or, No One Ever Went Broke Scaring You Into Thinking Social Security's Going Broke
by folkbum
Every six months, I send a big chunk of dough to American Family to insure my car. That money doesn't go into a safe with my name on it. Instead, that money goes into 1) a set of investments designed to increase AmFam's long-term financial stability and 2) the settlement payouts of other clients found to be at fault. Someday, I will (sadly, not too long ago, I did) need AmFam to pay for an accident myself. When that happens, the payout will come from the immediate cashflow of the company--the premiums their other customers are paying at that moment.
If you're Ron Johnson, or Rick Esenberg, or Nick Schweitzer, or any one of countless others on the right, that makes American Family insurance--hell, any insurance--a Ponzi scheme.
For after all, Social Security, which all of the above have happily (though RoJo's backing away? maybe?) called a Ponzi scheme, does exactly the same thing. We pay into it, the SSA invests some, and they use the rest to pay out benefits to other people.
Hell, the RoJos and Esenbergs and Schweitzers of the world would have beaten George Bailey to death in the bank, screaming at him about putting their money in Joe's house.
No, actually probably not. See, there's a political advantage to trashing Social Security that doesn't exist in trashing banks and insurance companies and every other operation that exists with a similar structure. We have been told for decades that Social Security is going bankrupt and will not be there for (me, you, your children, the creepy guy next door who peeks in your window, take your pick), and it has worked. Polls consistently show that people believe remarkable falsehoods about Social Security. And when you have people scared about Social Security, there's a campaign issue for you.
To be fair to the bloggers above, they try offering arguments. Probably because they, too, believe the falsehoods and have to twist and turn to make sense. Esenberg:
People like Jay who defend the system like to say that the government won't or can't default on those bonds. It certainly can. Congress could repudiate the bonds, although it likely won't. The problem - the one that Jay elides by saying that the trust fund "can pay" out benefits for a number of years - is what it would take to pay those benefits.
The trust fund can't just write a check. It must redeem those bonds, i.e., call in the government's IOU to itself. The government can't just write a check to honor the bonds because it doesn't have the money. It must either raise taxes or borrow more money. To the extent that this cannot be done, benefits must be reduced. Thus taxpayers who have paid "extra" as "we went" really have nothing to draw on. They must either forego benefits or impose even higher taxes on younger people.
Let's pretend for a second that the trust fund isn't really what is and instead is, like my mythical AmFam payments sitting in a safe. Every dollar spent from that trust fund would have been deficit spending (or higher taxes) over the last thirty years. If it was okay (or would have been) to deficit spend back then--on star wars, the war in Iraq, "ending welfare as we know it," whatever--why is it suddenly anathema to raise taxes or deficit spend to keep a promise we've made to our elders and poor? And it wouldn't take much: Social Security will continue to draw revenue that nearly meets the promised benefits for many years, bottoming out at between 75% and 80% of benefit levels. Small tweaks now--lifting the cap on taxable income, or redefining income to include more than just wages, or pushing the payroll tax up a smidge--would make future work to meet those promises much easier (either because you believe in the trust fund or because current deficits will be lower).
Schweitzer:
My question [. . .] is... where is the choice with Social Security? Yes, Social Security doesn't deceive anyone... everyone does in fact know how it works... or at least should. But Social Security has one advantage that no privately run Ponzi Scheme has... there is no choice in whether or not you participate. I belong to an entire generation of people who truly believe that we will not get anything from Social Security. [ed: see! I told you!] I am planning my retirement on the idea that Social Security will not pay me one red cent. I have to. I know exactly how Social Security operates, and I can also see demographics and how population is changing. There simply won't be enough people to pay me once I rise to the top of the pyramid.
For this, I defer to erstwhile Republican Charlie Crist, who makes a salient point: "There are other ways we can help fund it, by creating a pathway to citizenship. [. . . I]f we have those 11 to 14 million people productively participating in the American economy and paying the payroll taxes that would be attended to it, that would help Social Security." There is a labor force in this country willing and waiting to contribute to our financial health--and Nick's financial future--but the same forces scaring the pants off of you about the safety of Social Security are also busy scaring you about the Brown Menace because, you know, that too makes a good election issue. What's good for the country is bad for electoral fortunes.
And it's those fears that RoJo and his political allies are counting on, and apparently winning, in their quest to return to the freewheeling Bush years of no regulation and vast income growth for the already well-off. Esenberg and Schweitzer have become willing tools in that quest.
I have said before that I do not envy Rick Esenberg. I like him and have enjoyed every conversation we've ever had together. He is a smart guy--I wouldn't want to go up against him when death is on the line, let's say--and an honest conservative. However, he's also the guy the less honest or smart turn to when they need to legitimize their fetishes or polish their turds.
We saw it, for example, with the Gableman-Butler Wisconsin Supreme Court race. No doubt Esenberg agreed more in philosophy with the general lean of Mike Gableman, but Gableman proved to be at best a mediocre jurist and ran a campaign of outright lies and borderline racist attacks on Justice Louis Butler. As the lawyers on the Butler side of the blogosphere showed, repeatedly, Gableman's record and his seeming knowledge of Constitutional issues was wafer-thin against what proved to be Butler's complex and thoughtful record on a wide variety of cases. But law-prof Esenberg polished the Gableman turd week after week, day after day. It was painful to watch from here.
And we're seeing it now with Sarah Palin. In this morning's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Esenberg offers "How Palin reassures, challenges the right," an op-ed that bears little relationship to objective reality. The title of the piece suggests to me, if it is not a serious warning flag to everyone else--that the op-ed is directed at readers on the right and is not intended for moderate-to-left consumption. Even so, what Esenberg is telling his fellow conservatives needs a significant unpacking, and so I offer one here. It is long, but the payoff at the end is worth the reading, trust me--stick around.
He begins simply enough:
If Ronald Reagan was the Teflon candidate, Sarah Palin is the mirrored nominee. As a Democratic friend recently suggested, the Republicans could not have invented a better foil for Barack Obama.
I am not sure who his Democratic friend is, but this suggestion--as I read it and as I understand the definition of foil here--should not reassure anyone, let alone the right. Barack Obama has proved to be the calm, bold, and, dare I say it, presidential candidate in this race. His politics are moderate (as much center as left) and policy proposals are detailed and thoughtful. Obama's risen to the challenge of every situation life has offered him, and he's overcome those challenges with aplomb. If Palin here is his foil, that suggests she's hard-right, an inch-deep, likely to go-off half-cocked, and a relative failure at everything she tries.
As it turns out, that's a fairly accurate description of Palin--but that's not where Esenberg goes with all of this. Let's see some specifics:
Although a good deal of the enthusiasm generated by her nomination was lost in the wake of the financial meltdown and her unimpressive performance in an interview with Katie Couric, her strong showing in Thursday night’s vice presidential debate reinvigorates Palin as a factor in this election and in the future of the Republican party.
I suppose that by the Courickian standard, Palin's performance on Thursday was "strong." By, say, any other objective standard ever devised, her performance was not. Snap polls suggested a solid win from Joe Biden, and further polls have also shown that the debate pushed independents more toward the Democratic ticket than toward McCain-Palin. Neither Palin nor Biden was perfect in that debate, but Palin's performance was embarrassing. When she lacked a real answer on any topic, she pivoted to one of three things: discredited attacks on Obama's character and record; the word "maverick"; or her own supposed "record" on energy. Is the topic health care? Let's talk energy. Is the topic my greatest weakness? Did you know John McCain's a maverick? You want me to answer the questions? Screw you, buddy, I'm gonna talk straight to the 'merican people.
