Hullabaloo

Thursday, April 26, 2012

 
Unfunny Twits

by digby

It's been obvious for decades that there is a painfully puerile streak in the right wing. All you have to do is listen to the creepy, juvenile insults of Rush Limbaugh on any given day (like today) to get the picture. Ann Coulter and Dana Loesch are simple clowns. The twitter wars are rife with headache inducing "I know you are but what am I" exchanges.

But Monica Crowley never struck me as a member of the braindead junior high insult club until today:

Fox News' Monica Crowley reacted to news that Sandra Fluke is engaged by tweeting "To a man?" on Thursday.

Fluke, a Georgetown law student, stepped into the national spotlight when Rush Limbaugh attacked her as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for advocating employer-covered contraception. On Thursday, it was announced that Fluke is engaged to her long-time boyfriend.

It's just such an incredibly lame Limbaugh-esque insult. Fluke, after all, was called a "slut" for days on Limbaugh's show for allegedly demanding her birth control be paid for.("She can hardly walk, she's been having so much sex!") Now she's a lesbian?

Crowley, naturally, replied by saying that "the left" doesn't have a sense of humor. But on some level she must realize that she's sunk so low that she's just another right winger vomiting up an insult that doesn't make sense, even by their own low standards.

Try to keep up, conservatives: lesbians who are also "sluts" don't need birth control to prevent pregnancy. They might need it for health reasons, but any promiscuous behavior will not be affected by their access to contraception. So, if you're going to insult someone as a slut for advocating for birth control, calling them a lesbian a month later just makes you look stupider than you already look. Which I wouldn't have thought possible, since needing affordable birth control doesn't make you a slut in the first place --- and even if Fluke were a lesbian, who gives a damn? Peeling back the layers of idiocy in these insults could take days.

Twitter is a weird medium for certain people. There's something about it that just connects directly to their ids, and they can't help but let their real selves show. They seem to think they're just hanging out with their pals and they talk the way they usually do. It's very revealing. Of course Monica Crowley did work for Richard Nixon, so she learned at the Master's feet.


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digby 4/26/2012 06:30:00 PM |

 
A True National Treasure

by digby

It's not like they don't know exactly what they're going to get when they invite him ....

TIME'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE

APRIL 24, 2012

SPEAKER: STEPHEN COLBERT

MR. STEPHEN COLBERT: Thank you, very much. Lovely.

Good evening, and congratulations my fellow influencers. How is everyone feeling this evening?

Oh, come on, you could do better than that? Look at this room. Look at this people. Look at the view. You are the TIME 100, and we are better than other people. I'll say it, it's just us chickens. No one is live blogging this, right? You're on your honor. And I don't know about you, but it is such a relief to be away from the kind of riffraff who aren't influential enough to make the list. People like the Pope and Oprah. The Poprah.

You know, it's actually a bit dangerous to have this many influential people in the room. What if something should happen? It would wipe out the world's supply of influence. That's why some members of the TIME 100 are not here tonight, we have sequestered Warren Buffett and Viola Davis and in an undisclosed location in case we need to repopulate the world with influentialness.

That's right, Warren Buffett made the list. You know, who didn't? His secretary. That's why he gets to pay less in taxes, he earned it.

But we're not just icons tonight. According to TIME, we are also breakouts, and pioneers, moguls, and leaders. So remember, tonight, don't forget to mingle outside your category. Moguls, hook up with the pioneers, see if you can make a monguneer.
It would be fun to watch. I don't want to brag, but I happen to be on the list for the second time. Anybody else? Show of hands? Anybody else, the second time? We are an elite club. One more and we get a free hoagie.

Secretary Clinton was on the list for the seventh time. She had to leave earlier. Still is an honor to have met her. She's a feminist icon, a role model for so many women. Like the one young woman here tonight who bravely stepped into the media spotlight this year, and was immediately labeled a slut. I'm talking, of course, about Chelsea Handler.

Chelsea, you handled that with such poise. The horrible, horrible things that were said about you, tramp,gutter skank, and a lot of those were you talking about yourself. Brava, madam, you're a feminist icon.

Also, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke is here tonight. Also an instant, instant feminist icon. Famously tested, testified before Congress, that Georgetown, a Catholic institution, should be required to provide insurance coverage for her birth control.
Now, TIME 100 honoree, his eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan disagrees -- sir, lovely to see you again.

Of course, now some, some critics have said in response to this that if the Catholic church's insurance does not cover Sandra Fluke's birth control, it shouldn't cover Cardinal Dolan's Viagra.

Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, that's called celibacy plus. That's how the pros do it. Because chastity is one thing, but it shows true commitment to uphold your vows when you are sporting a crook you could hang a lighter on. Oh, wow, see you at mass on Sunday, sir?

I hope he doesn't become Pope.

I'm a Catholic, it's okay. I go to confession, it will be fine. Thank you.
And I am so happy that the TIME 100 included a true Christian role model this year, his holiness Tim Tebow. Is he here? Is Tim Tebow here, anyplace? Is he not?

Well, that just proves that they really shouldn't put Jesus on the list because, according to Tim, he did all the work, and you know, you know Jesus would have shown up to this dinner. Jesus loves Louie CK. He does, Louie. Jesus loves you. And he is always standing before you. And he's waiting for you. Open the door. Let him in, Louie. Let Jesus in.

He'd also like to you masturbate less, or at least stop talking about it publically. You have children. Okay, would you think about it? Okay.

Of course, all of us should be honored to be listed on the TIME 100 alongside the two men who will be slugging it out in the fall: President Obama, and the man who would defeat him, David Koch.

Give it up everybody. David Koch.

Little known fact -- David, nice to see you again, sir.

Little known fact, David's brother Charles Koch is actually even more influential. Charles pledged $40 million to defeat President Obama, David only $20 million. That's kind of cheap, Dave.

Sure, he's all for buying the elections, but when the bill for democracy comes up, Dave's always in the men's room. I'm sorry, I must have left Wisconsin in my other coat.

I was particularly excited to meet David Koch earlier tonight because I have a Super PAC, Colbert Super PAC, and I am -- thank you, thank you -- and I am happy to announce Mr. Koch has pledged $5 million to my Super PAC. And the great thing is, thanks to federal election law, there's no way for you to ever know whether that's a joke.

By the way, if David Koch likes his waiter tonight, he will be your next congressman.
Craig Newmark is here someplace. Craig Newmark, there you are, Craig. Nice to see you again, my friend, founder of Craig's List, recent TIME 100 honoree.

This year Craig's List made the decision to no longer accept prostitution ads. It was the right thing to do, though, of course -- no, give it up, it was the right thing to do. Though, ofcourse, it was hard on the Secret Service.

They left with Secretary Clinton, right? Good. Okay.

Of course, the founder of Huffpo, AriannaHuffingpo, is here, looking down on all of us lowly TIME 100s, as she silently strokes her new Pulitzer in her mind.

Interestingly enough, the Pulitzer Committee did not give out an award for fiction this year, which is surprising since both Rumsfeld and Cheney released there memoirs.
Fans of those books, are you?

Arianna, of course, is the fun table. She's sitting with Elie Wiesel, always a good time. I want to party with you, cowboy, or at least look for meaning in the Godless universe. Either way, I'll be drunk.

One of my favorite comedians Kristen Wiig is here tonight.

Kristen, congratulations on the TIME 100. Lovely to see you.

Her movie, Bridesmaids, huge success, andproved once and for all to the Hollywood boys club that women can have explosive diarrhea, too.
You are a feminist icon. Brava, madam.

But perhaps the most influential person on the list is here, Sara Blakely. The inventor of the Spanx. Give it up.

No one, no one has done more to control women's bodies, except maybe Cardinal Dolan.
Cardinal, congratulations, sir, you are afeminist icon.

