Hullabaloo

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

 
Goldilocks and the Randroids

by digby

Ok, this is certainly the strangest post of the year:

After hearing President Obama’s hilarious diatribe against the Ryan budget — a timid document that adds trillions to the deficit, takes a generation to bring the federal budget into balance, and makes zero effort to cancel out the innumerable departments, agencies, and programs that have exploded the federal micromanagement of American life — I have a question for the community-organizer-in-chief.

In light of his froth over this Ryanesque scourge of “Social Darwinism,” does the president favor repealing the laws that prohibit Americans from feeding the animals at the national parks that Obama risibly accuses Representative Ryan of trying to shut down?

You’ve probably seen the signs — they befoul the scenery throughout the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yellowstone, the Everglades, Yosemite, etc. No food for the fauna. The Darwinists at the U.S. Park Service claim that animals must learn to fend for themselves if they are to survive and thrive. When you feed animals, the bureaucrats coldly explain, they become dependents and no longer function as nature intends. They lose their capacity to make their own way. They fill up on foods that are harmful to their digestive systems. There is a dulling of the instincts that help wildlife avoid danger — they lose the fear of humans and cars, leading many of them to be killed while expecting to find food on the roadside. Some signs are downright mean in admonishing: “A fed animal is a dead animal.”

Mr. President, where is the empathy?

This isn't the first time a right winger has compared welfare recipients to animals, of course. Or Democratic politicians, for that matter. Even so, I think we can all agree that Andrew McCarthy needs some help with his metaphors.

But I was intrigued by his characterization of the Ryan budget as:

"a timid document that adds trillions to the deficit, takes a generation to bring the federal budget into balance, and makes zero effort to cancel out the innumerable departments, agencies, and programs that have exploded the federal micromanagement of American life."

Anyone want to make book on how long before Paul Ryan is designated a moderate/centrist by the Village media? After all, the left thinks he's too hot and now the right thinks he's too cold.

So he must be juuuuust right.

Update: Oopsie. Rush needs to send Andrew McCarthy a royalty check:

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digby 4/04/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Using their rhetoric: a primer

by digby

During the 2008 campaign Rick Perlstein offered some important advice to Democrats on how to steal GOP rhetoric, advice that they have, so far, failed to heed:

Reagan didn't praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, "This generation has a rendez vous with destiny." We should steal from Reagan too. As in: "There is no left and right. Only up or down." He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as "common sense." We should do the same for left-wing ideas.

Also, use Reagan to mess with righties' heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq. The rule isn't "never say anything nice about Reagan." It's "use Reagan for progressive ends."

I couldn't help thinking about this when I heard Obama's complaint about "unelected judges" and judicial activism. I think it's clever to turn their rhetoric around on them, but you have to recognize that these are not people who recognize hypocrisy. Therefore, you have to be more explicit and directly attribute your remarks to one of their heroes --- or the Republican party itself.

For instance, he could have said:

"As Ronald Reagan said back in 1986, 'we’ve had too many examples in recent years of courts and judges legislating. They’re not interpreting what the law says. In too many instances they have been actually legislating by legal decree what they think the law should be.' I agree with Ronald Reagan and I'm concerned they're going to do just that with the Affordable Care Act."

Or,

"In 2008, my opponent and I didn't agree on many things. But when it comes to this particular issue, I agree with John McCain when he said,"With a presumption that would have amazed the framers of our Constitution, and legal reasoning that would have mystified them, federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically. Assured of lifetime tenures, these judges show little regard for the authority of the president, the Congress, and the states. They display even less interest in the will of the people."

Now, I realize that's a mouthful so maybe it wouldn't have worked. But there are decades worth of quotes he could have used.

At the very least, Democratic operatives should be passing out copies of the Republican Party platforms whenever any right winger has the nerve to clutch his pearls and demand that the president apologize for offending the great majesty and dignity of the Court. Here are a few worth quoting:

1984 Platform:

We commend the President for appointing federal judges committed to the rights of law-abiding citizens and traditional family values. We share the public’s dissatisfaction with an elitist and unresponsive federal judiciary. If our legal institutions are to regain respect, they must respect the people’s legitimate interests in a stable, orderly society. In his second term, President Reagan will continue to appoint Supreme Court and other federal judges who share
our commitment to judicial restraint.

My stars! Fetch me the smellin' salts Miss Mellie.

1996 Platform:

Some members of the federal judiciary...make up laws and invent new rights as they go along, arrogating to themselves powers King George III never dared to exercise. They free vicious criminals, pamper felons in prison, frivolously overturn State laws enacted by citizen referenda.

The federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has overstepped its authority under the Constitution. It has usurped the right of citizen legislators and popularly elected executives to make law by declaring duly enacted laws to be “unconstitutional” through the misapplication of the principle of judicial review. Any other role for the judiciary, especially when personal preferences masquerade as interpreting the law, is fundamentally at odds with our system of government in which the people and their representatives decide issues great and small.

I'm fainting ...

2004 Platform:

In the federal courts, scores of judges with activist backgrounds in the hard-left now have lifetime tenure. Recent events have made it clear that these judges threaten America’s dearest institutions and our very way of life. The Pledge of Allegiance has already been invalidated by the courts once, and the Supreme Court’s ruling has left the Pledge in danger of being struck down again—not because the American people have rejected it and the values that it embodies, but because a handful of activist judges threaten to overturn commonsense and tradition...We believe that the self-proclaimed supremacy of these judicial activists is antithetical to the democratic ideals on which our nation was founded.

I don't know about you, but those all seem to me to be an attack on the legitimacy of the federal courts, something which was condemned as nearly treasonous and unAmerican by right wingers this week. I suspect one of the reasons they reacted so strongly (other than team solidarity) is that on some level they know that when the president uttered the words "judicial activism" and "unelected judges" it triggered a reflexive recognition on the part of casual observers who don't know the details.

In that respect, these conservatives are victims of their own success. By sheer repetition, they've managed to indoctrinate a good portion of the population to instantly loathe anything associated with those phrases. Obama uttering them probably caused at least some dissonance among their faithful, although they have no problem rejecting anything that he says. But it's the busy, average voter that could "take that the wrong way" and assume that Obama is just talking common sense. After all, doesn't "everybody" know that the judiciary is filled with judicial activists who are legislating from the bench? Certainly, that's all we've been hearing from Republicans for the past 40 years.

Update: And yes, there is this. They just can't help themselves.

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digby 4/04/2012 10:55:00 AM |

 
Spitzer on the JOBS bill

by digby

I realize it's fashionable to treat Eliot Spitzer like a clown because he was caught with his pants down (or rather more accurately, Wall Street arranged for him to be caught with his pants down.) Yes, predictable jokes about his personal sexual proclivities are hilarious and I grant that his hypocrisy as Attorney General with respect to prostitution does not reflect well on him. But I think it's probably a mistake to ignore his history as the first (and practically only) Attorney General who really took on the banks.

Perhaps the following rant is lacking in entertainment value, but it's good that somebody says it nonetheless:

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digby 4/04/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
Let's hope we see more of this

by David Atkins

If his speech to the Associated Press yesterday is any indication, the President is starting to figure out that the Republicans are simply never going to work with him in any way, shape or form, and that the press is heavily to blame for allowing them to get away with it. I know it's probably false hope, but it might just mean that there has started to be an awakening on the part of the President and his advisers that they're living in a nakedly partisan world, and that they might as well recognize and embrace the fact that partisanship cannot be transcended at the federal level because one side has gone totally berserk, and the theoretical media constructs that are supposed to punish the guilty party have utterly failed to do their job.

It was a mostly combative and refreshingly partisan speech, but I think the most eye-opening element came when the President defended his own centrist record to the press with some exasperation. Consider this bit from the Q&A; section:

MR. SINGLETON: Thank you, Mr. President. We appreciate so much you being with us today. I have some questions from the audience, which I will ask -- and I'll be more careful than I was last time I did this.