McCain, a Republican from Arizona, called directly on Russia to "cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from the sovereign Georgian territory." He said the United States should convene an emergency session with the U.N. Security Council "to call on Russia to reverse course" and gather the North Atlantic Council to review Georgia's security and measures NATO should take.
But back to Esenberg's polish of the Palin moose patty:
It's not that she has a grating voice that bothers me. It's that she's playing up the "backwards hick" when she is not, in fact, a backwards hick. We saw Palin at the convention deliver a (pre-scripted, mostly written for someone else) speech read from teleprompters. When she was doing that, she lacked the folksy, hicksy charm. Instead, she was dead serious and her delivery, while Fargo-y, was not peppered with youbetchas and donchanos. She only turned that on during the debate. You can compare the two here yourself.
I guess the question that I keep coming back to when I hear praise for her folksy speaking style, her "joesixpackhockeymom (wink) youbetchas," I can't help but wonder what the pundit world would think were Barack Obama to swap out his standard diction (Esenberg implies this is an element of Obama's "elitist" persona) to drop into something more like the Black English Vernacular and make references familiar to black popular culture. Oh, wait, I don't have to wonder--I can just go back to the harsh criticism Obama took when he let a little Jay-Z into his campaign last April. Some of the local righties even considered that the disqualifying moment of his campaign. When Obama turns on the "black," he gets hit hard. But when Palin turns on the "backwards hick," it is a sign she's not an elitist.
From there, Esenberg directs the rest of the piece to conservatives, though he still manages to mangle some facts:
Apart from the political dynamic, there is a substantive element to the Palin nomination as well with a significance that may well extend beyond November. Her selection sends two distinct messages: one that reassures the traditional Republican base and another that challenges it.
By selecting a staunch social conservative who has reduced both spending and taxes, John McCain signaled that he had no intention of abandoning the conservative movement and remaking the party. [. . .] The Palin nomination also challenged the complacency of a conservative movement that has had a difficult time moving beyond its successes. McCain may not want to remake the party, but he certainly intends to redirect it. Notwithstanding the fact that Palin initially supported an impossibly expensive bridge to connect Ketchikan to its airport, she did, in the end, kill it and directed that a more “fiscally responsible” alternative be found. Although she did not completely abandon Alaska’s requests for earmarked federal money, she substantially reduced them and warned her constituents that the state must push away from the federal trough. This reinforces McCain’s message of reform.
So much wrong in so few paragraphs! Palin may have cut some taxes, as mayor, but she raised others and raised spending by even more, leaving Wasilla, Alaska, in debt to the tune of $3000 per resident--that's not "fiscally responsible." The earmark for the "Bridge to Nowhere" was removed by Congress in 2005, long before Palin was sworn in. She won her race in part by promising to get that money and spend it for the bridge--and only when confronted with the reality that America generally would not tolerate such spending, she spent every single one of the potential bridge dollarson other projects, including on a road to the bridge that is not being built. That's not "fiscally responsible." Palin also pushed through a windfall profits tax on oil companies--something our own governor tried to do and which Rick Esenberg himself said "strikes me as political pandering." I am not sure how Esenberg can reconcile "political pandering" with "fiscally responsible."
But there is more. Palin is not, like Obama, an unreconstructed class warrior. But she, like McCain, takes seriously the obligation to ensure that the benefits of capitalism are widely enjoyed. The free market is the presumptive means to good ends, but not an end in itself. During Thursday’s debate, in response to a question about the financial crisis, she adopted a populist tone, “Darn right it was the predator lenders who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house.” While there is far more to the financial meltdown than this, her tone is a departure from doctrinaire laissez-faire economics.
This is my second-favorite paragraph in all of Esenberg's essay, because as I read through the various "live blogs" and reactions to the debate among local conservatives, to a one, almost, they recoiled in horror at this "populist" moment. Owen Robinson, for one, wrote, "Palin hitting corruption on Wall Street again. I hate that." I am not sure how Palin is supposed to be the link between social conservatives (the right-to-life crowd) and fiscal conservatives (the club for growth crowd) when she won't toe both lines.
Esenberg then talks class warfare for a moment, and delivers this:
Concern for those who are less fortunate is essential, but it is not measured by support for the compelled redistribution of income. Government cannot save you. It won’t pay your bills, and its job is not to take from Peter to pay Paul. But it can contribute to a set of circumstances in which Paul can help himself.
And that, my friends, was my favorite paragraph. Why? Because as much as Esenberg may well believe that government shouldn't pay your bills, Sarah Palin does. For what did she do with the results of the windfall profits tax on oil companies I noted earlier? This (my bold):
Alaska collected an estimated $6 billion from the new tax during the fiscal year that ended June 30, according to the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. That helped push the state's total oil revenue--from new and existing taxes, as well as royalties--to more than $10 billion, double the amount received last year. [. . .] Some of that new cash will end up in the wallets of Alaska's residents. Palin's administration last week gained legislative approval for a special $1,200 payment to every Alaskan to help cope with gas prices, which are among the highest in the country. That check will come on top of the annual dividend of about $2,000 that each resident could receive this year from an oil-wealth savings account.
Got that? Sarah Palin taxed oil companies and sent Alaskans a check to help pay their bills--exactly what Esenberg suggests Palin challenges conservatives not to do, not to engage in income redistribution or to tell Americans that their government will save you. She robbed Peter, paid Paul, and then bragged that Paul gave her an 80% approval rating.
There is little doubt that John McCain had an uphill battle against Barack Obama. The cards were all stacked against him and the current polls (Obama is over 50% in the pollster.com composite as I write this, 8.5 points above McCain, much worse for McCain than it was before Palin's debate with Biden) suggest that McCain has but the longest of shots to win. Palin may have re-invigorated the social conservative base that was tepid on McCain in the first place, I'll give you that. But whatever Palin may do for conservatives--and I submit to you that she does not do what Esenberg says she does--she clearly does not do for the American people. If this is the future of conservatism, conservatives will be in the minority for a long, long time.
There were many winners and losers after the fight over a taxpayer-funded killing game that children as young as 13 could play was shut down at Milwaukee's Summerfest. Among the biggest losers, I think, are the blowhards who spend half their lives yelling at us liberals to shut up, that we do not have any particular right never to be offended by stuff and the other half of the time complaining about the stuff that offends them. Including, apparently, the victory of such groups as Peace Action Wisconsin and Veterans for Peace over bloodlust and poor judgment.
That fight spun off a number of smaller battles across the Cheddarsphere, with many conservatives vowing never to go to Summerfest again and some even arguing, until corrected, that Summerfest had actually kicked the Army off the Summerfest grounds altogether. Affronts to good taste, rules of grammar, and common sense abounded. But one mini-drama stands out, between Mike Mathias and Rick Esenberg. Esenberg started it, followed by Mathias, and then one more round from each (MM, then RE) so far, with a few others joining in the fun, notably James Wigderson.
The Mathias-Esenberg skirmish is, in fact, a microcosm of a larger debate being played out in the national punditocracy. I think it's worth looking at more deeply, because what Esenberg and the like are doing is offering a grotesque version of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, with the booby prize being the deaths of more than 4000 American men and women, not to mention countless innocent Iraqi civilians.