Anyway, it is a true honor for all of us to be on the list, and a great business decision by TIME because given the state of the publishing industry, this might be the only way to guarantee selling 100 issues of a magazine this week.

Oh, and thank -- for the first timers, remember to keep your TIME 100 pins, it gets you 15 percent off of any hot entree at participating Applebee's.

Thank you, everyone. Congratulations to you all, and good night.

Balls of steel.

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digby 4/26/2012 04:19:00 PM |

 
A last gasp of hate

by David Atkins

Speculation has been intense about the Supreme Court's seemingly supportive reaction to AB1070, Arizona's stringent immigration law. If oral arguments are any indication, the most conservative Supreme Court in history will probably uphold the core parts of the law. That in turn has been seen as a political setback for the Obama Administration in specific, and for progressives more broadly. And on its face, that may well be accurate.

But there's another storyline here, too, reflected in the Arizona presidential polls. Two recent polls show a dead heat in Arizona between President Obama and Mitt Romney. While I wouldn't bet money on Arizona going blue this presidential cycle, the trend is as clear in Arizona as it is across much of the rest of the West: the days of the current incarnation of Republican politics are nearing a point of no return. A more liberal youth and the influx of Latino voters make that a certainty. Arizona's immigration law, far from being a harbinger of tougher restrictions down the road, is the last gasp of a dying and hateful demographic and ideology.

That's not to say that the Republican Party won't backtrack, reinvent itself, put forward more minority politicians to muddy the waters, and find other ways of dividing the population so that their rubes vote to give rich people even more money. And it's not to say that the current incarnation of the Republican Party won't have legs in many places across America for years, even a generation to come.

But it is important to note that conservatives can't keep going down this road forever. The polling in Arizona is a far better indicator of that fact than anything the Supreme Court might do this summer.


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thereisnospoon 4/26/2012 03:01:00 PM |

 
Un-American cool

by digby

If you think the 60s are dead, think again. It's not just the absurd hippie punching in the Facebook fever swamps. Take a look at this:

Karl Rove knows his people. Anyone who is genuinely comfortable with popular culture sets their teeth on edge. In fact, it's often seen as an outright threat.

I happened to watch the following with my rightwing Dad and I thought he was going to bust a gasket. Everything about it offended him from the Elvis tune to the dark glasses to the cheering audience. He would never have liked him, but this sparked a loathing for Bill Clinton so deep he was prepared to believe anything about him.

Paul Waldman has more.

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digby 4/26/2012 01:27:00 PM |

 
Liberals hate children

by digby

This is nice. I'm glad that everyone can agree that liberals are the most hate filled baby killers on the planet:

“The hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” Bryant told conservative radio host Tony Perkins on Tuesday.

Bryant touted the bill, which increases the requirements for doctors to legally perform abortions, as the “the first step” in ending abortions in Mississippi, a goal the governor campaigned on.

“We passed that bill and I think you’ll see other states follow,” Bryant said Tuesday in a video of the radio show segment posted by Right Wing Watch. “And when that happens, at least these fly-in abortionists are going to be regulated under the state laws of the Medical Procedures Act here in the state of Mississippi, as they should be across the nation.”

Well, he partly got that right. I loathe children with a burning passion and I want to kill them all, regardless of whether they are in the womb. It's just that killing them while they're inside another person is so much more enjoyable.

I'm not sure what this fellow means by the comment that "fly-in abortionists" should have to be regulated under Mississippi's state laws, but I'm guessing he meant that the federal government should enact such a law, which would be more than a little bit ironic coming from the state of Mississippi which pretty much invented the States' Rights doctrine to preserve their own right to discriminate, enslave and kill whomever they choose. Maybe he really thinks that all the other states agree with this blatant manipulation of the law to circumvent the US Constitution they claim they love, but he's got another thing coming. California's going in another direction entirely. What are they going to do about that?


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digby 4/26/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
Soft Serve Austerity

by digby

So we have disappointing news again today on the unemployment front. As Atrios points out, "it happens every spring" (lately.)

But it's important that people understand just why unemployment is as high as it is. It's not only because the invisible hand is pulling invisible strings. It's also because the government has been doing doing something very specific to make it happen: firing people, exactly the opposite of what it should have been doing.

In my piece about Krugman's various posts and articles yesterday, I mentioned this.

Here's more

from Doug Henwood:

As of March, the most recent data we have, we were 33 months into the recovery/expansion. In a “normal,” or at least average, expansion, total employment would be up 6.6% (which is why the index number on the graph is 106.6). But now it’s only up 1.8%. But there’s an enormous divergence in public and private sector employment. In an average recovery, private employment would be up 6.7% and the public sector up 6.4%. This time, though, the private sector is up just 2.7% (4 points short of the average)—but the public sector is down 2.5% (almost 9 points below average).

Putting some numbers on that, total employment is 6.3 million below where it would be in an average recovery. (As the graph shows, the decline in employment was far deeper than average, and the recovery slower to kick in.) Of that shortfall, 4.3 million comes from the private sector, and 2.0 million from the public. So the public sector is responsible for about a third of the deficiency. But that’s twice its share of total employment.

No doubt yahoos will cheer the fall in public employment as a reduction in waste—though there’s no visible payoff in private sector job growth. (Of course, the yahoos don’t care about the continued deterioration in public services.) Public sector austerity is a major drag on the job market. If public employment had merely matched the anemic growth in the private sector, the unemployment rate would be more like 7.4% than 8.2%. And if it had matched its post-World War II average, the unemployment rate would be under 7%.

Propagandists love to go on about how the socialist in the White House is scaring the private sector, leading to a hiring strike. But public sector austerity—mainly at the state and local level—is a major drag on the job market. That doesn’t get anywhere the attention that it should.

I have some sympathy for the states and cities. They are often hamstrung by balanced budget amendments and odd triggers and locks enacted by right wingers hoping for any opportunity to drown government in the bathtub (with babies and old people.) They cannot print money or borrow on the kind of terms the feds can. But there's no good reason why the Federal government isn't making up the difference. Certainly, it's ridiculous that it is operating under a hiring freeze at a time like this. But it is.

We may not have had the kind of austerity program like the UK's which has thrown them back into recession. But our government's soft-serve austerity has certainly been instrumental in keeping the US economy from rebounding.


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digby 4/26/2012 11:22:00 AM |

 
Compassionate Randroid

by digby

This is the most interesting development in right wing framing I've seen in a while. Jamelle Bouie reports:

I’m not surprised that Michael Gerson, architect of “compassionate conservatism,” has convinced himself that this generation of Republican leaders is carrying on in his footsteps (via Mike Allen):

Obama’s overreach has also produced another conservative reaction – a Reform Conservatism. The key figure here is Paul Ryan … Its brain trust includes thinkers such as Yuval Levin, James Capretta and Peter Wehner. The reform movement … looks for ways to achieve the ends of the welfare state both through more private means and more efficient public means. … Speaker John Boehner has adopted Ryan’s reform approach as the de facto ideology of the House Republican majority.

The Ryan budget does a lot of things. It flattens the tax code and dramatically cuts taxes for high-income earners. It caps federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, and it calls for higher military spending. It turns Medicaid into a block grant for the states, and gradually shifts Medicare to a private insurance plan.

He goes on to show just how absurd it is to claim that Ryan's budget will "achieve the ends of the welfare state through more private means and efficient public means." It's ridiculous on its face. Conservative philosophy doesn't believe that the ends of welfare state are even desirable, much less achievable. And Ryan's budget shows absolutely no such thing. It is a blueprint for shrinking the welfare state, period. If there's any idea that there will be a consequential private "fix" it's left to a combination of fairy dust and crossed fingers. Presumably, once the yoke of "government dependency" is removed everyone will be "free" to go out a get one of those fabulous, good paying jobs that are going unfilled.