Republicans have been sharply critical of your budget ideas as well. What can you say to the Americans who just want both sides to stop fighting and get some work done on their behalf?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I completely understand the American people’s frustrations, because the truth is that these are eminently solvable problems. I know that Christine Lagarde is here from the IMF, and she’s looking at the books of a lot of other countries around the world. The kinds of challenges they face fiscally are so much more severe than anything that we confront -- if we make some sensible decisions.

So the American people’s impulses are absolutely right. These are solvable problems if people of good faith came together and were willing to compromise. The challenge we have right now is that we have on one side, a party that will brook no compromise. And this is not just my assertion. We had presidential candidates who stood on a stage and were asked, “Would you accept a budget package, a deficit reduction plan, that involved $10 of cuts for every dollar in revenue increases?” Ten-to-one ratio of spending cuts to revenue. Not one of them raised their hand.

Think about that. Ronald Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control, that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases. Did it multiple times. He could not get through a Republican primary today.

So let's look at Bowles-Simpson. Essentially, my differences with Bowles-Simpson were I actually proposed less revenue and slightly lower defense spending cuts. The Republicans want to increase defense spending and take in no revenue, which makes it impossible to balance the deficit under the terms that Bowles-Simpson laid out -- unless you essentially eliminate discretionary spending. You don't just cut discretionary spending. Everything we think of as being pretty important -- from education to basic science and research to transportation spending to national parks to environmental protection -- we'd essentially have to eliminate.

I guess another way of thinking about this is -- and this bears on your reporting. I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and an equivalence is presented -- which reinforces I think people's cynicism about Washington generally. This is not one of those situations where there's an equivalence. I've got some of the most liberal Democrats in Congress who were prepared to make significant changes to entitlements that go against their political interests, and who said they were willing to do it. And we couldn't get a Republican to stand up and say, we'll raise some revenue, or even to suggest that we won't give more tax cuts to people who don't need them.

And so I think it's important to put the current debate in some historical context. It's not just true, by the way, of the budget. It's true of a lot of the debates that we're having out here.

Cap and trade was originally proposed by conservatives and Republicans as a market-based solution to solving environmental problems. The first President to talk about cap and trade was George H.W. Bush. Now you've got the other party essentially saying we shouldn’t even be thinking about environmental protection; let's gut the EPA.

Health care, which is in the news right now -- there's a reason why there's a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got covered, in contrast to a single-payer plan. Now, suddenly, this is some socialist overreach.

So as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it's important to remember that the positions I'm taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What's changed is the center of the Republican Party. And that’s certainly true with the budget.

Let's ignore the argument over whether centrism is the best approach. It isn't, of course, but that's not the point. The point is that the President is finally coming to terms with the fact that he's not about to get credit for it. Which led in turn to this response to the next question about the deficit (notice how obsessed the press seems to be with the deficit?):

I said this a few months after I was elected at the first G20 summit. I said the days when Americans using their credit cards and home equity loans finance the rest of the world’s growth by taking in imports from every place else -- those days are over. On the other hand, we continue to be a extraordinarily important market and foundation for global economic growth.

We do have to take care of our deficits. I think Christine has spoken before, and I think most economists would argue as well, that the challenge when it comes to our deficits is not short-term discretionary spending, which is manageable. As I said before and I want to repeat, as a percentage of our GDP, our discretionary spending -- all the things that the Republicans are proposing cutting -- is actually lower than it's been since Dwight Eisenhower. There has not been some massive expansion of social programs, programs that help the poor, environmental programs, education programs. That’s not our problem.

Our problem is that our revenue has dropped down to between 15 and 16 percent -- far lower than it has been historically, certainly far lower than it was under Ronald Reagan -- at the same time as our health care costs have surged, and our demographics mean that there is more and more pressure being placed on financing our Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs.

So at a time when the recovery is still gaining steam, and unemployment is still very high, the solution should be pretty apparent. And that is even as we continue to make investments in growth today -- for example, putting some of our construction workers back to work rebuilding schools and roads and bridges, or helping states to rehire teachers at a time when schools are having a huge difficulty retaining quality teachers in the classroom -- all of which would benefit our economy, we focus on a long-term plan to stabilize our revenues at a responsible level and to deal with our health care programs in a responsible way. And that's exactly what I'm proposing.

And what we've proposed is let's go back, for folks who are making more than $250,000 a year, to levels that were in place during the Clinton era, when wealthy people were doing just fine, and the economy was growing a lot stronger than it did after they were cut. And let's take on Medicare and Medicaid in a serious way -- which is not just a matter of taking those costs off the books, off the federal books, and pushing them onto individual seniors, but let's actually reduce health care costs. Because we spend more on health care with not as good outcomes as any other advanced, developed nation on Earth.

And that would seem to be a sensible proposal. The problem right now is not the technical means to solve it. The problem is our politics. And that's part of what this election and what this debate will need to be about, is, are we, as a country, willing to get back to common-sense, balanced, fair solutions that encourage our long-term economic growth and stabilize our budget. And it can be done.

One last point I want to make, Dean, that I think is important, because it goes to the growth issue. If state and local government hiring were basically on par to what our current recovery -- on par to past recoveries, the unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower than it is right now. If the construction industry were going through what we normally go through, that would be another point lower. The challenge we have right now -- part of the challenge we have in terms of growth has to do with the very specific issues of huge cuts in state and local government, and the housing market still recovering from this massive bubble. And that -- those two things are huge headwinds in terms of growth.

I say this because if we, for example, put some of those construction workers back to work, or we put some of those teachers back in the classroom, that could actually help create the kind of virtuous cycle that would bring in more revenues just because of economic growth, would benefit the private sector in significant ways. And that could help contribute to deficit reduction in the short term, even as we still have to do these important changes to our health care programs over the long term.

If these words are put into action during a second term, it may well be that a disillusioned and chastened President Obama may be the President in his second term that many of us hoped he would be in his first. It's not terribly likely, admittedly, but one can certainly hope. The positive signs are there.


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thereisnospoon 4/04/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

 
Science for sociopaths

by digby

I think the worst part of this horrible story is that these blithering idiots use the word "science" to bolster their hideous cruelty. It's bad enough that they forced this woman to give birth to her dying child out of insane zealotry, but that they have the utter gall to call the medical diagnosis into question is almost too much to take.

Danielle Deaver was 22 weeks pregnant when her water broke and doctors gave her a devastating prognosis: With undeveloped lungs, the baby likely would never survive outside the womb, and because all the amniotic fluid had drained, the tiny growing fetus slowly would be crushed by the uterus walls.

"What we learned from the perinatologist was that because there was no cushion, she couldn't move her arms and legs because of contractures," said Deaver, a 34-year-old nurse from Grand Isle, Neb. "And her face and head would be deformed because the uterus pushed down so hard."

Just one month earlier, Nebraska had enacted the nation's first fetal pain legislation, banning abortions after 20 weeks gestation. So the Deavers had to wait more than a week to deliver baby Elizabeth, who died after just 15 minutes.

"They could do nothing to make it better but tell us to wait, which made it worse," Danielle Deaver said. "Every time I felt movement, I was terrified she was hurting and trying to push the uterus away from her."

Horrifying, right? Well, not according to this awful person from Oklahoma, who knows better:

Taking the lead from Nebraska this week, the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted 94 to 2 to similarly ban abortion later than 20 weeks of gestation in what it called the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act." Bill 1888 will go on to the state Senate.

"It's a very sad situation all around," said Rep. Pam Peterson, who sponsored the Oklahoma bill. "It's about the humanness. These unborn babies are in excruciating pain in the abortion process at 20 weeks."We know they feel pain early on -- there is medical evidence."

She also said that the fact that Deaver's baby was reported by her mother as "perfect and beautiful in her arms" showed the "discrepancy" in the medical advice she was given that the skull would have been crushed.

"Thirty-eight years ago when Roe v. Wade passed, we didn't have the scientific evidence, but now this bill has caught up with the science," said Peterson. "Back in 1973, we were told they were a clump of cells and we didn't know the difference. Now we do fetal surgery and give anesthetics.

Keep in mind that this woman is a complete idiot and her scientific misinformation is propaganda. But worse than that is the fact that she would second guess real doctors about this diagnosis --- as well as the mother who was terrified that she was causing the terminally ill fetus pain! Evidently, the only thing this terrible woman from Oklahoma believes causes fetal pain is abortion.