To illustrate what's wrong with Esenberg et al., I quote first (via tristero) from George Packer, member of the aforementioned national punditocracy, commenting on fellow pundit Christopher Hitchens's years-late epiphany that waterboarding is torture:
“If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” Hitchens concludes when it’s over, citing Lincoln on slavery, “then there is no such thing as torture.” This is powerful testimony, but another writer would have made it his starting point. The fact that waterboarding is torture forces certain questions on anyone who has supported the war on terror as vehemently as Hitchens and who, in the past, has been far quicker to criticize its critics than its excesses. This is the beginning of an argument with himself—not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people.
It seems innocent enough, but that last bit contains the nut of everything that is wrong about otherwise-reasonable people who supported the abortion that is the Iraq War. If you are a "thinking" person who supported the war, you did so only with great reservation, and now that you see what a mess it was, is, and will continue to be (whether you still support it or not), you can can admit faults only with the pain of someone wrestling his greatest inner demons. "Hard trade-offs and ideological confusions" are the hallmarks of all "thinking" people's opinions on the Iraq War.
The flipside, of course, is that if you opposed this war from the start, recognized that it would be bungled and mismanaged, knew that Dick Cheney was lying to you (his mouth was moving, after all), you could not have been a thinking person. Thinking people had to weigh the implications long and hard and make the difficult to decision to support invading Iraq.
In other words, if you were wrong about Iraq, you were right, because clearly you were a serious person and you made difficult sacrifices in deciding to support the war. And if you were right about Iraq all along, you were wrong, because you were too stupid to have been right.
Think I'm doing a disservice to Esenberg? I'm not:
[W]e need to persuade people that, while war is hell, those who serve are doing something that is not only necessary, but that can be done with integrity and in a way that fulfills the human need for accomplishment.
The critics don't believe that. War, to them, is just undifferentiated killing. There is nothing about what we fight for and how we fight that is distinctive. But, in a world where evil exists--where there are Nazi Germanys, Soviet Russias and Al Qaeda--that leads to the charnel house just as certainly as a mindless celebration of conquest.
That's from his shock-and-awe opening salvo. Clearly, Esenberg suggests, anyone who opposes war is unthinking, uncaring, unfeeling. He clarifies in his comments to Mathias's first post: "[P]eace activists did not understand the situation in Iraq," he writes. Esenberg's second post is a longer argument for the idea that people opposing the war just didn't get it (titled, even, "Being serious about Iraq"!), and includes an eerie, likely unknowing paraphrase of Packer:
I don't cite Herman's piece as necessarily establishing that the Iraq war was the right decision. I remember, at the time, being very uncertain about whether it was. But it--along with so many other post war reviews--reminds us that the demonization of Bush reflects, at best, a refusal to face difficult facts and, at worst, a cynical manipulation of a complicated issue.
The issue was "complicated," Esenberg says, and those of us who were thinking people were "very uncertain" about whether invading Iraq was "the right decision." (I would also note that Esenberg dives into non-sequitur: not one word of either of Mathias's posts contains anything like "demonization of Bush"--Mathias's first post doesn't even say the man's name, and his second only notes that Bush ignored both protesters and prominent opponents of going to war.)
Wigderson makes it worse, by asking what peace activists would have done in Iraq if not go to war. Mathias eviscerates him:
James asks: “What would they have done?” And the response is: About what?
Hussein was at the front of no invading army. He was launching no missiles against his neighbors. His support for terrorism seemed limited to sending funds to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The price that has been paid in lives and treasure for such an affront seems wildly disproportionate.
But of course, to the Esenbergs, Packers, and Wigdersons of the world, to do nothing was the unthinking response. To do nothing did not carefully measure out the "complicated" issue or "clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions" of thinking people like them. To do nothing in Iraq, though the right thing, was wrong because there was no thought behind it.
This is simply not true. Saddam Hussein posed no threat to us, but al Qaeda did. That was my reason for opposing the war in Iraq, and I defy anyone to tell me how a) there is no thought behind it or b) it is wrong.
This graph, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, via chart-master Kevin Drum, explains quite neatly why, in fact, I'm right; it's of US casualties in Afghanistan:
Is it any wonder that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spent the whole of the recent NATO summit begging for help in Afghanistan?
***
Esenberg and Packer at least seem to want to live in the same reality as those of us who opposed the war; even though they will not acknowledge that such opposition was possible from anyone with a brain, their protestations over how "very uncertain" they were about the war allows that such opposition was at least a viable option. But there are some dead-enders who remain on another planet entirely, and they were brought out in the last few days by news that 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium was moved from Iraq to Canada. Cheddarsphere ex-pat Sean Hackbarth, for example, veers off to write,
We now know Saddam had 550 tons of the stuff [. . .].That, my friends, is a nuclear weapons program. It’s not a stretch to assume that a dictator who had a history of using WMDs and had tons of material that could be processed into a nuclear or dirty bomb would want more. It’s not a stretch to make a big deal out of this [. . .]. If it weren’t for President Bush’s invasion Saddam might well be on his way processing that 550 tons of yellowcake.
We now know? We've known about this yellowcake since 1981, at least, when Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear program to smithereens (a program never restarted). Heck, given that we were allies with Iraq in 1981, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out we gave him the stuff. We knew about this yellowcake in 1991, when the International Atomic Energy Agency locked it up and threw away the key. We knew about it through 1998 when IAEA inspectors made regular checks on it. We knew about it again in 2002 when the UN inspectors noted that it hadn't been touched. We knew about it in 2003 when US troops found it--still sealed. We've known about it every 18 months or so since then when some mention of it made the news. Now we know? That is a nuclear weapons progam? A different reality.
Perhaps Amy P., commenter on this news at Dad29's alternate-reality paradise, sums up this worldview in support of the war and against anyone suggesting it was a mistake:
No doubt Barack "Uniter" Obama will simply raise the white flag and we'll all find the peace that comes through submission under shari'a law.
There are so many things wrong with that--from the notion that Saddam Hussein, secular dictator, would have subjected us to religious law to the idea that Barack Obama will not defend the country if elected.
It leads me to ask this: Who, pray tell, are the real unthinking, unserious ones? Who are those who refuse to acknowledge reality and instead accept an immature, naïve world view? It is certainly not those of us who opposed the war from day one. It is not those involved in Wisconsin Peace Action or Veterans for Peace who oppose convincing 13-year-olds that going to Iraq will be fun and worthwhile. I think it would behoove the Esenbergs and Packers of the world to note the difference, and save their disdain for those who deserve it.
There's nothing quite so insulting as what we in the business call a "concern troll." They're everywhere, these days, even if they don't know what they're doing, talking about Democrats and the nomination process. Just trolling away, sounding quite, quite sincere in their wish for the Democrats to nominate someone who can win in November. Who are these people?
McCain voters.
I know, I know, it doesn't compute on its face, or even, for that matter, several dense troll-packed layers down. What possible reason could Republican, conservative, McCain-voting bloggers have for tsk-tsking the Democrats over our rush to nominate Barack Obama, whom they see as the weaker candidate against McCain? Well, it's the same reason why the Republicans are planning to air some pretty ugly ads against only Obama--not Hillary Clinton: Obama is the presumptive nominee (no matter what Clinton thinks) and, frankly, they're scared pantsless of how bad for their side a McCain-Obama race would turn out.
Maybe not all of them got a memo, no. But you can bet it's the talking-point of the rightward set, circulated at all levels and bubbling forth in public for consumption from a number of otherwise-reasonable people.