But it's quite brilliant, nonetheless. What they are doing is appropriating the DLC mantra of the 90s.

The DLC “seeks to define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions.

This rhetoric is still floating around in the ether, just waiting for the "compassionate conservatives" to pick it up in time for the election season. If Paul Ryan puts his imprimatur on it, I have little doubt that they think they can persuade some swing voters to their side. The groundwork has been well-laid by the DLC.

They know very well that it's going to be a fools game for Democrats to try to refute this concept by citing the specifics of Paul Ryan's plans. They'll sound just like liberals did back in the 90s --- boring and hidebound and tied to policies that have been proven not to work. Everyone says that Paul Ryan is a Very Serious Person and he doesn't look at all like a hardcore extremist. Let the fresh-faced young people with new ideas have a chance!

This sort of message is one that Mitt Romney can carry much better than the ultra-conservative message of the primary campaign. He's a "private sector problem solver" who can shrink government while "innovating" with "incentives" to create jobs and protect the vulnerable. We've seen this movie before.


Update: This is rich. From Sarah Posner:

Rep. Paul Ryan has decided that he doesn't like Ayn Rand after all, because she's an icky atheist. He told National Review's Robert Costa, in advance of his speech today at Georgetown University:

"I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them," Ryan says. "They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman," a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. "But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist."

"I reject her philosophy," Ryan says firmly. "It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas," who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. "Don’t give me Ayn Rand," he says.

Ryan enjoys bantering about dusty novels, but it’s not really his bailiwick. Philosophy, he tells me, is critical, but politics is about more than armchair musing. "This gets to the Jack Kemp in me, for the lack of a better phrase," he says — crafting public policy from broad ideas. "How do you produce prosperity and upward mobility?" he asks. "How do you attack the root causes of poverty instead of simply treating its symptoms? And how do you avoid a crisis that is going to hurt the vulnerable the most — a debt crisis — from ever happening?"

First, about that "dusty novel" Atlas Shrugged: here's Ryan in a 2009 video he posted on his own Facebook page, in which he claims that contemporary America is "like we're living in an Ayn Rand novel" and that "Ayn Rand, more than anybody else, did a fantastic job explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism, and that, to me, is what matters most."

And let's not forget this.

Sarah surmises that this is also a new right wing frame: Real Catholics don't just hate abortion, they hate "statism" too.


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digby 4/26/2012 09:45:00 AM |

 
Give the people what they want

by David Atkins

The numbers are in on the California "Millionaires' Tax" initiative, and they're looking good:

Likely voters in California continue to support the tax initiative that Gov. Jerry Brown seeks to place on the ballot in November, but they have strong reservations about the provision that would raise the state sales tax.

Those were among the findings reported Wednesday in the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California's latest survey of 823 likely voters who were interviewed April 3-10 on landline and cellular phones.

The survey showed likely voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Brown initiative. It temporarily would raise the income tax rate on couples earning $500,000 a year or more and also increase the state sales tax by one-quarter cent.

Overall, likely voters supported the proposal 54 percent to 39 percent. Three-quarters of Democrats backed the idea, while nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Republicans opposed it. A slight majority (53 percent) of the key group in the middle, independents, were in support.

The survey asked respondents separately about the two components of the initiative. An overwhelming majority (65 percent) supported the notion of raising income taxes on the wealthy, while a slight majority (52) opposed the sales tax idea.

Not a surprise. Consider it data point #1,317,928 that the public supports progressive taxation and opposes regressive taxation. But that's just spoiled voters wanting to raise somebody else's taxes, right? Surely the rich already pay more than their share of the burden, right?

Not so. Per the California Budget Project, the bottom quintile of California incomes pay 10.2% of their incomes in state and local taxes. The 2nd poorest quintile pay 8.7%. The next three quintiles pay anywhere from 7.5% to 8.2%. And top quintile? The lowest rate at 7.4%.

The wealthy have it very good in California. They've got it especially good because of the 2/3 supermajority rule (created by Proposition 13) on increasing taxes in the legislature, which means that any remotely progressive taxation measure has to go straight to the voters, since Republicans control a smidgen over 1/3 of the seats in each chamber of the legislature.

The only reason the initiative might fail is because Governor Brown insisted on keeping the quarter cent sales tax provision--a move his supporters have said was necessary to avert furious opposition from the Chamber of Commerce and other conservative organizations. I'm skeptical that the conservative organizations will hold their fire regardless--and I'm also skeptical of the idea that even if the Governor were right, the full opposition of business interests would do more damage to the legislation than the sales tax itself creates.

It might be better--at the state and national level--to simply give the people what they want, especially since the people are entirely justified and fiscally responsible in demanding it. That's how democracy is supposed to work, isn't it?


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thereisnospoon 4/26/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

 

Training the worker bees

by digby

The other day I wrote about the incredible shrinking lunch hour in the workplace and g0t a deluge of emails from people telling me that this is the new normal. If you want to get ahead, you'll quickly gobble a sandwich at your desk and get right back to work. In this economy, nobody's complaining.

And they aren't likely to going forward because we're training our kids to do the same thing:

[M]oney isn't the only scarce commodity cafeteria operators have to grapple with. Another one is time. Get this:

In the Minneapolis public schools, we are supposed to have 15 minutes to eat, which would be bad enough. But realistically we get only 10 to 11 minutes (we have been timing it).

That's from Minneapolis sixth graders Talia Bradley and Antonia Ritter, writing on the op-ed page of the Minnesota Star Tribune. Ten to 11 minutes to eat lunch? Welcome to fast-food nation, kids, where eating is a necessary inconvenience, to be dispatched with as rapidly as possible.

Nationwide, similar trends hold sway. According to the School Nutrition Association, elementary-school kids get a median of 25 minutes for lunch, while middle and high school students get 30.

Over at the Lunch Tray blog, University of Iowa law professor and parent of public-school children offers the following explanation for what he calls the "incredible shrinking lunch period":

At a meeting with concerned parents, the school superintendent sympathized with our concerns, but explained how much pressure the administrators were under, because of No Child Left Behind, to raise standardized test scores. As a result, administrators felt that they had to add instructional time to the day, and there were only so many places to find those minutes. Hence the disappearing lunch and recess.

Evidently, they're extending this to bathroom breaks as well. If you can make it all the way to the end of this odd story about a kindergartner having a bathroom accident you'll find out that it happened because the child wasn't allowed to leave her desk because she was taking a test.

First of all, I didn't know kindergartners had tests. Secondly, the teacher said she wouldn't let the little girl leave the room because the kids were being trained for the three hour math tests they have to take in 3rd grade. WTH?

I guess the younger generation will be well trained to be good little worker drones. It will never even occur to them that they might need to have a real meal break in the middle of the day. Having the right to take a bathroom break was only codified in 1998, so I guess we're only backsliding a little bit on that one.

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digby 4/25/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 

Fairies dropping like flies

by digby

Premature anti-confidence fairy-ist Paul Krugman comments on the entirely predicatble news that Britain officially has a double dip recession on its hands:

When David Cameron became PM, and announced his austerity plans — buying completely into both the confidence fairy and the invisible bond vigilantes — many were the hosannas, from both sides of the Atlantic. Pundits here urged Obama to “do a Cameron”; Cameron and Osborne were the toast of Very Serious People everywhere.

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Britain is also unique in having chosen the Big Wrong freely, facing neither pressure from bond markets nor conditions imposed by Berlin and Frankfurt.

Now, the defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here.

It's hard to believe the Austerian excuse is that it's not their fault because the real pain hasn't even begun, but there you have it.