Literally, nothing matters but forcing women to go through childbirth even if, according to their own beliefs, the fetus could be in terrible pain until such time as the woman delivers the dying child. How sick and twisted can these people get?

Lucky for them their fetal pain propaganda isn't true. But if any of their religious beliefs are true, they're still going to hell for what they're putting these families through.


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digby 4/03/2012 07:30:00 PM |

 
Bipartisan authority

by digby

Greenwald points out a little known detail about the strip search decision:

What virtually none of this anti-Florence commentary mentioned, though, was that the Obama DOJ formally urged the Court to reach the conclusion it reached. While the Obama administration and court conservatives have been at odds in a handful of high-profile cases (most notably Citizens United and the health care law), this is yet another case, in a long line, where the Obama administration was able to have its preferred policies judicially endorsed by getting right-wing judges to embrace them:

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that in the interest of security, prisons could conduct visual body cavity searches of all detainees after they had contact with outsiders. For years after that ruling, lower courts ruled that the prison had to have a reasonable suspicion that the arrestee was concealing contraband before subjecting him to a strip search upon entering the facility.

But in recent years, some courts have begun to allow a blanket policy to strip search all arrestees.

The Obama administration is siding with the prisons in the case and urging the court to allow a blanket policy for all inmates set to enter the general prison population.

“When you have a rule that treats everyone the same,” Justice Department lawyer Nicole A. Saharsky argued, “you don’t have folks that are singled out. You don’t have any security gaps.”

As The Guardian said yesterday: “The decision was a victory for the jails and for the Obama administration, which argued for an across-the-board rule allowing strip-searches of all those entering the general jail population, even those arrested on minor offenses.”

Oh hell, I give up.

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digby 4/03/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Women don't care about contraception

by digby

Nikki Haley wants to keep the government out of the bedroom. Or something:

“All of my policy is not based on a label,” Haley remarked. “It’s based on what I’ve lived and what I know: Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all of those things.”

“We care about contraception too,” co-host Joy Behar interrupted.

“But that’s not the only thing they care about,” Haley replied, slightly revising her earlier assertion. “The media wants to talk about contraception. … While we care about contraception, let’s be clear. All we’re saying is we don’t want government to mandate when we have to have it and when we don’t. We want to be able to make that decision.”

Well hell, why didn't anyone tell me that the government was going to mandate when women had to have contraception and when they didn't? That would be terrible.

Here I thought that contraception only had to be offered at no cost as part of insurance policies' preventive care package. I should have known the Obamacommies wanted the government to intrude into the intimate details of women's reproductive lives. Thank God the social conservatives are out there fighting against that. Oh wait ...

Update: Nicole Belle has the video and more.

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digby 4/03/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Blue Dog Rebranding

by David Atkins

Oh how cute! The Blue Dogs are starting to realize that their brand might be getting a little tarnished, so they're remaking themselves. Behold: The "Blue Dog Research Forum" is now...Center Forward.

They have the following quote prominently displayed on their site:

America is neither right nor left. Republican nor Democrat. Red nor blue. The solutions that will move us forward come from where they always have – the center.

Most political agendas engage in a level of historical revisionism, but this one takes some serious chutzpah. The level of blind mythmaking in this comically inaccurate statement is breathtaking.

It was radical revolutionaries who helped birth this nation and free it from the British crown. It was centrists who urged on the disastrous compromises on slavery prior to the Civil War, including and especially the Compromise of 1850. It was Centrists who encouraged Lincoln to simply allow the South to secede. It was Lincoln who took the radical step of insisting on fighting the war and emancipating the slaves.

Social Security and the New Deal were not centrist legislation, nor was much of anything FDR did centrist. The one major "centrist" move FDR made to appease the Blue Dogs of his day was the attempt to close the deficit in 1937, and it was a disaster.

It was radicals who earned women the right to vote, radicals like Rosa Parks who helped end Jim Crow and segregation, radicals who earned 18-year-olds the right to vote, and radicals who pushed through Medicare. And today, it is radicals who have fought and clawed their way to allow LGBT Americans to live relatively openly and share in most of the same civil rights as their fellow straight Americans.

On the conservative side of the aisle, it was not the Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans who were responsible for the movement that begat Ronald Reagan, but rather the insurgent and radical conservatives of the Goldwater stripe. As a progressive, I view the Reagan ascendancy as a very negative thing, but insofar as any of the Reagan mythology is to be believed, it wasn't centrists who created him, but conservative revolutionaries.

On the Affordable Care Act, it was centrists like Baucus and Nelson who delayed and stalled the passage of the bill, demanding bribes in exchange for their votes and attempting futilely to earn the support of even of a few Republicans even as the nature of the bill shifted further and further to the right.

In fact, centrists have almost never helped create the solutions that have moved us forward in our nation's history. They have either been irrelevant, or actively harmful. There is nothing honorable or noble about the centrist position in American politics, partly because the system is intrinsically so resistant to change and easily corruptible that radicals are the only ones who are ever able to move things in any direction except in favor of moneyed interests.

Which leads us to the first issue listed in the Center Forward Solution Center: opposition to greater taxes on the wealthy.

Politicians often cite the fact that Warren Buffet’s secretary pays a lower effective tax rate than he does as Exhibit A on why the tax code is unfair. But as our economy claws its way back from a recession does it make sense to target one particular group of taxpayers with a tax increase? In this series, we examine opinions from the center left and right on how we can make our tax code fairer without impeding economic growth.

Hmmmm...I wonder where the center of American public opinion is on this question. Oh, right:

Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama’s proposed jobs plan by a margin of two-to-one, a new Gallup poll Wednesday says.

Sixty-six percent of respondents said that they backed increasing income taxes on individuals earning over $200,000 and families earning at least $250,000, while only 32 percent were opposed.

An even greater majority thought that taxes should be raised on corporations, with 70 percent of respondents favoring hiking taxes on corporations by eliminating tax deductions and 26 percent were opposed.

Centrism, ladies and gentlemen. It has little to with what the American people want or need, or with the solutions that make sense and have worked in the past. It has everything to do with what the narrow band of people who happen to fall in between the modern Democratic and Republicans political parties happen to think Americans deserve. And it's just an amazing coincidence that it happens to align with the interests of the nation's most well-off.


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thereisnospoon 4/03/2012 02:47:00 PM |

 
The voice of progressivism

by digby

From Howie:

Blue America was the first national group to endorse Ilya Sheyman and we were sad that the DCCC and other DC conservatives were able beat him in the primary last month. But we were as happy as can be that just to the southeast of his district, another outstanding movement progressive, Dr. David Gill, turned back those same forces and triumphed the same night that Ilya faltered. Hopefully Ilya will run again and win-- and be greeted on the steps of Congress by David Gill, who has run several times already. Sometimes, as we saw with Donna Edwards and Alan Grayson, it takes more than one try.

Illinois' newly redrawn 13th congressional district is very different from the one Dr. Gill has run in previously. It's a D+1 district that voted for Obama by 11 points. But his opponent, conservative Republican Tim Johnson, David told us, "is still voting like he’s in his old 60-40 Republican district. He’s now voted for the extreme Ryan plan to end Medicare twice. He refused last summer to vote to raise the debt ceiling, an action that was necessary because of his votes for Bush’s wars and tax cuts for the rich. He’s been in Congress for six terms and he’s a 40-year politician. He’s out of touch with the district."

David is a 20 year member of Physicians For a Single Health Payer Plan. "I became interested in running because of what I see on a daily basis in the health care industry as an ER doctor. We have a two-tiered system of access to healthcare in America and, frankly, the American health care system is failing a lot of people." But if health care was got him interested in running originally, he's as far from a one-issue candidate as you'll find.

"Health care is one symptom of many. There are many areas impacted by our corporate governance. Retirement security, jobs, healthcare, education and restoring the health of our planet are all areas where private interests are trumping the public good in Congress. People get to Washington, spend too much time around corporate lobbyists and suddenly forget that Social Security is in better financial health than the Federal budget that’s been decimated by Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest. They forget that Climate Change is the biggest crisis we are facing today, not the deficit. They forget that we have a jobs crisis to fix. They’ve forgotten that government should be working to solve problems for regular people."