Exhibit A would be Rick Esenberg. He sidled into concern troll mode with a post early election morn, wondering, goshdarnit, what's making it so hard for that nice man to seal the deal with Democrats?
But don't Democrats have to be worried about a guy who can't put away such an empty suit? And no matter what the polls say about a race that hasn't started, it's hard not to conclude that Obama has left folks in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio unimpressed. You can make a fairly strong argument that, for a Democrat to win, Pennsylvania shouldn't even be in play. How do you get to 270 if, after McCain actually campaigns there, it's in the GOP column?
So many breathless questions, so much concern trolling. If there were a concern troll scale--like, say, the Richter Scale, or the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender--this would be peaking at a fairly solid 6 or 6.5, starting, of course, with his labeling of Clinton as "an empty suit." It takes a lot of, erm, concernes, as they might say en espanol, to paint someone who still can win a hot primary and run neck-and-neck with Obama with that kind of brush. Voters clearly don't see that suit as empty at all; in fact, one Clinton voter (*cough*me*cough*) highly resents the implication that I'm too dumb to pick an empty suit out of a crowd. But because Obama is presumptive nominee, such lies are not intended as lies per se; rather, they are to be read as an acknowledgment of reality, sort of a paternal pat on the head to reassure us that he, too, knows Obama's in the driver's seat of this race, something most Dem readers of Esenberg's blog figured out weeks ago. (NOTE: Had he gone with "an empty pantsuit," as many of his colleagues are wont to do, he would have slipped from concern trolling right into flat boorishness and lost credibility. That's what I like about Rick--he knows which lines to dance up to but not cross.)
Further, there are some other Esenberg concern-troll lies not meant to be read as such. For example, suggesting that Obama has not impressed the voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It feels true, again, because, well, Obama lost those states. But there are any number of ways to put the lie to it. For example, since the start of the elections this year, Obama has drawn more money in contributions from Ohio and Pennsylvania that Clinton has. Two-thirds of Ohio and Pennsylvania primary voters said in exit polls that they would be satisfied in Obama won the nomination--considerably more voters than actually voted for him. And while Obama may be behind McCain in Pennsylvania according Pollster.com's trendlines this morning, that's almost entirely because of Republican polling firm Strategic Vision, as opposed to non-partisan polling firms finding Obama ahead for the last month. Pennsylvania hasn't voted for a Republican since they voted against Dukakis--and they keep electing Democrats lately to state-wide office. It's nice Rick, that you seem to care, but, please, keep it and your falsities to yourself.
The Recess Supervisor makes a lot of the same concern-trolly points Esenberg does about Obama's losing to Clinton in states that will be important in November (apparently, McCain's losses in key Republican swing states like Colorado, Minnesota, and Louisiana don't matter). But RS's additional complaints concerns--not to mention his use of ultra-violent bullet points--put him onthe concern troll scale at about a 7.5 to 8. Here's some of his "concern":
Barack Obama outspent Hillary Clinton 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania and lost by ten. Shouldn't that be story? [. . .] Why won't the talking heads mention how Obama's narrow lead in pledged delegates and the popular vote owe largely to his running up the score in states in the Great Plains and the Mountain West that Democrats have absolutely no chance of winning in November? Are Obama's whopping victories in states like Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Kansas really the stuff that Democratic superdelegates want to base their decision on? The voice of voters who will do NOTHING to bring them the White House come November? [. . .] Obama's spent a year trying to sell voters the yellow brick road, and it's starting to come up short. Swing voters aren't buying it.
Money: I think the story is that Obama is outraising Clinton three-to-one. How in the world can we expect Clinton to compete with McCain's campaign finance shenanigans if she can't raise money herself? That is my real concern as a real Democrat, not some phony ginned-up trollishnes of the Supervisor's.
"No chance" states: Montana, North Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska have been electing Democrats state-wide lately. There will be close House contests in Utah. Colorado and Nevada--not on RS's list, but implied--will be battleground states in this cycle, based on changing Demographics if nothing else. As a Democrat, I want a candidate who can make those states more competitive. I want a Democrat who can have coattails in states like Utah or Kansas. I want Republicans to have to spend money to defend in those places, instead of in Ohio or Pennsylvania, and I want Nevada and Colorado to go blue this year. The Dems' win without the South strategy has always gone through the Mountain West, and if Obama can make it happen, that's a good thing.
The "yellow brick road": I see that RS has bought into the BS that Obama's campaign is some kind of fantasy of hope and change rather than a coherent and extensive collection of detailed policy proposals. It's funny--Esenberg calls Clinton the empty suit, and here the Recess Supervisor implies that it's Obama, instead, whose suit is empty. Is it too much to ask that the concern trolls settle on a single storyline?
But the concern-troll cake of the week has been taken by Brian Fraley, whose post yesterday goes off the scale completely. What makes Fraley bury the needle is not merely that he's demonstrably wrong in his concern trolling--and in total denial about it--but that he does it with a snippy I-told-you-so attitude:
After Obama’s ‘Bitter, Cling to Guns and God’ jab was made public I wrote:
If he actually said this condescending, elitist claptrap it will take all his vast rhetorical skills to talk himself out of the firestorm heading his way. And not because us rubes are going to merely cling to our guns and our religion. But rather, because he just insulted the largest block of swing voters in America.
Well, how did my prediction shake out after the first contest since his San Francisco treat? Well, look at how Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama in Pennsylvania’s rural counties and the northern suburban counties outside Philly. It’s not a matter of her winning there. Look at the numbers. The percentages are staggering. White middle class, and Catholic voters went to Clinton by unbelievable margins.
Lucky for us, we can actually look at some polling data to find out if what Fraley said here is true. We can compare what happened in Pennsylvania to what happened in neighboring Ohio, as the states share some demographic qualities as well as a border, and Ohio was the last major primary before Obama's "cling" statements were made public. (In general, Ohio's electorate is a little more amenable to Obama--more black voters and more younger voters than Pennsylvania--so that fact that Obama did better in PA is itself notable.)
Comparing CNN exit poll data (same company, same questions, already linked above) between Ohio and PA, you find that Obama actually improved this week! More whites voted for Obama in PA (34% OH, 38% PA). Obama gained among white men (from 39% to 44%) and white women (from 31% to 34%). He gained among those earning less than $50k a year (from 42% in OH to 46% in PA). He did fall among Catholics (from 36% in OH to 31%) but he gained among Protestants (from 36% to 53%)–and remember, his “cling” to religion comment was not specific about which religion, so it should have offended everyone equally. Fraley restated his claim in a comment even more explicitly: "Blue collar white catholic swing voters, who may have been warming up to Obama at one point, are running away from him in droves." And to prove it, he reiterates his point about Obama's losing Tuesday in areas that were Clinton strongholds. I don't see anyone leaving Obama "in droves," though. Maybe you can, and if so, I would appreciate it if you explained it to me.
And if you're thinking about concern trolling, please, keep it to yourself.
POST SCRIPT: Former Republican John Cole has a solid take on all of this:
I have had the tv on for 2 minutes and am already ready to scream as Joe Scarborough asks why “obama can not close the deal.”
Gee. I dunno. Because he is running against an exceedingly popular candidate who has a 16 year advantage building a political machine who just a few months ago was Mrs. Inevitable?
Seriously. Make Plaisted was about to turn blue. Luckily, he can let it all out in a fit of laughter. The collective liberal-Cheddarspherean impatience was prompted by Rick Esenberg's initial silence over the Michael Gableman Supreme Court ad I discussed here over the weekend; Esenberg's response came last night.