As for Murrica, Krugman has this:

That spike early on is Census hiring; once that was past, the Obama years shaped up as an era of huge cuts in public employment compared with previous experience. If public employment had grown the way it did under Bush, we’d have 1.3 million more government workers, and probably an unemployment rate of 7 percent or less.

And let's not forget that it's only thanks to the Tea Party being total morons that we were spared the full Austerian Monty. If the powers that be had had their way, our confidence fairies would all be hitting the ground and splatting at our feet as well.

Update: When academics face off:

Ben Bernanke responds to my magazine piece; as I see it, in effect he declared that he has been assimilated by the Fed Borg:

I guess the, uh, the question is, um, does it make sense to actively seek a higher inflation rate in order to, uh, achieve a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate? The view of the committee is that that would be very, uh, uh, reckless. We have, uh, we, the Federal Reserve, have spent 30 years building up credibility for low and stable inflation, which has proved extremely valuable, in that we’ve been able to take strong accommodative actions in the last four or five years to support the economy without leading to a, [indiscernible] expectations or destabilization of inflation. To risk that asset, for, what I think would be quite tentative and, uh, perhaps doubtful gains, on the real side would be an unwise thing to do.

Notice the framing — “a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate”. It’s basically an assertion that we’re doing all right, maybe could do a bit better, but not worth endangering the Fed’s reputation — oh, and as long as we don’t have actual deflation, no problem.

Read Krugman's article for the whole ugly tale. What is millions of people suffering and having their futures irrevocably altered in the face of the Fed's reputation being (further) sullied? Priorities!


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digby 4/25/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
It's Romney

by David Atkins

With Gingrich dropping out, the last sideshow in the GOP primary is gone. The Republicans have their nominee, and they'll just have to learn to love him.

Someone recently asked in the comment why the contraceptive issue had seemingly died down on the political radar. I'm sure it will be back, particularly in campaigns at the congressional level, but one reason it's gotten less play of late on the presidential level is the Romney ascendancy. The rest of the campaign for the White House is going to be fought mostly on the ground of economic justice--and while social issues obviously have an economic component, that's not quite as clear to the voters.

This would be be a lot easier if the Obama Administration had been more active on issues of economic justice, and less friendly to the interests of Wall Street. But you go to war with the army you have...


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thereisnospoon 4/25/2012 03:02:00 PM |

 
Ms Overton's right to choose

by digby

This is an interesting strategy:

As states across the country are passing laws to restrict access to abortion, California lawmakers are considering a significant expansion of who would be able to perform the procedure in the state.

Under a bill that passed its first committee hearing Tuesday, nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and physician assistants would be able to perform what is known as an "aspiration" abortion, which is the most common abortion procedure and takes place in the first trimester of a pregnancy.

The current form of the bill, SB1338 by Sen. Christine Kehoe, D-San Diego, would allow for only 41 people in the state, in addition to doctors, who have been through a pilot study on the issue to perform aspiration abortions, but backers say they expect that number to be significantly expanded as the proposal moves forward.

Also on Tuesday, an Assembly committee passed a separate bill that would expand access to birth control by allowing registered nurses to dispense the medication.

"These bills are stark contrasts to what is happening nationally and in too many states across the country," said Kathy Kneer, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, which is backing both measures...

"I'm surprised that supporters of abortion would think this is a good move. They are lessening the medical requirements for someone who can do an abortion," said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee. "That does nothing to promote safety or to protect women's health,"

Tobias said the bill, compared with what other states are doing, shows "California is out of step with the rest of the country."

The last I heard all this was supposed to be left "up to the states" so I don't think the zealots are in a position to complain.

And for all its "extremism" it's really just expanding access to a guaranteed constitutional right. Studies have shown that these medical professionals are perfectly capable of dispensing birth control and performing early abortions. The more people who are qualified and licensed to dispense birth control and perform first trimester abortions, the less likely it is that the forced childbirth zealots are able to reduce their availablility. But that won't stop thezealots from saying otherwise. After all, these are people who lie about everything in service to their "cause."


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digby 4/25/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
An epic scam across decades

by digby

Today's important factoid, from Dean Baker:

In an article on the release of the 2012 Social Security trustees report the Washington Post told readers that:

"Social Security’s bleak outlook is primarily driven by the ever-larger numbers of people in the baby boom generation entering retirement."

Actually the fact that baby boomers would enter retirement is not news. Back in 1983, the Greenspan Commission knew that the baby boomers would retire, yet they still projected that the program would be able to pay all promised benefits into the 2050s.

The main reason that the program's finances have deteriorated relative to the projected path is that wage growth has not kept pace with the path projected. This is in part due to the fact that productivity growth slowed in the 80s, before accelerating again in the mid-90s and in part due to the fact that much more wage income now goes to people earning above the taxable cap.

In 1983 only 10 percent of wage income fell above the cap and escaped taxation. Now more than 18 percent of wage income is above the cap.

This demographic "time bomb" the financial industry pushes is industry propaganda. We've known about the demographics for decades and prepared for it. The problem is our stagnant economy and a perfidious 1%, not the "math problem" they say it is.

Someone reminded me of this post by Kevin Drum from a couple of years ago that explains the fundamental issue:

In 1983, when we last reformed Social Security, we made an implicit deal between two groups of American taxpayers. Call them Groups A and B. For about 30 years, Group A would pay higher taxes than necessary, thus allowing Group B to reduce their tax rates. Then, for about 30 years after that, Group A would pay lower taxes than necessary and Group B would make up for this with higher tax rates.

This might have been a squirrelly deal to make. But it doesn't matter. It's the deal we made. And it's obviously unfair to change it halfway through.

So who is Group A? It's people who pay Social Security payroll taxes, which mostly means working and middle class taxpayers. And who is Group B? It's people who pay federal income taxes, which mostly means the well-off and the rich. For nearly 30 years, Group A has been overpaying payroll taxes, and that's allowed the government to lower income tax rates. The implicit promise of the 1983 deal is that sometime in the next few years, this is going to flip. Group A will begin underpaying payroll taxes, and the rich, who have reaped the benefits of their overpayment for 30 years, will make good on their half of the deal by paying higher income tax rates to make up the difference.

The physical embodiment of this deal is the Social Security trust fund. Group A overpaid and built up a pile of bonds in the trust fund. Those bonds are a promise by Group B to repay the money. That promise is going to start coming due in a few years, and it's hardly surprising that Group B isn't as excited about the deal now as it was in 1983. It's never as much fun paying off a loan as it is to spend the money in the first place.

But pay it off they must. The rich have been getting a loan from the middle class for decades, and the loan papers are the Social Security trust fund bonds that George W. Bush is admiring in the photograph above. Anybody who claims the trust fund is a myth is basically saying it's OK for the rich to renege on that loan.

But surely no one would ever say such a thing. Right?

As Gaius Publius from Americablog (with whom I had the pleasure of spending time with this past week-end) told me: "they just don't want to pay the money back."

It's not much more complicated than that. Between an unwillingness to properly raise the cap to keep up with the change in wage distribution and wealthy bondholders telling the rest of us "thanks very much for the nice loan but they won't be paying it back," we have a projected social security shortfall in a couple of decades right in elder years of the baby boom --- which is allowing these greedheads to argue for reducing the program even more. Sa-weeet.


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digby 4/25/2012 12:30:00 PM |

 
A Nation in Chaos

by digby

The lines aren't quite as clear, but they're still there.

If you want to see the story in each individual state, click through to this page where you will find it in interactive form. It's really quite chilling.

Not that this could in any way possibly be relevant to the issue, but still, it's interesting:

“There has been a decrease in apprehensions at the border, which points to the fact that fewer people are crossing the border,” says Pew's Ms. Cohn.

In 2005, more than 1 million Mexicans were taken into custody trying to cross the US border. By 2011, that number decreased by more than 70 percent.