And David was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. He's also opposed to the continued occupation of Afghanistan. "I’ve come to the realization the past few years that our presence in Afghanistan has outlived its usefulness. It’s time to end our mission there and get our troops out of harm’s way as soon as possible."

He can win this race and bring a healthy dose of Prairie State populism to Washington.[With our help.] David just defeated a DCCC and New Democrat-backed congressional challenger who outspent him 5-1. He ran a strictly grassroots, people-powered campaign and he won without compromising his progressive values. as you can see in the video above. "I was willing to stand up and fight back against the Republican War on Women and special interest-domination of Congress and the residents of IL-13 responded and were willing to put their trust in me."

David joined Howie for a live chat earlier today at Crooks and Liars. Here's a sample of what a winning progressive sounds like:

Howie: The Beltway conventional wisdom is that it's better to run as a "moderate"-- by which they mean a conservative-- in a swing district like IL-13. They seem to think voters aren't ready for progressive solutions that have been caused by conservative policies. And you seem to embody a whole package of progressive solutions and from what I'm reading and hearing you're campaigning hard on all the tough topics of the day that the DCCC tells their candidates to run away from. Forget for a moment Democratic voters who will vote for the Democratic candidate and Republican voters who will vote for the Republican candidate. Let's just look at independents and swing voters. You're meeting them and talking with them. Are they ready for your messages about hot social issues and about accountability for Wall Street crooks and the even issues that fly in the face of the official Democratic Party line. I've seen on your campaign website, for example, that you don't favor the corporate trade policies that Democrats like Clinton and Obama push but that you're an advocate for fair trade over so-called "free" trade. Do swing voters understand that kind of stuff?


David Gill: One of the big reasons Republicans won the House in 2010 was the ‘Mediscare’ Ads they ran telling seniors that the Affordable Care Act was going to cut their Medicare. Tim Johnson has now voted twice for the extreme Ryan Plan to end Medicare as we know it. Swing voters in this district, not just Democrats, want to know that Medicare and Social Security will be there for them and that politicians won’t take it away. As I recently told Bernie Schoenberg of the State Journal-Register (Springfield), my health care plan for “Improved Medicare For All” would be a way for people to have better health care, while also hanging on to more of their money by stopping the flow of 40 percent of our health care dollars into a black pit known as the private health insurance industry. And so, I don’t consider that an extremely progressive position. I consider it a people-oriented position.

If you saw the Gallup poll released yesterday, you saw Romney absolutely tanking with women in swing states. That’s no surprise to us. There’s a perception in Washington that women outside ‘Blue’ areas feel
differently about their right to contraception and women’s reproductive health services. They don’t. I think that in particular Tim Johnson’s participation in the Republican War on Women is going to really motivate previously apathetic women on the large college campuses (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Springfield, Illinois State, Southern Illinois at Edwardsville) in this district to vote him out.

This district has a history of electing tough, independent-minded progressives. A good chunk of it was in the old IL-17, and was represented by Lane Evans and Phil Hare for many years. People I talk to at diners and county fairs nod in approval when I tell them that they may not all ways agree with me, but they’ll always know where I stand.

As far as how swing voters’ reaction to trade policy, in the very center of this district is Decatur, a national focal point of labor unrest in the 1990s. This district has seen its share of factory closures and layoffs and it’s all too aware of the effect that corporate free trade policies have had. From the reaction I’ve gotten from average voters, I expect my support for working people in this district to be a wedge issue that takes votes away from Tom Johnson and not a liability. People are fed up with Washington and people are fed up with Wall Street.

Read the whole chat if you have the chance. He's a very smart candidate who's thought through all these issues. The Party machine is unhappy that he won, of course, and are dong what they can to sow destructive dissent in the district. At this point I have to believe they'd rather lose the majority than back a progressive who doesn't toe their line. (At the very least I have to question their arrogant assumption that they know best who can beat Republicans. If they were that good, Nancy Pelosi would still be speaker.)

David Gill's a fighter for all the values and all the principles Blue America stands for. Congress will be a far better place if he's elected. Please consider giving what you can. This is where we begin.


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digby 4/03/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
QOTD - Atrios

by digby

Oh this is going to be fun. Atrios is counting down the top ten wankers of the decade. And he's doing it in style. Here's an excerpt from today's post on the 9th runner-up, Megan McArdle:

With McArdle we have the pinnacle of glibertarianism, though "fuck you I've got mine" has morphed into "oh fuck I don't have quite enough I'd better be more creative even my defenses of plutocracy" as the years have passed. This post will probably be seen as unfair somehow, as apparently she's on a blogging break to write a book. Its title is, dear me, PERMISSION TO SUCK, about "how risk aversion is sapping America of its core strengths." Now I do think we should have a bit of permission to suck, to have a few career fails in our lives, but the problem isn't risk aversion, it's that the consequences of a bad coin toss are catastrophic for those of us without significant parental support in our do the trapeze without a social safety net world. A few of the fortunate do, indeed, have permission to suck. And suck they do.

He's also running a spring fundraiser. Everyone who's enjoyed the wonder that is Atrios over the past ten years should throw a couple of bucks in the kitty if they can.


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digby 4/03/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Judicial activism with a twist

by digby

Greg Sargent:

To the fainting couch! Obama attacked the Supreme Court and threatened it with a backlash, should it strike down his tyrannical scheme to impose a government takeover of health care on the nation!

That’s what many conservative writers and even some centrist ones are arguing. They are saying that Obama’s words about the Court yesterday were “unsettling” and a “witch-hunt,” and they’re likening them to F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Court in retaliation for decisions striking down New Deal initiatives.

Ok, I give up. These people are now openly defending the Court against accusations of judicial activism?

I'm just going to print here the definition of judicial activism at the "Conservapedia"

"Judicial activism" is when judges substitute their own political opinions for the applicable law, or when judges act like a legislature (legislating from the bench) rather than like a traditional court. In so doing, the court takes for itself the powers of Congress, rather than limiting itself to the powers traditionally given to the judiciary.

In this regard, judicial activism is a way for liberals to avoid the regular legislative means of enacting laws in order to ignore public opinion and dodge public debate.

Courts in California — both state and federal ones — frequently engage in judicial activism. One major example of this is the relatively recent California Supreme Court decision In re Marriage Cases, wherein four California Supreme Court justices (who are appointed, not elected) unilaterally overruled the will of the people of the state of California, and legalized gay "marriage." Proposition 22, which recognized the traditional definition of marriage had previously been put in place by a majority of California voters, but this did not deter the liberal judges of the court from acting. In response, a majority of California voters passed Proposition 8, which amended California's Constitution to uphold the sanctity of marriage, stemming the tide of the liberal homosexual assault on marriage before it was too late.

Judicial activism should not be confused with the courts' Constitutionally mandated rule in enforcing limitations on government power and preserving the Constitutional structure of government, as they did in Bush v. Gore, Boy Scouts v. Dale, and D.C. v. Heller.

Examples of judicial activism:

Griswold v. Connecticut - 1965 Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to posess, distribute and use contraception.

Roe v. Wade - 1973 Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion.

Lawrence v. Texas - 2003 Supreme Court ruling establishing a constitutional right to sodomy.

They left out the original sin of liberal judicial activism --- the one that caused all the hoopla to begin with --- Brown vs board of education:

In fact, the Republican presidential candidates don't seem to have gotten the word --- they're still out there running against the judicial activists in the federal courts.

None of this is to say that liberals are any less inconsistent when they attack the Court for judicial activism. But you can't really blame them. The Republicans are the ones who turned this meme into a rallying cry a long time ago. They're just appropriating it. And truthfully, liberals favor federal government so a court that challenges states' rights and defends civil liberties, as the Warren Court did, isn't quite as inconsistent as the wingnuts who bellowed for years about liberal activist judges now defending the federal courts. But I admit, it's close thing.