Sometimes I feel bad for Rick; he's a genuinely nice man and certainly one of the smartest people on the conservative side of the blogging aisle. But he's also their resident legal expert, the one whom the rest of the conservative Cheddarsphere counts on to set the tone for discussion of legal issues. That's a lot of pressure. Moreover, while he continues to insist that he has not endorsed anyone in the present Supreme Court campaign, he's been so in the bag for anti-Louis Butler forces that we pro-Butler bloggers find his neutrality dance laughable--some more colorfully so than others. But reading between the lines, I also don't think he cares much for Gableman, but of course he cannot say so--because of that very in-the-bagness.
In short, I do not envy him his position.
Esenberg does not defend the Gableman ad (the only defense I have seen came from Brian Fraley, who in the process seems to decide that defendants should not have defense attorneys; for his sake, I hope he's never arrested), and in fact uses some strong terms to denounce it:
I am very disappointed that the campaign ran that ad. If the point of the ad is that criminal defense lawyers are "unsafe" as judges, it works against one of the presuppositions of our adversarial system of justice (albeit a presupposition that the general public tends to be uncomfortable with). [. . .] I have nothing to do with the Gableman campaign, but I would have rather strongly counseled against this ad.
I have no problem with that. But before condemning the Gableman ad, Esenberg first has to take a detour and get het up about a pro-Butler ad (Wigderson calls this the "Bullock Rule"):
The Greater Wisconsin Committee has put out an ad criticizing Gableman for not obtaining sufficiently weighty sentences as a prosecutor and pronouncing insufficiently weighty sentences as a judge. I haven't caught any bloggers on the left objecting to the ad which would have made them all apoplectic had it been directed at the incumbent. How can we possibly tell whether these defendants deserved more? You can't assess the propriety of an outcome without some background. The disingenuous nature of the ad is magnified by the fact that the Greater Wisconsin Committee--funded by trial lawyers, unions and casinos--has absolutely no interest in electing someone who is "tough on crime.
Yes, you read that right: Esenberg is taking a group to task for making soft-on-crime ads. Now, he did criticize the Coalition for America's Families (once, twice) for their Butler's-soft-on-crime ads, which is commendable; but when he did so, Esenberg criticized their accuracy--he did not damn them for existing at all, as he seems to here with the GWC ad.
Moreover, Esenberg does not note that the soft/tough-on-crime conversation was started by Gableman and his enablers at CAF and the WMC. It seems to me that if Gableman is going to tout his own tough-on-crime credentials and disparage his opponent on that front, he opens himself up to criticism in that vein. When he claims to have prosecuted arson, it seems reasonable for his opposition to point out that he prosecuted exactly one arsonist who was acquitted at trial. Or that for all his scary sex-offender talk about Butler, Gableman as a judgeseemed to go pretty light on the sex offenders.
But what really made me laugh--that great exhalation of the breath we'd been holding--was the last part of Esenberg's criticism of the GWC ad, about its "disingenuous nature." Puh-lease. Is he trying to tell me that Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce--pushing the Butler's-soft-on-crime schtick--has as its primary consideration the handful of criminal cases before the Court every term? Does he think the the big-business money-men behind CAF (like industrialist Terry Kohler) are most concerned about sex predators? Riiiight. The response from WMC defenders is always that WMC wants safe places to do business. Does Esenberg think that union members, casinos, and plaintiff's attorneys would rather have crime-infested places to live and work, that they don't have as much interest as WMC in safety and security? Come on, Rick--that's just ridiculous.
Milwaukee's public radio station, WUWM (available at 89.7 FM on the radio dial--yes, people, there's an entire band of radio out there that is not AM!--and via streaming audio at WUWM.com), is doing a series this year on Wisconsin bloggers on their "Lake Effect" program. They are starting the series with a handful of political bloggers this week: I'm on Monday, Michael Mathias of Pundit Nation is scheduled for Wednesday, and Rick Esenberg of Shark and Shepherd will appear this week as well.
I'm apparently leading off the show Monday. Jane Hampden, the host and producer, begins the interview by saying I've been called Milwaukee's premier liberal blogger, or somesuch. That kind of threw me for a loop--I don't call myself that--and the rest of the interview just went downhill.
If you can't catch the show when it airs Monday at 10 AM and 11 PM, you can always listen to the on-line archives the next day.
I believe, and have argued repeatedly before (here on the blog as well as elsewhere) that William Jefferson should not be in Congress. That he remains in Congress is not so much anything I can control--I will not offer a defense of his being there.
Noted conservative rationalizer (he's a professional, you know) Rick Esenberg, though, offers a surprisingly spirited defense:
[T]o remove or suspend a[n elected official] is to interfere with a choice that the voters have made.
So . . . I guess that's that. Maybe Fred needs to take the William Jefferson issue up with Rick, instead of liberals like me.
First, I would like to thank Jay for inviting me to be the 151st member of Team folkbum.
After the Juneteenth Day beating of Pat Kasthurirangaian, many people decried the senseless violence, and rightfully so. But then the right wing bloggers continued to decry the act, day after day. Then they decried those that they felt didn't decry the incident stridently enough.
Now that Summerfest has wrapped up its 40th year, the crime report is out. MSJ reports that 450 people were arrested with a total of 628 charges. While most of the charges are related to underage drinking or possession of a controlled substance, there were also arrests for battery, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing an officer. Surely, there would be lamentations about the wild crowds, especially since crime was up by one and half times as that of last year.
But there were no cries for justice, no calls to close Summerfest, not even some gnashing of teeth or hair pulling. Instead, the only comments that the right had about this crisis that was Summerfest was that Ludicrus would be appearing, causing chaos throughout the city (Sorry, Charlie, never happened) or that Roger Waters wouldn't change his anti-war, anti-establishment attitude for them. One talk show host commiserated with a Waukesha County man on how unfair the police were for giving his underage daughter a citation for possession of alchohol. One would think that at the very least, seeing that 65% of the scofflaws were from outside of Milwaukee County, that they would call for a wall to be built around the county to keep these thugs out.
Question: What do the following quotations have in common?
• One problem with the "whack 'em all" approach the Wisconsin Supreme Court took toward lead paint companies last spring is you never know where the hammer's going to fall next.
• School choice needs clarification from the court? In what possible way? [T]he matter is crystalline. School choice is constitutional. The matter is settled.
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• [The Wisconsin Supreme Court] announced that it would apply rational basis scrutiny "with teeth" and proceeded to, essentially, substitute its own judgment for that of the legislature
• The court also rejected establishment clause challenges to school choice in Jackson v. Benson. Would Justice Clifford like to revisit those decisions? There is no way to know. But it does make for interesting speculation.
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• The poll also found widespread disapproval for many of the Court’s most egregious acts of activism, including the lead paint and med mal caps decisions.
• If the case came up again, and one can imagine ways it could arise, with Linda Clifford on the Court, it is possible that Jackson could get reversed.
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• The court struck down limits on medical malpractice non-economic awards, opened the door to massive punitive damage awards, and, in a case involving lead paint, adopted an unprecedented and radical theory that will allow businesses to be sued for things they may not actually have made.
• A. Because it’s important to thousands of families in its audience. Q. Why is it news that Linda Clifford wants to re-open the school choice case?
Each set of quotations is from the same author. Each author insists that recent Wisconsin Supreme Court cases--medical malpractice and lead paint, specifically--were wrongly decided, that the court went off in an errant and bizarre direction that needs serious correcting. There's just no way that those cases could possibly be considered settled law.