Meanwhile, deportations of illegal Mexican immigrants have jumped sharply. In 2010, nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants were deported – 73 percent of them Mexicans.

In fact, this hasn't been a real problem for quite some time:

One million Mexicans said they returned from the US between 2005 and 2010, according to a new dem-ographic study of Mexican census data. That's three times the number who said they'd returned in the previous five-year period.

And they aren't just home for a visit: One prominent sociologist in the US has counted "net zero" migration for the first time since the 1960s.

One might ask why so many of these states have suddenly decided to enact these new draconian laws since the 2010 takeover by the Tea Partiers, but that would be very rude. So, I'll just re-read this instead.


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digby 4/25/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
Randian Catholicism

by digby

Via Think Progress

VOTER: Do you think that health care is a right or a privilege?

KELLY: My belief system is this. The health care for anybody but especially for our nation. The highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government. What I believe is that all things we drive, we do, health care, anything, is a privilege to some extent. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, those are inalienable rights endowed by your creator. If you’re claiming a right, if you’re going to say anything’s a right, if you’re going to say you have a right to a cell phone, then who has the responsibility to pay for it? That’s what I believe.

VOTER: So you’d put health care as a privilege then?

KELLY: Absolutely, absolutely. I believe that all things we have are. But they’re privileges you earn.

Jefferson was only talking about fetuses, you see. Our Creator endows us with an inalienable right to life but once born we must earn the privilege of keeping it.

That's Paul Ryan's Randian Catholicism in a nutshell.


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digby 4/25/2012 09:30:00 AM |

 
Family values

by David Atkins

Yesterday I wrote about the centrality of patriarchy disguised as "family values" to the conservative project of maintaining private power, be it in Rick Santorum's America or in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. I argued that in a bizarre but very real sense, keeping women oppressed was seen as central to the maintenance of conservative political and economic power. Case in point: the disturbingly American psychotic sexual politics of Iran under the Ayatollahs:

Khamenei contends that the health of the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic's well-being and is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:

In Islam, women have been prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one's physical attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be undermined.

Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women -- fitna -- is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested reelection. In other words, women's hair is itself seen as seditious and counterrevolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran's first post-revolutionary president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women's hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays.

This sort of sexual "family values" politics designed to quash female empowerment leads not surprisingly to rampant, culture-wide hypocrisy:

Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word "sexy" is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.

That's reminiscent of the fact that the leading porn consumers in the United States, per capita, are red states with hyper-religious Utah and hyper-conservative Alaska leading the pack.

I'll close with Ayatollah Khamenei:

More than Iran's enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption.… I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center said: "Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts." He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.

Substitute "America" for "Iran" and "Satan" for "America," and it sounds like something Rick Santorum might have said. Misogyny is central to the conservative social order. Take it away, and conservatism itself crumbles underfoot. The Ayatollahs know it. The Taliban know it. Rick Santorum knows it. Rush Limbaugh knows it.

And that's why, no matter how counterproductive it is for Republicans, they can't resist waging the war on women. It's of existential importance to them.


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thereisnospoon 4/25/2012 07:30:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

 
Pierce vs Douthat

by digby

Yet another in the very long list of things I didn't know: Charlie Pierce is a Christian scholar. And, as might be expected, he takes Ross Douthat's new book downtown. Hard:

[N]owhere does Douthat so clearly punch above his weight class as when he decides to correct the damage he sees as having been done by the historical Jesus movement, the work of Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman and, ultimately, Dan Brown's novels. Even speaking through Mark Lilla, it takes no little chutzpah for a New York Times op-ed golden child to imply that someone of Pagels's obvious accomplishments is a "half-educated evangelical guru." Simply put, Elaine Pagels has forgotten more about the events surrounding the founding of Christianity, including the spectacular multiplicity of sects that exploded in the deserts of the Middle East at the same time, than Ross Douthat will ever know, and to lump her work in with the popular fiction of The Da Vinci Code is to attempt to blame Galileo for Lost in Space. First, he offers a threadbare explanation for why Pagels is wrong in her assessment of the early Gnostic texts. (His argument: St. Paul says they're wrong.) He describes the eventual calcification of the sprawling Jesus movement into the Nicene Creed as "an intellectual effort that spanned generations" without even taking into account the political and imperial imperatives that drove the process of defining Christian doctrine in such a way as to not disturb the shaky remnants of the Roman empire. The First Council of Nicaea, after all, was called by the Emperor Constantine, not by the bishops of the Church. Constantine — whose adoption of the Christianity that Douthat so celebrates would later be condemned by James Madison as the worst thing that ever happened to both religion and government — demanded religious peace. The council did its damndest to give it to him. The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways, but Constantine was a doozy. Douthat is perfectly willing to agree that early Christianity was a series of boisterous theological arguments as long as you're willing to believe that he and St. Paul won them all.

This is about a subject about which I know almost nothing. But when Charlie Pierce writes about it, I want to know more. It's a wonderful piece for all sorts of reasons and you should read the whole thing.

As I said, this is not my field, but I do know this: anyone who thinks that Catholics had it better in the past in America are drinking communion wine spiked with acid. I just ain't so.


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digby 4/24/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
Jesuit snap

by digby

Georgetown calls out the Great Randian Hope:

Dear Rep. Paul Ryan,

Welcome to Georgetown University. We appreciate your willingness to talk about how Catholic social teaching can help inform effective policy in dealing with the urgent challenges facing our country. As members of an academic community at a Catholic university, we see your visit on April 26 for the Whittington Lecture as an opportunity to discuss Catholic social teaching and its role in public policy.

However, we would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has wisely noted in several letters to Congress – “a just framework for future budgets cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor persons.” Catholic bishops recently wrote that “the House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria.”

In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.

Cuts to anti-hunger programs have devastating consequences. Last year, one in six Americans lived below the official poverty level and over 46 million Americans – almost half of them children – used food stamps for basic nutrition. We also know how cuts in Pell Grants will make it difficult for low-income students to pursue their educations at colleges across the nation, including Georgetown. At a time when charities are strained to the breaking point and local governments have a hard time paying for essential services, the federal government must not walk away from the most vulnerable.

While you often appeal to Catholic teaching on “subsidiarity” as a rationale for gutting government programs, you are profoundly misreading Church teaching. Subsidiarity is not a free pass to dismantle government programs and abandon the poor to their own devices. This often misused Catholic principle cuts both ways. It calls for solutions to be enacted as close to the level of local communities as possible. But it also demands that higher levels of government provide help -- “subsidium”-- when communities and local governments face problems beyond their means to address such as economic crises, high unemployment, endemic poverty and hunger. According to Pope Benedict XVI: "Subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa.”

Along with this letter, we have included a copy of the Vatican's Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by John Paul II, to help deepen your understanding of Catholic social teaching.

Paul Ryan responded by saying this:

"Chairman Ryan remains grateful for Georgetown's invitation to advance a thoughtful dialogue this week on his efforts to avert a looming debt crisis that would hurt the poor the first and the worst. Ryan looks forward to affirming our shared commitment to a preferential option for the poor, which of course does not mean a preferential option for bigger government."

No word on what to do with the poor (also known as moochers, looters and parasites) but I'm sure he has some ideas.

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digby 4/24/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
The greatest revolution

by David Atkins

Mona Eltahawy's heartrending piece in Foreign Policy on misogyny in the Middle East is just another reminder of something that has become increasingly obvious: while racial and religious tyranny are standard practice in conservative societies, the deepest core of the conservative impulse lies in misogyny.

As Corey Robin often points out, conservatism is at its core about the maintenance of private power. Government is hated by conservatives when it interferes with the free exercise of private power even at the expense of others; it is beloved by conservatives when it helps private power extend its control and influence.