The truth is that the Court is inherently political and always has been to lesser and greater degrees. But since the left is the faction in America that believes in government activism, progressives should recognize that as long as the conservatives have a 5-4 majority (or worse)the best they can do is hold back the tide through the democratic process and keep them from completely repealing the progress of the 20th century. This court is not going to ever going to be friendly to their agenda.

Unfortunately, the Democratic majority doesn't seem to be inclined to do that. They want to "do things" not stop things so they are eager to enact "Grand Bargains" and "Big Deals" that basically advance the conservative agenda --- which the court will codify.

It's certainly possible that the Court will uphold Obamacare. It was, after all, a pretty conservative plan. But progressives should probably come to terms with the fact that their desire for progress at the federal level is mostly in a holding pattern until this court changes.(There will always be some room for progress --- gay rights, for instance, looks to be one that's transcending ideology.) And they should gird themselves for the fact that it could get even worse if the president is conservative at the time of a new Court vacancy --- or even if the Senate remains in the grip of right wing influence.

Kagan and Sotomayor were both good appointments but they didn't change the ideological bent of the court. The right is not going to allow a liberal majority on the Court any time soon --- and I think they've proven that they will prevent it by any means necessary. They know very well the power they hold with a Court majority and they will protect it from "judicial activism" by any means necessary.


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digby 4/03/2012 11:17:00 AM |

 
Abstract freedom for the privileged

by digby

Alleged legal expert Ann Althouse offered a puerile libertarian defense of the Kennedy position in oral arguments over Obamacare:

“Liberty” is a high abstraction. What is it about the liberty of compulsion to buy an expensive health insurance policy that Justice Kennedy is supposed to find appealing? Just because someone loves liberty doesn’t mean they’re going to love everything you slap a “liberty” label on!

Indeed. Being able to afford health care is a "high abstraction" to well paid college professors who are in good health and already have it. For the person who is sick or petrified of getting sick, it doesn't feel quite as abstract.

This gets to the very essence of what drives me nuts about Randians. Their concept of "liberty" is the most cramped, narrow definition one can possibly fit into an plutocratic system.

Scott Lemiuex answers:

Universal health care has freedom-enhancing properties in a lot of ways: it allows you to move, or engage in entrepreneurial activities, without losing the employer-based coverage that is the only practical means of obtaining insurance for those who aren’t poor or extremely wealthy. Mobility, particularly in American constitutionalism, has always been a treasured liberty. Bankruptcy is, to put it mildly, detrimental to liberty in all kinds of ways. Beyond that, whether you want to call the security that comes from health coverage freedom-enhancing is a matter of taste, but this security is certainly more valuable to most people that the “freedom” of knowing that you can be bankrupted by an accident or unforeseen illness.

The even bigger problem here is that the rugged individualists who go without health insurance are not making a “choice” to be free of state constraint and state-provided benefits. They are, in fact, making a choice to stick the taxpayers with the bill if they have a medical emergency. Even a moderately sophisticated libertarian understands that the “freedom” to free ride is no freedom at all.

Perhaps Althouse, like the judicial idol she defended so feebly, would prefer a libertarian dystopia in which people who aren’t lucky enough to have taxpayer-funded health insurance are just left to die from accidents or treatable illnesses. But whatever they would like the policy baseline to be, what matters both for public policy and for the question of whether the mandate is a necessary and proper part of a concededly constitutional regulatory framework is what the policy baseline under federal, state, and common law actually is.

At the moment, that general social framework requires that we don't allow people to die in the street for lack of health insurance.

But if the Randroids have their way, that will change. They're just preparing the ground.And the silly Tea Partiers will be happy to help them because they believe they will never be among those who are on the losing side of that game. Maybe they feel "free" in making that choice, but it's a damned shame their twisted brand of "freedom" results in the suffering of millions of others.


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digby 4/03/2012 09:20:00 AM |

 
Only in Arizona

by David Atkins

Viva Jon Stewart:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

God forbid anyone call Republicans institutional racists. That would be deeply unserious, horribly divisive and terribly partisan.


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thereisnospoon 4/03/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Monday, April 02, 2012

 
Fundamentalist bedfellows

by digby

This is nice:

That's the gay pride flag flying over a military installation in Afghanistan.

Tony Perkins of the family research council is very upset:

PERKINS: Where is the concern now for angering Afghan Muslims, who vehemently oppose homosexuality? The issue is as much an issue of military security as it is of religious morality. After February’s accident with the Korans, American lives were lost. What price will we pay because some want to use the military to show their gay pride?

Let's call him Tony "Neville Chamberlain" Perkins from now on, ok?

I think Tony's coming perilously close to suggesting that Americans should adopt Sharia Law, don't you think? But then, there's nothing new in that. If there's any group that hates gays as much as the Taliban, it's Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council. In fact, they share a whole bunch of conservative religious values. It's a natural that they'd hook up eventually.

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digby 4/02/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
The BS Cult

by digby

Stan Collender makes the important observation that some of the most deluded, fringe characters in politics today are the deficit scolds who have turned Simpson-Bowles into a religion:

B-S and some of their biggest supporters then made a huge mistake when they expressed surprise and extreme disappointment that the Obama administration didn't make the co-chairs' recommendation the basis of its fiscal 2012 budget, that is, the first one it submitted after the commission ended.

That demonstrated a level of political tone deafness that seriously hurt the credibility of what had now become a B-S cult. They were seriously suggesting that the Obama White House unilaterally support the tax increases and spending cuts included in the two co-chairs' plan even though it was virtually guaranteed that the GOP would never agree to do the same and would punish Democrats for doing so.

The B-S cult also showed its political naivete by pushing ahead and suggesting that voter support for deficit reduction was large enough to protect the president and that he would thrive politically if he just supported what the co-chairs' had recommended. The Bowles-Simpson insistence that there was a large, vocal constituency for substantial spending reductions and tax increases when even the results in their own commission, let alone the results of the past 30 years, proved just the opposite and made it easy for the White House, House, Senate, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives and just about everyone other than members of the cult to dismiss the B-S cause as nothing more than a political fringe effort.

In other words, the B-S "brand" was irreparably damaged. Instead of being commonly accepted as a sincere effort by well-meaning people to come up with a deficit reduction plan that could be supported by both political parties, had a chance of succeeding and, therefore, was something that many people wanted to be associated with, B-S became synonymous with bad politics and worse political judgment. That made it easy for members of Congress to run away from anything associated with it.

The fact that B-S supporters had become more of a political cult who drink their own Kool-Aid and believe what they're saying when few others do was put on display for all to see last week when something called Bowles-Simpson was offered as an amendment when the House debated the fiscal 2013 budget resolution.

By the time the B-S amendment was announced, it was already clear that no amendment had any chance of beating the plan put together by Paul Ryan and offering it made no sense because it was guaranteed to fail. Moving ahead was the budget equivalent of a presidential candidate deciding to run in a primary that she or he has absolutely no chance of winning. Not only are the results bad, but it raises serious questions about the quality of the decision making that led to entering the race in the first place.

In other words, B-S supporters again looked and sounded politically tone deaf and not ready for prime time.

Read the whole thing. It's a refreshing bit of clarity. It's so nice to see someone point out that the so-called moderates and centrists are deluded and incompetent, along with being wrong on the merits. If only the rest of the political establishment knew this.

Unfortunately, it would appear that we can add Nancy Pelosi to the cult of BS:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday threw her support behind the sweeping budget proposal crafted by President Obama's fiscal commission, a plan she once deemed "simply unacceptable."

The California Democrat said she only voted against a budget amendment Wednesday that was based on the recommendations of fiscal commission co-chairmen Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles because the package had been altered.

The budget amendment, sponsored by Reps. Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), was a "caricature" of the Simpson-Bowles plan, Pelosi charged. She said she would have supported the original plan had it been offered up for a vote.

"They advertised it as Simpson-Bowles, but they changed the spending and revenue provisions in it, and so it did not receive support on either side of the aisle because it was not a good idea," Pelosi said during her weekly press briefing in the Capitol.

"I felt fully ready to vote for that [Simpson-Bowles] myself, thought it was not even a controversial thing. But it is not what that is," she added. "And swings of tens-of-billions of dollars mean something in terms of the lives of the American people."