And each author is then duly shocked--just shocked!--that candidate Linda Clifford would indicate that school funding and school choice decisions of a decade ago "interested" her and might need further "clarification." That, they all say, is settled law.
As it turns out, the definition of settled law certainly seems to be "court decisions I agree with"--in much the same way judicial activism often turns out to mean "court decisions I disagree with." But I don't bring this up merely because I enjoy these kind of juxtapositions that make plain the other side's hypocrisy (though it does make me giggle on the inside). No, I bring this up because I keep getting criticized--from the left as well as the right--to write about something other than Judge Annette Ziegler's, whaddyacallit, blatant disregard for the judicial code of conduct, namely issues.
Well, here's one that I actually know and care about--the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or, as it's known in the vernacular, vouchers. And there's a very good reason why Linda Clifford might think that the issue is somewhat less than settled, and it's known in my house as Article I, section 18:
[N]or shall any money be drawn from the treasury for the benefit of religious societies, or religious or theological seminaries.
The question is whether or not the voucher program, which sends 80% of its taxpayer dollars (money "drawn from the treasury") to religious schools, violates Article I, section 18. The original court in Jackson v. Benson held (not without dissent) that the MPCP's expansion to include religious schools was not sufficiently "to the benefit of" the "religious societies" running the schools.
But that was in 1997 before the expansion actually happened; the court really had nothing to go on but its gut intuition about what might happen should the program be expanded. We've had a decade of data since to weigh, and it may be worth revisiting the question.
There is little chance that the United States Supreme Court would revisit the issue, since it found no conflict with the First Amendment and, frankly, I don't see much of one, either. That leaves just the state court, and the distinctly different clause--the benefits clause, as it's known. (Despite the reflexive criticism Clifford got from the right for saying so, it's true that the state and federal courts don't always have to "march in lockstep.")
Among the best collectors of data on the MPCP is the Public Policy Forum. It released its 2007 report on the program in February. It received no fanfare and, as far as I can tell, one single mention in the media, by Sarah Carr on the Journal Sentinel's education blog. I haven't written about it yet because I've been pretty busy--still am--but I'm surprised no one else has, because its conclusions are striking and bear a direct relation to this issue.
I made some predictions last year about what would happen once the increased enrollment cap came to be, with its attendant easing of financial restrictions on participation. I missed some of them and others it's too early to tell on, but there was one that I nailed:
A significant portion of the increase--I'm going to guess at least 1000, if not a full 2/3--will be moderate-income white students. Changes in the law will allow many currently ineligible students to slip right into the program without even having to change schools.
I wrote that in stark contrast to the people trumpeting the compromise as a way to help out poor minority students stuck in dead-end MPS schools. Their concern is touching, but I would bet almost all of them knew what time it was. The PPF report tells us:
The 17,951 students using vouchers represent an increase over last year of 2,516 voucher users. However, the growth in total enrollment in these schools was much less, at 620 students; almost 60% of the new voucher users were therefore not new to the private schools. [emphasis in the original]
As you dig deeper into the report, the ramifications of this become obvious:
But upon closer analysis, it appears that MPS may not be feeling the competition that voucher advocates had hoped. In 1998 and 2006, the two years in which the program had structural changes to allow thousands more students to be eligible to receive vouchers, more private school students took advantage of the changes than public school students. The new voucher users tend to already be in private school; 58% of new voucher users in 1998 and 60% in 2006. [. . . I]n the Catholic and Lutheran schools in particular, new voucher users tended to be students that were already attending these schools.
If you look at the accompanying graphs, you'll see that Catholic schools enrolled about 150 more students for this year, but added 950 to their rolls of voucher students. The Lutherans' total enrollment was up by only a handful of students, but 450 students started using vouchers this year.
Supporters of the program--the former Dennis York Christian Schneider, for example--should be confounded; Schneider writes about the Supreme Court race with exactly this issue in mind, asking to know what the candidates think about "Wisconsin’s school choice program, which gives low-income African American children a chance to escape Milwaukee’s failing schools." But now we know--and should have known back in 1999 or so, after the expansion to religious schools--that the big benefits are going to students who wouldn't be in MPS anyway; the money is propping up the Catholic and Lutheran schools who spent the 1990s hemorrhaging students and seeming doomed to failure.
If I were calling it, knowing what we know now, this seems like a "benefit" to "religious societies" that comes straight out of the state's treasury. For all I know, Linda Clifford doesn't see it as an Article I, Section 18 violation, even with the new information. And prehaps Annette Ziegler would call it a conflict. Neither one, as part of that same judicial code of conduct that Ziegler occasionally ignores, can say specifically how they'd rule.
But to say that a decade later, with a decade's worth of information about how the MPCP is using tax dollars "for the benefit of religious societies," the case cannot be reconsidered is ridiculous. It can be, and should be, and someday, I hope, it will be.
The Brawler writes about unions so I don't have to. All youse who are afraid of imaginary union goons (like the scary 300 pound men of Paul Noonan's fevered imagination) are apparently unfamiliar with the facts.
Speaking of studies that burst conservatives' imaginary-world bubbles, it turns out that immigrants--including illegal ones--boost pay more than prison populations.
The Cheddarsphere's own Sean Hackbarth has been the point man on what I see as a too-little-too-late campaign to distance the genteel right from Ann Coulter. (If you don't know why Coulter is in the news again, just Google it up.) I say too-little-too-late because Ann Coulter is now and has been for a long time a known quantity. Yet I didn't see Sean boycotting the convention; rather, he was quite glad to go despite knowing that Coulter would be there even after her as-offensive remarks from last year.
Blue Texan pointedly asks Sean why it took so long, especially given that her remarks this weekend were tame by comparison to her previous hits. Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has reports from the same now-aghast bloggers reporting on how much that very convention loved Coulter before the speech.
It is often said that there is basically nothing a prominent right-winger can say that will get them ostracized (although someone should ask David Brock about that). And I predict that there will be little change to Ann Coulter's media status after this past weekend.
Anyone who thinks that the crisis at Walter Reed is somehow indicative of government's inability to deliver health care should read this and this.
Who knew that Rick Esenberg's done more drugs than I have? And I'm a cymbal-banging leader of the drum-circle left!
This is from the same massive conservative conference Ann Coulter befouled. I don't entirely know if the picture is fair, but it's kind of funny. I got it from here, but the site's currently under a denial-of-service attack by those genteel righties.
I can't believe people aren't embarrassed to death to do things like this. Saying one night, about Mitt Romney's Mormonism, "We created a new religious litmus test. This is very troublesome to me, and no other candidate is getting that scrutiny." And then saying the very next night about Barack Obama, "Now, a closer look at the church's vision has led many to call them separatist and, in some cases, even drawing comparisons to a cult." How does his brain not explode?
And, saved for last because my head might explode: I actually agree with McIlheran. Althouse, however, continues to befuddle me.
I would also accept it from Dad29 or Rick Esenberg, or any one of the dozens of other Right Cheddarsphereans who had their undies bunched about two bloggers hired by the John Edwards for President Campaign. What will they say about a campaign chairman?
In 1997, shortly after I finished grad school, I started working at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. My very first project, literally in my first week, dealt with a Republican member of South Carolina’s Board of Education, who wanted to impose Christianity on public school students. When one of his colleagues on the board alluded to concerns about religious minorities in the state, this board member said, on tape, “Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims. And put that in the minutes.”