There is nothing more central to the conservative concept of private power than the traditional family. In the West, "traditional" family has been redefined to "nuclear family," but make no mistake: "traditional" family in the true sense of the word means the most patriarchal form possible, including polygyny and child marriage. That's why the most conservative fundamentalist movements, wherever they may be found, always revert back to this form. When conservatives talk in such glowing terms about "traditional family," they do so because the family unit constitutes the most basic private unit. And they know exactly who, in their mind, belongs in charge of that unit: men.

Women's rights constitutes an assault on their control not only of women's bodies, but of the most basic unit of private power. To assault that is in a very real sense to assault the entire conservative enterprise. If the Enlightenment and state interference to protect women's rights can intervene in even this most sacred of units, then no piece of private power infrastructure is safe. If the man can be torn down as king of his castle--a private power arrangement that has been in place for millennia--how much less safe are investment bankers at the top of their own very recent artificial dungheap?

The right to misogyny, then, must be defended at all costs: the more conservative the society, the stronger the misogyny. And the stronger the conservative impulse, the violently will the misogynistic impulse be defended.

Whether in Santorum's America or Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, this impulse is the same. It's the last, greatest stand of conservative power. And it's here that the greatest revolution against conservatism must be undertaken. It's not an overstatement to suggest that the powerful psychological elements of conservatism will have been broken when the undertrodden and underrepresented 50% of the population finally achieves equal rights and standing throughout the world.


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thereisnospoon 4/24/2012 03:16:00 PM |

 
Where's my conscience exception?

by digby

I guess those taxpayers who aren't Christians are just out of luck. Your tax dollars are going to promote and support Christianity whether you like it or not:

If you want to help carry out the anti-abortion mission of the taxpayer-funded Care Net Pregnancy Resource Center, you have to be a Christian.

It's right there on the Rapid City, S.D., center's volunteer application.

"Do you consider yourself a Christian?" "If yes, how long have you been a Christian?" "As a Christian, what is the basis of your salvation?" "Please provide the following information concerning your local church. Church name … Denomination ... Pastor's name." "This organization is a Christian pro-life ministry. We believe that our faith in Jesus Christ empowers us, enables us, and motivates us to provide pregnancy services in this community. Please write a brief statement about how your faith would affect your volunteer work at this center."

But that hasn't stopped the center from receiving federal funding and other forms of government support.

In 2010, it was awarded a $34,000 "capacity building" grant as part of President Obama's stimulus bill.

Last year, the nonprofit National Fatherhood Initiative, with "support from the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Family Assistance," awarded the center $25,000 for capacity building.

And when South Dakota passed a law requiring that women get counseling from a "pregnancy help center" before receiving an abortion, the Rapid City center was quick to sign up -- becoming one of three such facilities listed on the state's official website.

I guess that's just fine. But asking religiously affiliated employers to offer contraception coverage is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Interesting how that works.

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digby 4/24/2012 01:30:00 PM |

 
Fair'n Balanced

by digby

Colbert explains Fox News subtext:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

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digby 4/24/2012 12:00:00 PM |

 
FYI

by digby

It looks like Lila Rose is is at it again:

In recent weeks people who oppose Planned Parenthood, and our mission to provide high-quality reproductive health care, have been conducting a secret, nationwide hoax campaign in an attempt to undermine women’s access to services.

For years opponents of reproductive health and rights have used secret videotaping tactics with fictitious patient scenarios and selective editing to promote falsehoods about Planned Parenthood’s mission, services, and policies. Recently, one group has escalated these hoax visits in many states, apparently using secret recorders while inquiring about sex selection abortions. We anticipate that this group, likely in coordination with a broad range of anti-choice leaders, will soon launch a propaganda campaign with the goal of discrediting Planned Parenthood, and, ultimately, furthering legislation that blocks access to basic reproductive health care, including birth control.

We can expect this propaganda campaign to further escalate the political battles over access to health care, rather than focus on the best ways to help women and their families get the care they need.
[...]
As a women’s rights advocate for nearly 100 years, Planned Parenthood finds the concept of sex selection deeply unsettling. Planned Parenthood does not offer sex determination services; our ultrasound services are limited to medical purposes.

Apparently, this is yet another of their lines of assault against a woman's right to control her own body. I was unaware of it:

Recent attempts to restrict or deny access to safe abortion under the guise of preventing gender bias is harmful to women’s health, counter to a human rights agenda, and primarily a political tactic of groups who work to make abortion illegal. Planned Parenthood opposes legislation that intrudes on the doctor/patient relationship by requiring doctors to become investigators and patients their suspects, and that strips nonjudgmental, high-quality care from women in need.

The world’s leading women’s health and rights organizations, including the World Health Organization, do not believe that curtailing access to abortion services is a legitimate means of addressing sex selection, and are clear that gender bias can only be resolved by addressing the underlying conditions that lead to it. And we agree. We support efforts that ensure girls and women have access to economic opportunity, including fair wages, basic health care, political participation, education, and a life free of violence and discrimination. Planned Parenthood works to ensure women and their families have access to high-quality nonjudgmental health services free of coercion, supported by information and counseling.

Well, that's exactly what they don't want. So, they're doing the usual thing, trying to entrap some lone worker into saying something wrong so they can discredit the entire organization:

From the questions that were repeatedly asked in these recent hoax visits, we expect that the materials eventually released will focus on Planned Parenthood's non-judgmental discussions with the various women who posed as possible patients. So, we would like to address that subject directly.

Planned Parenthood insists on the highest professional standards, which among other things means we offer nonjudgmental, confidential care in accordance with relevant laws. That doesn’t mean we always agree with the decisions made by people who seek our help, but it does mean that we realize that we can’t know all of the circumstances faced by any patient and that requiring women to justify the care they seek is a dangerous health care model for an organization. Four decades ago women in the United States were forced to justify their decision to seek abortion to a panel of doctors, and thankfully we’ve come a long way since then. We provide information that women seek, but ultimately the decision to seek legal abortion is a private one.

Planned Parenthood has extensive guidelines and training requirements for all staff who may encounter difficult or unusual questions, such as those posed by the hoax patients. If a health center learns of an instance where a staff member has not fully followed policies or procedures, swift action is taken to remedy the situation. Our rigorous and ongoing training and quality assurance help identify potential issues, and all health centers respond to any training or personnel needs with professionalism and respect. Planned Parenthood cares about staff, and conducts retraining or other personnel action responsibly.

Basically it's just another form of harassment designed to make Planned Parenthood workers suspicious of every patient, worrying that they are being entrapped by some fanatic rather than providing care and information. If they catch some employee saying something they can edit and use against Planned Parenthood in their hoax videos, it's just frosting on the cake.

I wonder how many kids Lila Rose has adopted? It's the least she can do.


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digby 4/24/2012 11:00:00 AM |

 
Tonight's the night

by digby



It's election day in Pennsylvania, and we're about to see if the good guys can win one. We might just unseat a Blue Dog and replace him with a progressive --- something that's so unheard of the Democrats don't even think it's possible.

Yesterday the biggest newspaper in the district, the Scranton Times-Tribune endorsed Matt Cartwright against Tim Holden. Matt spent the weekend barnstorming up and down the large, sprawling district, including appearances with former Congressman Joe Sestak, who endorsed him last week. The biggest newspaper in Luzerne County, the Citizens Voice, endorsed him over the weekend, stating bluntly that "Judging by Cartwright’s campaign and Holden’s record, Cartwright would be a stronger advocate for working families in our region." Highly respected Wilkes-Barre columnist and ex-state Rep., Kevin Blaum ("The Arena"), writing for the Times Leader explained on Sunday why he's voting for Cartwright. The last polls showed that Matt was ahead of Holden and we're keeping our fingers crossed that they've held up.