Pressed if she would have supported Simpson-Bowles in its initial iteration, Pelosi said, "Yes, yes."

I'm told that she wasn't really referring to Simpson Bowles but rather the general concept of a "Grand Bargain." That's not exactly reassuring.

The only good news here is that if Nancy Pelosi says that Simpson-Bowles is a terrific plan, you can bet that the Republicans will double their efforts to oppose it. Hopefully, Pelosi was being more clever than we think.


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digby 4/02/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
Whither moderates?

by David Atkins

E.J. Dionne has a good piece in the Washington Post today, touching on the alarming rightward lurch of the last twenty years. After noting the remarkable conservative shift in conservative budgets and in SCOTUS arguments on the Affordable Care Act, Dionne points out the obvious:

A small hint of how this push to the right moves moderates away from moderation came in an effort last week to use an amendment on the House floor to force a vote on the deficit-reduction proposals offered by the commission headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton.

You learned only in paragraphs buried deep in the news stories that the House was not even asked to consider the actual commission plan. To cobble together bipartisan support, sponsors of the ersatz Simpson-Bowles amendment kept all of the commission’s spending cuts but slashed the amount it prescribed for tax increases in half. See how relentless pressure from the right turns self-styled moderates into conservatives? If there’s a cave-in, it’s always to starboard.

Note how many deficit hawks regularly trash President Obama for not endorsing Simpson-Bowles while they continue to praise Ryan — even though Ryan voted to kill the initiative when he was a member of the commission. Here again is the double standard that benefits conservatives, proving that, contrary to establishment opinion, Obama was absolutely right not to embrace the Simpson-Bowles framework. If he had, a moderately conservative proposal would suddenly have defined the “left wing” of the debate, just because Obama endorsed it.

This is nuts. Yet mainstream journalism and mainstream moderates play right along.

Liberal bloggers have been pointing this out for almost a decade now. Just as with "he said she said" journalism, increasingly those complaints have started to become acknowledged in more "serious" traditional sources.

But what of so-called moderates? At some point even the devotees of the High Broderist church must realize that despite their self-satisfaction at avoiding nasty "partisanship" and "labels," they're going to boil in this pot just like the rest of us.

That's part of why we're seeing efforts like "No Labels" or candidacies like that of Linda Parks. There are a bunch of closet Eisenhower/Nixon Republicans and Reagan Democrats out there who refuse for variegated reasons to join with the progressive or even the Democratic cause, but know well that the Republicans have gone far off the deep end.

But rather than look introspectively at whether their own viewpoints might need some re-evaluation, their instinct is to put their fingers in their ears and scream "Both sides are so AWFUL! Can't we stop the partisanship?" It's the coping mechanism of a five-year-old child with cognitive dissonance.


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thereisnospoon 4/02/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Spreading freedom

by digby

So, I guess all Americans should be prepared to be strip searched if they happen to find themselves in custody, no matter what the charge or (lack of) evidence of criminal behavior:

The Supreme Court case arose from the arrest of Albert W. Florence in New Jersey in 2005. Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled his wife, April, over for speeding. A records search revealed an outstanding warrant based on an unpaid fine. (The information was wrong; the fine had been paid.)

Mr. Florence was held for a week in jails in two counties, and he was strip-searched twice. There is some dispute about the details but general agreement that he was made to stand naked in front of a guard who required him to move intimate parts of his body. The guards did not touch him.

“Turn around,” Mr. Florence, in an interview last year, recalled being told by jail officials. “Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.”

The great moderate "swing" Justice,Anthony Kennedy, who apparently believes that everyone who is taken into custody is potentially a serial killer, said;

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, joined by the court’s conservative wing, wrote that courts are in no position to second-guess the judgments of correctional officials who must consider not only the possibility of smuggled weapons and drugs but also public health and information about gang affiliations.

About 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails, Justice Kennedy wrote.

Under Monday’s ruling, he wrote, "every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed."

Well at least they didn't make cavity searches mandatory, although I can't think why they wouldn't. If it's important for police to have the ability to make suspects who are arrested on a warrant for an unpaid fine strip and "spread their cheeks", it's hard to see what the logic would be in denying them the ability to feel around. After all, he could have had a deadly weapon stashed way up in there.

This is punitive, anyone can see that. They are "breaking down" suspects with humiliation to make them docile and afraid. There is no reason to grant the police blanket permission to do this except for a naive belief that anyone who is arrested must be guilty of something.

This by the way, is a perfect illustration of modern conservatism's definition of freedom. As per the previous post, they believe it is fundamental to liberty that property and wealth be protected from government coercion. But the police powers of the state easily extend to forcing individuals who are suspected of nothing more than failing to pay a fine to get naked and spread their cheeks for a policeman.

The majority of the court, by the way, also thinks actual evidence of innocence is irrelevant in death penalty cases. They are living in another dimension.


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digby 4/02/2012 02:00:00 PM |

 
Beyond profits

by digby

Jeffrey Rosen wrote this in the NY Times Magazine in June of 2008, nearly four years ago:

Though the current Supreme Court has a well-earned reputation for divisiveness, it has been surprisingly united in cases affecting business interests. Of the 30 business cases last term, 22 were decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes.[...]

Business cases at the Supreme Court typically receive less attention than cases concerning issues like affirmative action, abortion or the death penalty. The disputes tend to be harder to follow: the legal arguments are more technical, the underlying stories less emotional. But these cases — which include shareholder suits, antitrust challenges to corporate mergers, patent disputes and efforts to reduce punitive-damage awards and prevent product-liability suits — are no less important. They involve billions of dollars, have huge consequences for the economy and can have a greater effect on people’s daily lives than the often symbolic battles of the culture wars. In the current Supreme Court term, the justices have already blocked a liability suit against Medtronic, the manufacturer of a heart catheter, and rejected a type of shareholder suit that includes a claim against Enron. In the coming months, the court will decide whether to reduce the largest punitive-damage award in American history, which resulted from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.

dday commented at the time:

And they did reduce that punitive-damage award, as we know. David Souter, one of the court's "liberals," wrote the opinion.

The hot-button issues of gun rights and Roe get all the ink, but ex-corporate lawyer John Roberts has really revolutionized the nation's highest Court, and on issues with business interests at the forefront he have shown himself and his Court extremely willing to ignore precedent and to act in an activist fashion

Luckily the moderates on the court seem to have wised up. The question is, what does the Roberts Court really think is a business interest?

I suspect that many people believed that because Obamacare was so deferential to the insurance industry --- essentially forcing 30 million new customers to buy their product, even if it might be for their own good --- that the court would naturally uphold the law. After all, it was good for business. But it didn't seem to go that way.This new article by Jeffrey Toobin about the Obamacare oral arguments shows how weird it really was:

Last week, however, the conservative Justices were showing no deference to Congress, especially on economic matters. The questions from the quartet of Kennedy, John G. Roberts, Jr., Antonin Scalia, and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., amounted to a catalogue of complaints about the Affordable Care Act. (Clarence Thomas, their silent ally, presumably was with them in spirit.) In particular, they appeared to regard the law as scandalously cruel to one party in the debate—and it wasn’t the uninsured. The Justices’ own words revealed where their sympathies lie. Roberts: “If you’re an insurance company and you don’t believe that you can give the coverage in the way Congress mandated it without the individual mandate, what type of action do you bring in a court?” Scalia: “That’s going to bankrupt the insurance companies if not the states.” Alito: “What is the difference between guaranteed-issue and community-rating provisions on the one hand and other provisions that increase costs substantially for insurance companies?” Kennedy: “We would be exercising the judicial power if one provision was stricken and the others remained to impose a risk on insurance companies that Congress had never intended.”

It would seem that no pro-business Democratic policy is going to be quite good enough to protect the oppressed minority corporations from the predations of average citizens.

There's been a lot of commentary exposing the conservative members' hackish rhetoric and ignorant lack of understanding of how the health care market works. But that's not really the issue for these people. These conservatives' first principle is that government regulation of industry is an impingement of corporations' constitutional rights.