The guy’s name was Henry Jordan. I got to work trying to force his resignation, but to no avail. I helped drum up some media interest, but the GOP establishment in South Carolina stood by Jordan, the response from local voters was tepid, and he kept his job looking out for the educational needs of children.
Republican presidential candidate Duncan Hunter on Thursday named … former state Rep. Tom Marchant and Dr. Henry Jordan campaign co-chairmen.
I suppose you could say that John Edwards has about a billion percent better chance of winning the Democratic nomination than Duncan Hunter does of winning the Republican nomination, and therefore Hunter doesn't merit the same close examination of his staff. I suppose you could also say that McIlheran, Esenberg, and 29 are Catholic and, therefore, don't pay attention to people who hate other religions. I suppose you could also say that the double standard remains firmly in place, so I shouldn't hold my breath.
In any case, I feel I should at least get the Duncan Hunter "screw the Budhists and kill the Muslims" story out there for you--an elected official speaking in his capacity as an elected official (as opposed, you know, to a couple of bloggers on their personal blogs) now chairing a campaign for president who suffers from far worse religious intolerance than any campaign employee we have seen yet in this election season. Let the denunciations begin.
Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature will have to close a $1.6 billion deficit as they develop the next two-year budget, according to a new report released Monday.
Officials vowed that they would not raise taxes to close the gap between what state agencies say they need and what taxes are expected to generate.
The $1.6 billion figure was the latest estimate of the so-called structural deficit facing the state. It is about 6% of the $26.4 billion that state government is on track to collect in taxes and fees over the next two years.
They're revelling because it's Jim Doyle who is the public face of that shortfall, and not Mark Green, and because with one house of the legislature now in Democratic hands, they can blame us for any failure. You've got everything from smarmy I told you sos to you get what you deserve coming from their side, with a healthy dose of Doyle lied, he lied, he lied because he claimed to have balanced the budget (I paraphrased a little). But let's go back to the story, shall we?
Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature will have to close a $1.6 billion [. . .] gap between what state agencies say they need and what taxes are expected to generate.
One thing the critics are forgetting is that we don't owe anyone any actual money yet; this is just the gap between budget requests and projected revenues for the next two years. Two years ago (note that date on that memo, Rick), we got an almost identical report, and, by all accounts, we expect to end this biennium with a small--in the tens of millions--surplus. In other words (raids to the transportation fund notwithstanding), it's the righties here who are lying when they say Doyle didn't--past tense--balance the budget. The 2007-2009 budget isn't written yet; Doyle didn't claim to have balanced it yet; we don't even know the details of all the agencies' demands yet. How can Doyle have lied about something that hasn't even happened?
I suppose turnabout is, indeed, fair play, since we are still dealing with the aftermath of the Thompson-McCallum years (where's our tobacco settlement money?). But I can only imagine sighs of relief from their side--along with their stifled giggles--that Green won't be dealing with the problem. Green, if you recall, couldn't even begin to describe how he'd address budget issues during the campaign just completed (staying vague on purpose?), beyond just promising to spend money wisely and cut taxes.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the projected deficit here won't shrink as the budget process nears, and we face a full $1.6 billion shortfall. Rather than just lie about Doyle and snigger at the challenge he and the legislature faces (or predict end-of-the-world tax and fee hikes), I challenge the right to propose a solution. What would you cut? Do we educate 80,000 fewer K-12 children? Release 20,000 prisoners? Pave 800 fewer miles (.pdf)?
Employers in Wisconsin pay an estimated 26.5% more to provide health benefits than the national average, according to a respected national survey released Monday.
The annual survey by Mercer Health & Benefits LLC found that health benefit costs average $9,516 this year for each employee in Wisconsin, compared with $7,523 nationally. That's $1,993 in additional average costs for each employee.
The Mercer survey also found that costs in Wisconsin rose this year at a faster rate, 9.3% on average, compared with 6.1% nationally.
If you think these stories--deficits and health care--aren't related, you're not paying attention. If the state paid less for its employees' health care (and all the local units of government, too--not to mention you, the consumer/ citizen/ taxpayer), the projected cost of running the place would fall and there would be more money in your pocket, too. I continue to lament that, fifteen years ago when the state tinkered with school funding formulas (adding revenue caps and the QEO), they didn't tackle health care instead. If they'd done the work then to keep health care inflation at closer to overall inflation--or just closer to the national average for health care costs--we wouldn't be facing a deficit now. See my post yesterday, or Carrie or Ben for more.
So there's my idea. Now you--give us a hand, oh ye wise sages of AM radio and the Right Cheddarsphere. Don't just dance your happy dance, and don't be vague like Mark Green. Try to be productive in this discussion, and put your ideas where your big mouths are.
Update: More from Seth, here, and you can make up your own mind about Milwaukee Journal Sentinel bias. Update 2: Carrie takes on Charlie Sykes and George Mitchell; in short, they're all wet.
A follow-up to something I mentioned yesterday: Rick Esenberg has clarified his relationship to the Alliance Defense Fund:
First, I do not work for ADF and I will not take upon myself the burden of agreeing with every position taken by every client they represent if for no other reason that I am not aware of them. What I do with ADF is consider referrals from them of pro bono work. I was asked to blog on a law blog they have created. This does not mean that I become involved in everything they do or that they consult with me on anything they do. I think ADF is a fine organization that provides excellent legal representation to religious conservatives (on lots of issues that have nothing to do with gays and lesbians), but Rick is not ADF and ADF is not Rick.
Thanks to Rick for explaining his role; as I noted, given the paucity of appearances of his name on ADF's website, it seemed unlikely that the connection was strong.
However, Rick goes on in that post to say this, about the ADF and the possible consequences of the language in the second sentence of the anti-gay-marriage-and-civil-unions-and-any-other-substantially-similar-legal-arrangement amendment:
As to what position ADF will take on domestic partner benefits, I don't know. I think the question is too imprecise to even hazard a guess. I do know that they have taken the position that reciprocal benefit schemes are OK. What they are hinky about (and, I think, rightly so) is in creating statuses that are "marriage lite." They don't mind people sharing benefits (as long as its not part of a status like marriage) or entering into agreements under which they may assume certain obligations toward another.
My opinion, after thinking a lot since I first blogged about it in March, is that the amendment would not prohibit an employer from saying that you can designate another person to share your health insurance. I can't tell you whether people employed by ADF would agree. They are smart guys and girls and form their own opinions.
That completely doesn't square with reality; in the post I linked to yesterday, Joshua Freker documents that time after time the ADF has gone after partner benefits, both in Wisconsin and around the country. Neither Josh nor Rick distinguishes that these challenges seem to be of public employees' benefits, not the private sector; but as a public employee (Milwaukee Public Schools), I can tell you that I don't want the ADF meddling in what my employer can and can't do, the way they tried to in Madison. And ADF-affiliated attorneys have challenged more than just bennies, up to and including domestic violence protections.
These are not abstract "Oh, gee, I don't know what would happen" sort of questions. Rick Esenberg, too, is a smart man and a smart enough attorney to know precedent when he sees it. He's waffling when he says he doesn't know what ADF might do. And his defense--that the ACLU might sue demanding recognition of same-sex marriage without the amendment--is not enough to cover that waffling.
Some light reading on the Menard's flap: Seth and Cory tell us that just knowing Menard's is building in Iowa and Ohio doesn't tell you the whole story.