If Matt wins, that will mean that Blue Dogs really are becoming an endangered species and Steny Hoyer will have a hard time sleeping tonight.

Howie says:

We've been making the case for Cartwright and why Holden is too corrupt and too conservative to be given another term in Congress. But for anyone who lives in the area-- or who has friends or relatives who live in the area-- I want to ask you to remember one final thought before voting. And it isn't even my own. This thought comes from Eugene Kiely and Ben Finley of FactCheck.org who make the point that Tim Holden is a lying sack of shit who, in his desperation, has resorted to smearing Matt Cartwright with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate bribes being sent his way by Democratic congressional corruptionist-in-chief Steny Hoyer. Their startling and horrifying report:

Rep. Tim Holden falsely claimed in a recent TV ad that his opponent won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in exchange for campaign contributions to a corrupt judge. In fact, a jury-- not the judge-- awarded $3 million to lawyer Matt Cartwright’s client in that case. The Holden campaign told us it had no evidence to prove the donation had any influence over the judge during that trial. The campaign pulled the ad after just one day on the air.

This is not the first time that the veteran Democratic congressman has accused his primary opponent, Cartwright, of making improper campaign contributions. In an earlier TV ad, Holden sought to link Cartwright to the infamous “kids-for-cash” scandal that sent two Pennsylvania judges to prison. In that ad, Holden criticized Cartwright for contributions he and his law firm made to judges who accepted kickbacks for sending juveniles to for-profit juvenile detention facilities. Again, the campaign contributions from Cartwright and his law firm were unrelated to the corruption case. It was merely a case of guilt by association.

In their own words, Holden's smear campaign against Cartwright-- who has tried to run a strictly positive campaign based on the issues and on what he can offer to Democrats in northeastern Pennsylvania-- "is the most savage example of what has been a bruising primary."

When we put up those billboards in Holden's district he cried like a baby, calling Blue America a "Super Pac" run by a "Hollywood record executive" (which only made Howie's friends in the music business actually get involved.) The Democratic Party wasn't happy either. But at some point you just have to say enough. Tim Holden isn't entitled to a seat in the US congress and his constituents are not obligated to vote for him just because he's been there.

We are cautiously optimistic. Unseating incumbents is the hardest task in electoral politics and to replace a conservative with a real progressive is very, very rare. But we might just get it done tonight.

If you feel like helping out Blue America PAC so that we can do some more of this sort of thing, you can donate here.

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digby 4/24/2012 09:27:00 AM |

 
They Know It's Wrong

by David Atkins

Krugman:

Bernanke was and is a fine economist. More than that, before joining the Fed, he wrote extensively, in academic studies of both the Great Depression and modern Japan, about the exact problems he would confront at the end of 2008. He argued forcefully for an aggressive response, castigating the Bank of Japan, the Fed’s counterpart, for its passivity. Presumably, the Fed under his leadership would be different.

Instead, while the Fed went to great lengths to rescue the financial system, it has done far less to rescue workers. The U.S. economy remains deeply depressed, with long-term unemployment in particular still disastrously high, a point Bernanke himself has recently emphasized. Yet the Fed isn’t taking strong action to rectify the situation.

The Bernanke Conundrum — the divergence between what Professor Bernanke advocated and what Chairman Bernanke has actually done — can be reconciled in a few possible ways. Maybe Professor Bernanke was wrong, and there’s nothing more a policy maker in this situation can do. Maybe politics are the impediment, and Chairman Bernanke has been forced to hide his inner professor. Or maybe the onetime academic has been assimilated by the Fed Borg and turned into a conventional central banker. Whichever account you prefer, however, the fact is that the Fed isn’t doing the job many economists expected it to do, and a result is mass suffering for American workers.

These guys know that bailing out the rich while leaving the poor and middle class to suffer is the wrong policy. Maybe Ayn Rand devotee Greenspan didn't know that, but at least Ben Bernanke does. And yet it happens anyway.

One can argue that Bernanke and friends are personally corrupt, and that's possible. But it's also possible that the system itself is so rigged against doing the right thing that people who have made their careers out of proposing mostly the right policies find themselves trapped into doing the wrong things. Washington is corrupt, but it's difficult to believe that everyone in power is that corrupted--unless every single one of us is a lot more corruptible than we believe. I tend to think the problem is systemic.

Which answer is the right one makes a huge difference in terms of how one goes about solving the problem.

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thereisnospoon 4/24/2012 08:24:00 AM |

Monday, April 23, 2012

 
Yes, they really can yodel

by digby

By popular demand: An engineers's guide to cat yodeling (with bonus cat polka)

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digby 4/23/2012 08:00:00 PM |

 
Mr Empathy

by digby

Sean Hannity today in answer to a caller who said that people couldn't relate to Mitt Romney because he'd never gone to bed hungry:

I don't believe people are going to bed hungry. Do you know how much, do you ever go shopping? I go sometimes but I hate it. Do you ever go? ... you can get, for instance I have friends of mine who eat rice and beans all the time. Beans protein, rice. Inexpensive. You can make a big pot of this for a week for negligible amounts of money and you can feed your whole family.

Look, you should have vegetables and fruit in there as well, but if you need to survive you can survive off it. It's not ideal but you could get some cheap meat and throw in there as well for protein. There are ways to live really, really cheaply.

Yes, I'll bet he goes to the grocery store often and has a ton of friends who live on rice and beans and maybe a pigs foot once in a while:

Deadline.com reported last week that Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, the crown jewels of Fox News, are close to signing new deals that could take them both at least into 2016.

The New York Times said both currently make around $10 million a year, comparable to broadcast anchors. O’Reilly has been a top rated show on Fox News for much of his run, with Hannity a solid No. 2. It’s unknown how much they’ll be making this go around though a renewal deal is likely to be wrapped up soon.

I'm guessing that if Sean's poor "friends" actually exist they're his servants. People who make 10 million dollars a year don't often socialize with people who live on rice and beans.

I guess rice and beans are probably more filling than cake, though, so that's good.

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digby 4/23/2012 06:00:00 PM |

 
From the "who could ever have predicted" files

by digby

Well, hell, why didn't somebody warn them?

Citizens from Prague to Paris to Amsterdam have made it abundantly clear in the past few days that they are tired of the economic austerity forced on them by the euro zone debt crisis.

But as the budget-cutting pain of reduced government benefits and social services brings protesters to the streets and fuels support for nationalist or far-left parties, it remains unclear what the economic alternatives might be. Rejecting austerity budgets in favor of more government spending will not ensure growth, many economists say.

Governments in countries like Spain are having enough trouble financing their existing debt, much less coming up with stimulus money. Germany, the only large country in the euro zone with the budgetary room to increase deficit spending, is not willing to do so. Neither was the Netherlands, at least until its government collapsed Monday over a dispute that essentially reflects the austerity versus growth debate.

“We are getting more and more reform fatigue,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt. “It is a problematic phase in the sovereign debt crisis.”

Financial markets were down deeply and broadly in Europe on Monday, on concerns over the austerity backlash, and the sell-off carried over to the U.S. markets. As more European countries teeter on the edge of recession or slip into one — and official figures released Monday confirmed that Spain had done so — even the policy-making elite has begun to question whether Germany and the European Central Bank have gone too far in insisting that fiscal discipline is a prerequisite to growth.

Ya think? I'm sure I don't have to tell readers of this blog just how obvious this is. But it takes your breath away to see this, written down in black and white:

[A]s the budget-cutting pain of reduced government benefits and social services brings protesters to the streets and fuels support for nationalist or far-left parties, it remains unclear what the economic alternatives might be. Rejecting austerity budgets in favor of more government spending will not ensure growth, many economists say.