They are as activist as it is possible for a court to be, which, let's be honest here, is not unprecedented. But while the Warren Court took up the cause of individual human rights, the Roberts Court is trying to liberate wealth and property from the shackles of forced social responsibility. It's all about rights and freedom but it depends on whether you think those concepts rightly belong to individual human beings or whether you think that business and property have a greater claim. I think it's fairly clear what this court believes.

The one argument I've heard that could lead someone to think there is a possibility that this court would temporarily stall its own long term agenda is the idea that striking down this mandate puts a big crimp in the Social Security privatization scheme and the financial industry really wants its hands on all that money. Unfortunately, their confused and misplaced worries about the insurance industry argue for the idea that their "principles", such as they are, outweigh the profits of the industries they seek to protect if those profits derive in any way from government coercion. I'm not sure even business knows where that might lead, but I'm guessing that at some point there will be some dissonance on the right.

Of course, they are also seeking to remove the government's ability provide similar services for ordinary Americans so what may seem like a principled stand against crony capitalism is really a radical plan to turn our society into a Hobbesian nightmare. If you have enough money, you have nothing to worry about.

And hey, Galt's Gulch will be there for those of you talented producers who deserve to live like dignified human beings. I suspect it will be a lot like Las Vegas but without all the icky middle class and poor people.

Update: I have a sneaking suspicion that the president lecturing the Court about legitimacy and judicial activism might not carry a lot of weight with them.

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digby 4/02/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Quote 'O the Day

by digby

ABC News

Ann Romney asked about Romney being "too stiff": "I guess we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out because he is not!"

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digby 4/02/2012 10:00:00 AM |

 
When terrorism is no big deal

by digby

And nobody gives a damn ...

Police are looking for a suspect after a bomb went off Sunday night outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Grand Chute, Wisc.

WGBA, the NBC affiliate in Green Bay, reported the explosion did only a small amount of damage to the building. The television station did not report any injuries.

What? No terrorist manhunt? Why not?

Ask yourself how this would be treated if it were an airport? Or a bank?

I realize that Planned Parenthood clinics have been getting bombed for decades and it would seem that most of the country thinks that's not a problem. Or at least Republican politicians and the religious people of the right don't since they incite this stuff on a daily basis. But still, you'd think there would be just a little bit more disapprobation. When you have the police agencies at all levels of government sparing no expense or manpower to chase down elusive threats from deadbeat muslim terrorist wannabes (not to mention innocent people)you'd think there would be a little bit more concern about a decades-long terrorist threat against American women exercising their constitutional rights. At least enough of a concern that major candidates for president of the United States wouldn't feed the flames by pandering to the would-be terrorists.

Update: Let's just say it also isn't helpful when major newspapers run articles that are filled with misinformation and lies on the subject.

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digby 4/02/2012 09:00:00 AM |

 
If only they had nominated a more conservative candidate

by David Atkins

Much has been written already about the Gallup results showing President Obama up by 9 over Mitt Romney in a poll of twelve battleground states. The lead is largely due to an overwhelming 60%+ lead by Obama among women under the age of 50--a major shift since mid-February when less than half of women under 50 supported the President:

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Romney's main advantage is among men 50 and older, swamping Obama 56%-38%.

Republicans' traditional strength among men "won't be good enough if we're losing women by nine points or 10 points," says Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush. "The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us … and Republicans have unfairly taken on water on this issue." [ed. note: "unfairly"? Really?]

In the poll, Romney leads among all men by a single point, but the president leads among women by 18. That reflects a greater disparity between the views of men and women than the 12-point gender gap in the 2008 election.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina says Romney's promise to "end Planned Parenthood" — the former Massachusetts governor says he wants to eliminate federal funding for the group — and his endorsement of an amendment that would allow employers to refuse to cover contraception in health care plans have created "severe problems" for him in the general election.

The usual caveats apply, of course: it's very early, these numbers will shift back and forth and up and down many times before November, et cetera. But let's postulate that the numbers in November end up similar to what we're seeing now in terms of the demographic split, and that Obama notches a moderately easy victory over Romney largely due to women.

The guaranteed conservative reaction to a Romney defeat will be to claim that they would have won with a true conservative candidate, and that nominating a "liberal" like Romney guaranteed their defeat. They would have all sorts of potential and circumstantial evidence to back that up.

But the gender disparity doesn't lie. Women hate Santorum and Gingrich more than they hate Romney. "True" conservatives play to the FreeRepublic/Limbaugh audience, which is overwhelmingly older and especially male. There is no way a candidate can win an election if they lose 6 in 10 women and younger voters.

More importantly, a party that banks increasingly exclusively on older white men for its votes is in increasingly dire straits. Digby posted recently about how the 2006 and 2008 elections may have been a mere interregnum in an era of conservative dominance. I would suggest a potential alternative: a slowly but increasingly progressive electorate, especially if you excise the amazingly retrograde phenomenon of the Deep South. One that elected Bill Clinton twice, that elected Al Gore but for a theft by the Supreme Court, and one that only barely elected conservatives based on the historical accidents of the 9/11 attacks and a cynical Mediscare backlash against a bitterly fought healthcare overhaul during a wretched economy.

From 2000 to August 2001, the Bush presidency was something of a joke. He barely held on for dear life in 2004 just a year after marshaling the nation into the invasion of Iraq, despite near comical reliance on terror alerts. In 2006 the Republicans got creamed and then once again in 2008 through the election of an African-American named Barack Hussein Obama. The fact that we're used to that name by now doesn't make it any less remarkable. Yes, there was 2010, but pundits famous and obscure alike often forget that the balance of 2010 was largely tipped by angry and scared elderly folks who bought into the Republican line that Obamacare was going to kill their Medicare and institute death panels in order to subsidize free medical care for lazy layabouts. It was not the pure conservative tea party backlash as it is often described.

Republicans have gotten some unusual lucky breaks over several cycles in the last decade and a half. But the general trend under normal circumstances looks very bad for them, and the latest Gallup polling only reinforces it. A party that is getting only more, not less conservative and increasingly reliant on the votes of old white men is a party that is in serious trouble.

That won't stop them from blaming their potential 2012 defeat on having nominated an inadequately conservative candidate, though. That's what people in denial do.


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thereisnospoon 4/02/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Sunday, April 01, 2012

 
Georgia, out of its mind

by digby

Another day, another abomination for women's rights:

After an emotional 14-hour workday that included fist-fights between lobbyists and a walk-out by women Democrats, the Georgia House passed a Senate-approved bill Thursday night that criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks.
The bill, which does not contain rape or incest exemptions, is expected to receive a signature from Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.

Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.

The bill as first proposed outlawed all abortions after 20 weeks under all circumstances. After negotiations with the Senate, the House passed a revised HB 954 that makes an exemption for “medically futile” pregnancies or those in which the woman’s life or health is threatened.

If this makes its seem like Rep. England and the rest of the representatives looked beyond their cows and pigs and recognized women as capable, full-thinking human beings, think again: HB 954 excludes a woman’s “emotional or mental condition,” which means women suffering from mental illness would be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. It also ignores pregnant women who are suicidal and driven to inflict harm on themselves because of their unwanted pregnancy.

In order for a pregnancy to be considered “medically futile,” the fetus must be diagnosed with an irreversible chromosomal or congenital anomaly that is “incompatible with sustaining life after birth.” The Georgia “fetal pain” bill also stipulates that the abortion must be performed in such a way that the fetus emerges alive. If doctors perform the abortion differently, they face felony charges and up to 10 years in prison. Given all this, the so-called compromise suddenly does not look like much of a bargain.

I'd say so. I don't know what this means in terms of medical procedures, but I don't understand it. They allowed abortion when the fetus cannot live after birth but they are requiring that the fetus be delivered alive? Is this so that these fetuses can be put on life support? What's the logic here except to make the woman feel as terrible as it's possible to make her and interfere again in a medical procedure they have no expertise (or business) interfering with. These laws are just ghoulish.

Oh, and in case this falls into the "who cares" side of the ledger for you, how about this?

Although not as emotional, a similarly controversial debate has been had about proposed cuts to unemployment benefits.