If indeed Democrats do take control of the House of Representatives after this November's elections, according to Chris Bowers, it will be the first time since 1955 that the South has not controlled the House:
The gains Democrats are making in this election are not the result of becoming more moderate. The gains Democrats are making in this election are not the result of doing a better job of talking to "values voters." The gains Democrats are making in this election are not coming from rebuking the party's liberal wing. The gains Democrats are making in this election are not coming from moving to the right on national security, immigration, or taxes. The gains Democrats are making in this election are not the result of recapturing "the Bubba vote." It is easy to tell that the Democratic gains in this election are not the result of any of those things, because Democrats have not done any of those things. We have, instead, built significantly improved political infrastructure, moved to the left, and rallied a broad, people-powered coalition against Republican extremism. [. . .] This will be the first post-Dixiecrat, post-Blue Dog, post-DLC, post-triangulation, post-moderation victory for Democrats in a long, long time.
Some more reading on North Korea: Josh Marshall provides a timeline and remids of us the salient fact: This is not Bill Clinton's fault:
So Clinton strikes a deal to keep plutonium out of the North Koreans' hands. The deal keeps the plutonium out of reach for the last six years of Clinton's term and the first two of Bush's. Bush pulls out of the deal. Four years later a plutonium bomb explodes.
Mixter asks, "Who was president in 2002?" I ask, at what point--2009? 2010?--does stuff start being the fault of the guy under whose watch this happened?
Among the scariest parts of the "Detainee Trials" bill passed a couple weeks back (and then buried under the Foleylanche) is the notion that, at his discretion, the president can declare anyone, even citizens of the United States, "ublawful combatants." You can be arrested for something as innocuous as donating to a non-profit, thrown in jail, and tortured. If it happened to Jose Padilla, it could happen to you:
He stayed in a black hole, kept by his own government, for the next three-and-a-half-years with no charges of any kind ever asserted against him and with the administration insisting on the right to detain him (and any other American citizen) indefinitely--all based solely on the secret, unchallengeable say-so of the President.
Even if you like George W. Bush, consider what President Hillary would do with that kind of power, the decide if you want that in the unsupervised and unchallengeable hands of one person.
A note about Blogads: I'm generally happy to take anoyone's money, of any stripe, if you want to support what I do or promote yourself. However, I did reject an ad this week--the first time I've done so--for JB Van Hollen. The ad was "Dems for JB," and I felt that anyone seeing the ad might mistake me as a Dem for JB. I am not; I support Kathleen Falk and, even though my influence is undoubtedly very small in the matter, will not do anything to give the impression that I think we should elect Van Hollen. I'm sure his money spends just like anyone else's, but I had to say no.
Yesterday, I wrote about how abusive and hostile the other side of the Cheddarsphere can be (my great sin, to be clear, was linking to someone else; that alone was enough to prompt a profane and childish explosion). One of the good guys, to me, has always been Rick Esenberg, who I don't think has a hostile or profane bone in his body. However, Fair Wisconsin's Joshua Freker Ferrets out something about Rick:
The picture becomes clearer when we note that Esenberg has begun working with the Alliance Defense Fund, which has been at the forefront in pushing bans across the country. He contributes to their blog, Constitutionally Correct. [. . .] Esenberg works with an organization passionately opposed to providing gay families with any measure of fair treatment. So when he says that the Wisconsin ban wouldn't touch gay families' health care--when he offers an interpretation counter to the one put forth by ADF attorneys across the country--count me as deeply skeptical.
If our ban passes, is Esenberg saying that ADF won't sue here? Or that he won't take part in such a suit? Somehow, I doubt it.
Now, to be fair to Rick the connections I found Googling ADF's website for Rick's name are a little slim, but he is indeed attached to ADF in some ways. I think it is incumbent upon Rick to explain why ADF's history of pursuing cases based on the kind of weasel language our proposed amendment contains shouldn't make us wary of a "yes" vote. (Reminder: Vote no.)
Frank Rich hit it right on the head last weekend in the New York Times when he said that Bill Frist no doubt changed his position against stem cell research when he saw the polling and found the support to be "eye-popping."
You can bet the GOP realizes that Jim Doyle has a nice big horse to ride back to the Governor's Mansion with the stem cell issue. Even with the disegagement of the electorate, many people recognize the potential that lies in embryonic stem cell research. Heck, many Republican business people also recognize the potential that this technology offers in furthering Wisconsin as the "third coast" in bio-med research; a potential that not only benefits the labs and bio-pharms directly involved but a whole host of suport businesses as well.
So get set for a flurry of conservative columnists sweating away to claim things aren't what they are and diversionary tactics such as labeling Doyle's latest campaign ad as misleading to fit in with their "the governor is dis-honest" frame. The Journal has pitched in on this one big time.
Case in point is Rick Esenberg's op-ed in this morning's Journal.
I don't have time to research or refute all the howlers, but his essay is a bit conflicted -- a hallmark of much of his work.
Let's take one. He assails the popularly held asertion that there are 400,000 surplus embryos from in vitro fertilzation clinics. Us supporters of stem cell research maintain that if the anti-abortion crowd is so concerned about these "people" being destroyed in the quest for cures, then flushing them away eventually is not exactly death with dignity.
Esenberg claims that a Rand study says there are 11,000 embryos. Just a quick hit here. That's still a goodly share of "people," just over the size of my home town Port Washington. You still have to flush even that small number away if you arn't going to apply them to science.
Then Rick goes on to bring help from the left by "quoting" a Mother Jones piece by Liza Mundy that says, despite what stem cell supporters say, the parents do not want to give the embryos they helped create for stem cell research.
The way Rick puts it from the article:
It seems that, in overwhelming numbers, they cannot bring themselves to destroy the embryos or to turn them over for research because, whether they be "lives" or "potential lives," creating them for destruction seems wrong.
Well, we do have the internets (damn that Al Gore!) and you can read the article for yourself (no link provided in the Journal).
First off, Mundy accepts the existence of the large number of frozen embryos, from of all places a "rand consulting group" study. She puts the number in fact at 500,000.
She then goes on the talk about those parents. Yes, one of their feelings is to preserve their embryonic progeny. But this of course is no conservativeworld and it turns out that these parents are much more conflicted than what Esenberg claims.
According to the study led by Dr. Robert Nachtigal:
Couples, (the research) found, were confused yet deeply affected by the responsibility of deciding what to do with their embryos. They wanted to do the right thing. All of the 58 couples in his study had children as a result of treatment, so they knew, well, what even three-day-old embryos can and do grow into. (Nachtigall is currently studying a much larger sample of couples, where both egg and sperm come from the parents. It should answer the question of whether couples who use donor eggs are in any way distinct in their thinking about embryos.) “Some saw them as biological material, but most recognized the potential for life,” Nachtigall told colleagues at the asrm meeting. “For many couples, it seems there is no good decision; yet they still take it seriously morally.”
And that is not to say the previous study that you will find in the article is invalid, which found:
...many patients begin in vertro fertilization with some notion about how they will dispose of surplus embryos. (The choices come down to five: use them; donate them for research; donate them to another infertile person; freeze them indefinitely; or have them thawed, that is, quietly disposed of.)
Brace yourself, you will see more of these op-eds as we approach the election with lots of poorly researched assertions. My only hope is that the Journal editorial page does a better job of fact checking.
The GOP knows full well that the stem cell issue will make a difference in this election like it did earlier this year in the New Jersey special election for Governor, and as it will across this country. In the process, they will be willing to sacrifice this very important research for their usual short term gain. Don't let them do it.
