose their majority, but pretty damn close.

On average, over the model’s 100,000 simulation runs, the Democrats are projected to lose a net of six and a half Senate seats, which would leave them with 52 or 53 senators. (Even though the G.O.P. primary in Alaska remains too close to call, that outcome is unlikely to alter the model.)

It seems we're not the only ones disappointed with the way the Democrats have led the past two years. It's really quite abominable that we, the people, handed them overwhelming control of the House and Senate, the presidency with a 70% approval rating, a GOP in shambles, and this is what they've done with it.

And before anyone blames it on the economy, the reason the economy is in so much trouble is because the President refused to even try to get the larger stimulus that everyone knew was needed. And the Democrats in Congress should have never ceded power to a President fearful of wielding it.

They're all to blame. Read More......

Cops were reportedly told to shoot looters in New Orleans

I tend to not be terribly sympathetic to the looting thing. Having said that, it depends on the situation. If people are starving in a disaster, I'd much more sympathetic. If folks are out having a joy ride, taking advantage of the disaster to get something for free, I'm much less sympathetic. Pro Publica:

In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

It's not clear how broadly the order was communicated. Some officers who heard it say they refused to carry it out. Others say they understood it as a fundamental change in the standards on deadly force, which allow police to fire only to protect themselves or others from what appears to be an imminent physical threat.

Your thoughts? Read More......