House Bill 347 was proposed because Georgia needs to repay more than $700 million it borrowed from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits during the Great Recession. Supporters of the bill say they are trying to do that without putting too much pressure on businesses still trying to recover.

HB 347, as a compromise, would not delay distributing the first unemployment check by a week as was originally proposed. However, unemployment payments would drop from 26 weeks to a sliding scale of 14 to 20 weeks. It also would increase the amount taxed for unemployment insurance.

Georgia's unemployment rate stands at about 9.1 percent, above the 8.3 percent U.S. jobless rate.

The good news is that they decided not to cut people off who are already in the system. It's just for the new lucky duckies. At 9.1 unemployment that adds up to quite a few people.

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digby 4/01/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Choices

by David Atkins

It's amazing the choices people make. Michele Bachmann agrees:

BACHMANN: One argument that the government was trying to make is that somehow health care is uniquely different. That government can regulate it because everyone participates. Health insurance is not uniquely different. It’s still an opportunity that some people choose to engage in, but 40 million people do not. And the premise was made that people don’t buy insurance because they can’t afford it. That’s not true. There are people who just decide they want to roll the dice and take their chances that they won’t need insurance.

You know, that's totally true. I know a few people who can afford a Bentley but don't drive one. They choose to go without a Bentley. Which also means that the other 300 million Americans who don't own a Bentley simply choose not to drive one. Money's no object: they just roll the dice on a less prestigious car. Their loss.

Choices, choices, choices...


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thereisnospoon 4/01/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
"The character assassination of a dead 17 year old boy"

by digby

Chris Hayes on the backlash:

It was inevitable, I'm sorry to say.

I don't know how many of these awful people are out there, but they're out there. All you have to do is read the comment sections of any major news site and right wing blog to see them.

Those right wingers who are smearing the victim and tendentiously lecturing everyone about the presumption of innocence for George Zimmerman are the same ones, by the way, who say that anyone the government designates a terrorist is automatically guilty and has no rights. They always seem to rediscover due process when it suits them.

*For the record, I don't know if George Zimmerman is a racist or if he really believes he acted in self-defense. But there is no doubt that he shot and killed an unarmed 17 year old boy and that fact alone should require that he be subjected to more than a perfunctory police interview and set free.

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digby 4/01/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Indisputable proof

by digby

I love this:

Jose Hernandez (D), who is looking to unseat Rep. Jeff Denham (R-CA), has released a video defending his claim that he is in fact an astronaut. A Sacramento law firm asked a judge to block describing himself as such because he left NASA.

Needless to say, the judge declined the sleazy despicable Republican law firms' request.

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digby 4/01/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
When everything is possible

by digby

This piece in today's NY Times about fathers, sons and baseball is just wonderful.It's written by Irish immigrant Colum McCann draws a beautiful picture of childhood, family and memory.

As the years went on, baseball surrounded me more and more. My son began listening to the radio late at night, under the covers. There was something gloriously tribal about the Yankees for him. He learned to imitate John Sterling, the radio announcer. It is high, it is far, it is gone. An A-bomb from A-Rod. He began playing the game too, and so I would walk to Central Park with him. How far was my own father on the street behind me, juggling a soccer ball at his feet? How far was my dead grandfather?

We become the children of our children, the sons of our sons. We watch our kids as if watching ourselves. We take on the burden of their victories and defeats. It is our privilege, our curse too. We get older and younger at the same time.

I never meant to fall in love with baseball, but I did. I learned to realize that it does what all good sports should do: it creates the possibility of joy.

As a child my husband did the same thing with his dad, a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and jazz musician who had followed the team out to Los Angeles and then settled in Las Vegas where he could escape the stultifying conformity of the his small town, east coast upbringing. (In those days, the Dodger games were broadcast all over the Southwest.) And even today, much older than his father was then, I can see a vestige of that little kid every spring when the first exhibition games are played and the whole world seems for a minute as if it has another chance. He even listens on a solar transistor radio rather than the sleek smartphone App. I guess it's something about the sound of Vin Scully's voice coming through the tinny speakers that makes it right.

Anyway, it's a beautiful piece that's worth reading on a Sunday spring morning even if you aren't a baseball fan.

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digby 4/01/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
Questioning the generals

by digby

I wondered how long it would take before he backtracked on this:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said Sunday he misspoke earlier in the week when he accused military officials of not being honest about the Pentagon budget.

“I really misspoke,” Ryan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I didn’t mean to make that kind of an impression. So, I was clumsy in how I was describing the point I was trying to make.”

On Thursday, the Wisconsin congressman said senior military leaders had been misleading when they defended a decrease in Pentagon spending proposals. He argued that the generals were not “giving us their true advice” and accused them of toeing an administration line.
[...]
On Sunday, Ryan told CNN Chief Political Correspondent Candy Crowley that he called [General]Dempsey to apologize and clarify his comments.

“What I was attempting to say is, President Obama put out his budget number for the Pentagon first, $500 billion cut, and then they began the strategy review to conform the budget to meet that number,” Ryan said. “We think it should have been the other way around.”

On the same program Sunday morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also commented on the stir surrounding Ryan’s remarks.

“I think we have to take the generals' word as they give it to us,” he said. “We're going to move in the direction of making sure that America still is No. 1 in the world in defense, and the defense sequester, which I suspect Congressman Ryan was referring to, is something that many of us are looking at as something that could put us in a position to no longer be No. 1.”

Calling Generals liars is treasonous in the Republican Party. I was fairly shocked that he went there and that he took this long to walk it back.

This is also why if anyone believes that today's conservatives will ever stop agitating for wars and start voting for defense cuts they are cracked. Yes, they will say certain things along those lines if it suits them in the moment to trip up the other side. They are even known to do it just to create dissonance among their political opponents. But when push comes to shove they will always be on the side of authoritarian force and that means support for cops, military and wars. It's definitional.

Ryan won't make that mistake again.

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digby 4/01/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
More Job-Killing Regulation. Oh, wait...

by David Atkins

Remember how the EPA refused to regulate the neonicotinoid pesticides that killing all the bees?

Well, now it's the FDA's turn. From the OnEarth blog:

BPA is here to stay. This afternoon, federal regulators rejected a request to remove the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol-A from all food and drink packaging, including can linings and plastic bottles.

Officials say there’s not enough scientific evidence to justify taking action, despite the widespread health concerns of doctors and public health advocates who supported a ban. ("Ludicrous," "bogus," "illogical," were some of the responses from scientists and health authorities to the decision.)

"While evidence from some studies have raised questions as to whether BPA may be associated with a variety of health effects, there remain serious questions about these studies, particularly as they relate to humans," the Food and Drug Administration said in its response to a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth).

FDA said it will continue to study the matter, though if its record on BPA is any indication, a change in tune could be a long time coming. NRDC asked the agency to ban BPA from food containers back in 2008. By law, the agency had 180 days to act. Instead, it did nothing, even failing to open the question to public comment. After two years passed and the evidence of BPA’s danger mounted, NRDC sued.

It took a judge’s ruling to force the FDA to make a decision. March 31 was the court-imposed deadline.

But maybe the NRDC is a crazy hippie organization that doesn't know what it's talking about and is being alarmist. Corporate America knows these chemicals aren't dangerous. If they were, companies would be getting rid of them to avoid the potential for lawsuits. Oh, wait:

Many companies have already responded to consumer demand by removing BPA from their products. In 2008, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Toys "R" Us said they began phasing out bottles, sippy cups and other children's items containing BPA. By the end of 2009, the six leading makers of baby bottles in the United States went BPA-free. Earlier this month, Campbell Soup said it would begin removing BPA from its most-popular soups, though it did not set a time frame.

Either the Obama Administration has control of agencies like the FDA and EPA or it doesn't. If this were going on under the Bush Administration, it would rightly be accused of kneecapping them via corporate collusion. If the Obama Administration wishes to avoid the same accusation, it may want to step in with a heavier hand.

It's not as if the conservatives aren't already peddling rhetoric about eliminating regulatory organizations, anyway. There's not much to lose.


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thereisnospoon 4/01/2012 07:30:00 AM |