I'm sure that't true. There are few guarantees in life. And you can find "many economists" who'll say anything. What one could fairly easily predict is that rejecting austerity budgets would mean less austerity. And that would make sense since austerity clearly isn't working.

This pretzel logic reminds me of one we are having in the United States today about Social Security. The new projections came out and apparently the trustees have changed the arbitrary assumptions they were using to some new arbitrary assumptions. (They are now projecting that we are all going to be much poorer overall so we'll have less money to save in our social security fund.) The final analysis is that in 2033, the fund will come up short and will only be able to pay out 3/4 of its promised benefits.

Or, as Atrios says:

Alternatively we could make people retire later and cut everybody's benefits now and give the money to rich people. Just a thought.

That is actually the plan the entire political establishment is trying to sell. Krugman put it this way:

Let us reason together*: the dire fate we’re supposed to fear is that future benefits won’t be as high as scheduled; and in order to avert that fate we must, um, guarantee through immediate action that future benefits won’t be as high as scheduled. Yay! Wait, what?

No, really. I guess there would be some virtue to making this all crystal clear well in advance, but that’s pretty second-order. Basically, the “solution” just locks in the bad things for seniors that the attackers claim will happen anyway.

Atrios also reports that Mark Warner is already out there saying the fund "runs dry" in 2033, which is a lie. But typical of our favorite centrist panic artists. Here's a perfect example of the genre:

August 28, 1996 

 CHICAGO - Sen. Bob Kerrey smells an odor coming from the Republican and Democratic stands on entitlements.

"It's one of the cruelest things we do, when we say, Republicans or Democrats, `Oh, we can wait and reform Social Security later,' " the Nebraska Democrat said.

Mr. Kerrey says that without reform, entitlements will claim 100 percent of the Treasury in 2012.

"This is not caused by liberals, not caused by conservatives, but by a simple demographic fact," Mr. Kerrey warned at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council. 

"We [will have] converted the federal government into an ATM machine."

How'd that turn out?

Eric Kingson and Nancy Altman have the detailed response to the scare stories. Whatever shortfall there is can be easily remedied without cutting benefits. They just don't want to do it.

Update: This trope that there's nothing to be done about the Eurocrisis is everywhere.  Read this by Dean Baker for the antidote.


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digby 4/23/2012 04:30:00 PM |

 
The Bush program gets a pass

by David Atkins

Oh boy. Think Progress has a great find today, quoting RNC Special Media Press Secretary Alexandra Franceschi, on the Fernando Espuelas radio show:

ESPUELAS: What do you mean by economic security? Regardless of who the ultimate nominee is, what’s the general idea that the RNC, or the Republican party in general, has in terms of this message?

FRANCESCHI: Well, it’s a message of being able to attain the American dream. It’s less government spending, which a Tarrance Group poll, came out last week actually, shows that the majority of Hispanics believe that less government spending is the way out of this deficit crisis. It’s lowering taxes so small businesses can grow and they can employ more people, because we understand that the private sector is the engine of the economy. It’s not the government. [...]

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

One of the many messaging problems of the Obama Administration has been the failure to continually remind Americans of the Bush Administration and its failures. One can argue endlessly about why the Administration has been almost as keen to put the Bush Administration down the memory hole as the Republicans have been, but whatever its causes, it has helped allow the Republican Party to rebrand itself under the Tea Party logo, and to crawl out from what should have been a decades-long political hole after the Bush Administration's domestic and foreign policy disasters.

And it's not even as if the Republicans have moderated or altered their economic program since 2008. In fact, they've doubled down on it and made it worse. Not even the Bush-Cheney team would have dared put forward the Paul Ryan budget.

FDR was able to win four terms in office, essentially running against Hooverism every time. The Republicans are still running against Jimmy Carter. The Bush Administration should hang as an albatross around the necks of Republicans for decades. Instead, they've both been allowed to rebrand themselves. RNC communications flacks are openly saying the Republicans would continue Bush policies. And Jeb Bush is seriously considering a run for office.

Can you imagine if Republicans were running against FDR in 1936 suggesting that they would pursue the same policies as Hoover, and seriously promoting Hoover's brother as a 1940 presidential candidate? Or the Democrats doubling down on cardigan sweaters and another scion of the Carter family in 1984 and 1988? It's sheer madness.

And yet modern Republicans are allowed to get away with it.


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thereisnospoon 4/23/2012 03:00:00 PM |

 
Maybe they just don't trust him

by digby


Here's Politico with a story about California congressman Dana Rohrabacher:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Monday he was denied entry into Afghanistan because of his critical views of that country’s government. 

“Apparently, [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai just goes bananas every time he hears that I might be, in some way, coming into his country,” Rohrabacher said in a phone interview with POLITICO on Monday while he waited in Qatar for a flight back to the U.S.

Rohrabacher also suspected that Karzai was picking on him because he had opened a House investigation into corruption not only within the Afghan government but also Karzai himself.

The California Republican, who chairs the committee’s oversight panel, was stopped in Dubai Friday as part of congressional delegation on its way to Kabul. “Absolutely he believes his denial is based on his vocal opposition to [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai and Dana’s relationship with the former Northern Alliance leaders,” Rohrabacher spokesperson Tara Olivia Setmayer said.

Rohrabacher was a last minute addition to the trip led by Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) when another member dropped out a few days earlier. “When Karzai found out Dana was a part of the [congressional delegation], he told the State Dept the entire CODEL would be denied if Rohrabacher was included,” Setmayer said.

Rohrabacher said that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally relayed Karzai’s message urging him not to join the delegation given how sensitive the relations between the two governments have been, particularly in light of alleged massacre of Afghan civilians by U. S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales and the accidental burning of the Koran.

“She has some things she’s trying to accomplish and this might really jeopardize some of the efforts that she’s been making and would I consider not going,” he said of his conversation with Clinton. “I was not in any way trying to hinder job and I went out of my way to make sure that that was evident.”

The BBC first reported this and I wouldn't expect them to know the whole story of Rohrabachers notorious longterm relationship with the Taliban. But you'd think the Politico would:

Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a "dual tract" policy with the Taliban.

A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, "If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy."
[...]
A November/December 1996 article in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported, "The potential rise of power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher" because the congressman believes the "Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S." Later in the article, Rohrabacher claimed that:

•Taliban leaders are "not terrorists or revolutionaries."

•Media reports documenting the Taliban’s harsh, radical beliefs were "nonsense."

•The Taliban would develop a "disciplined, moral society" that did not harbor terrorists.

•The Taliban posed no threat to the U.S.

Evidence of Rohrabacher’s attempts to conduct his own foreign policy became public on April 10, 2001, not in the U.S., but in the Middle East. On that day, ignoring his own lack of official authority, Rohrabacher opened negotiations with the Taliban at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, ostensibly for a "Free Markets and Democracy" conference. There, Rohrabacher secretly met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, an advisor to Mullah Omar. Diplomatic sources claim Muttawakil sought the congressman’s assistance in increasing U.S. aid—already more than $100 million annually—to Afghanistan and indicated that the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, wanted by the Clinton administration for the fatal bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. For his part, Rohrabacher handed Muttawakil his unsolicited plans for war-torn Afghanistan. "We examined a peace plan," he laconically told reporters in Qatar.

After Taliban-related terrorists attacked the U.S. last September, Rohrabacher associates worked hard to downplay the Qatar meeting. Republican strategist Grover Norquist told a reporter that the congressman had accidentally encountered the Taliban official in a hotel hallway.

But that preposterous assertion is contradicted by much evidence.

If you were Secretary of State would you want a guy with his history going anywhere near Afghanistan? I'd guess that nobody trusts him --- not the US government, Karzai or the Taliban. Who would?



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digby 4/23/2012 01:00:00 PM |